Graduate employability in Ethiopian higher education: A decade of persistent gaps, policy incoherence, and unmet labor market demands (2013–2025)

Globally, the higher education system faces a persistent challenge in integrating graduates' qualifications with dynamic labour market needs. This raises a serious concern that is widely felt in developing countries, and rapid expansion often exacerbates the imbalance of skills and graduates' unemployment. This systematic review examines this global problem in the Ethiopian higher education sector, where, despite decades of political attention, there are still significant challenges to employability. The study provides a careful analysis of policy incoherence, systemic failures, and unsatisfactory demands for the labour market from 2013 to 2025. The review uses a structured analytical approach and synthesizes the findings of 43 published through methodological classification, keyword-driven thematic analysis, and spatial and temporal trend mapping. The analysis reveals the dominant curriculum and skills mismatch caused by theory-intensive education, widespread policy incoherence between mass and job creation, and important gender and rural and urban disparities, exacerbated by institutional inequalities. Methodologically, the field is characterized by a dependency on mixed-method designs but suffers from a critical lack of employer-informed data, longitudinal studies, and experimental interventions. The study concluded that bridging these gaps required immediate and multifaceted reforms: implementing a jointly developed industry curriculum based on competencies, decentralizing government to improve institutional response, establishing targeted equity programs for rural women and graduates, and giving priority to rigorous and solution-oriented research, including longitudinal tracking studies and randomized control trials.