AMMAN, Jordan — Twice a year, the names and faces of a select group of young women are splashed across the pages of Jordanian newspapers, their names written in bold, black lettering and their passport-sized photos adorned with colored frames. These are students who have achieved top grades in the general secondary examination, the test taken to qualify for university.

Between 1980 and 2002, adult literacy rates for Jordanian women rose from 55 percent to 86 percent, according to the World Bank. Jordan is now one of eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa where more women than men go to university. Yet, when they graduate, their education is not yielding jobs.

Unemployment levels among highly educated women are above 35 percent, the World Bank said in a report published last year: “Unemployment rises with the level of education for women, while men with higher education are less likely to be unemployed.”

A gap between the educational system and job market requirements contributes considerably to unemployment among both men and women. Only half of the 50,000 graduates who leave the country’s universities each year find jobs, Atef Obeidat, a former labor minister, said at a conference last year.
“There is certainly a disconnect,” said Tara Vishwanath, a lead economist in the Middle East and North Africa region at the World Bank. “The educational curriculums are old, never reformed; they are government-led and unresponsive to the needs of a private sector.”

The disparity between male and female employment exists in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But it is higher than average in Jordan.

The inability to integrate educated women into the work force is not only a failure at the individual level. It may be a major factor holding back growth.

“It’s better to have an educated mother, yet there is a need for women to contribute in the work place, ” said Deema Bibi, chief executive at Injaz, a nonprofit organization that offered skills training and career guidance.

“Women have lots of enthusiasm, especially among the educated,” said Ms. Vishwanath, who led a comprehensive regional study on gender equality and development last year. But “given their mobility constraints, which limit their opportunities, they spend a long time searching and not finding a job and that results in dropping out,” she said.

One problem is that women tend to concentrate on studies in the humanities, which are not necessarily what employers are looking for. “There is also discouragement that comes from looking for work for a long time and not finding productive opportunities and this is true for both men and women,” Ms. Vishwanath said.

New graduates also may have weak interpersonal and other basic skills that make companies reluctant to hire them.

“The educational system is not a citadel of strength in Jordan,” said Rula Quawas, a Fulbright Scholar-in-residence at Champlain College in Vermont, teaching classes on Arab women and who has taught extensively in Jordan.

Jordan’s higher education system is well regarded in the region, yet more than a quarter of its unemployed youth aged 20 to 24 hold a secondary or higher education certificate, according to the World Bank. Some say this reflects a public school system that still encourages rote learning and is characterized by outdated teaching methodologies, poorly trained teachers and limited use of technology.

“An educational system should give empowerment, skills to think critically, creatively, intelligently, the ability to contest, to challenge and to say ‘I think not,”’ Ms. Quawas said. “The students know about content but don’t have skills; the labor market today requires creativity, innovation, vision — the whole paradigm of teaching needs to change. We are graduating robots.”

Education reform is much discussed, including plans to encourage students to enroll in practical vocational training rather than the academic stream. Meanwhile, however, the number of students entering university has nearly doubled in the past decade, and last year reached an estimated 92,000 a year, up from fewer than 50,000 in 2005, according to United Nations figures.

One problem is that most secondary school graduates, even if they have relatively poor grades in the general secondary exam, still prefer to go to university rather than a vocational college, for reasons of social prestige. Another is that Jordan is better at creating low-skill jobs than high-skill jobs.

“We are conducting national campaigns to encourage Jordanians to take low-skill jobs,” said Najah Buriqi, director of the employment and training agency at the Ministry of Labor.

“The jobs that are being created attract migrant workers with lower skills,” she said. “We are trying to change the working culture here — but this has to simultaneously happen along with education reform.”

Read in the NYTimes

By BEN HUBBARD
ZARQA, Jordan — Late one night, Abu Abdullah left his whole life behind.

Abandoning his wife, two children and a modest frozen foods business, he sneaked across the border to Syria to join an affiliate of Al Qaeda.

He thrived on the blasts and gunfire and relished the feeling of serving what he saw as a celestial cause. But his wife’s anguish soon persuaded him to return to this desert city, where he now longs for his days as an international jihadist.

“If I could go back and do it again, I would not come back,” he said. “Those were the best three months of my life.”

Here in the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who gained infamy for his bloody reign as the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq during the early years of the American occupation there, the increasingly sectarian war in Syria has ignited militants, inspiring the largest jihadist mobilization the city has ever seen.

Jordanian analysts and Islamists estimate that 800 to 1,200 Jordanians have gone to fight in Syria, more than double the number who fought in Afghanistan or Iraq. Though the fighters come from across the country, fully one-third hail from here, the most from any single area.

Most fighters disappear without telling their families, only to resurface across the border with the Nusra Front, Syria’s Qaeda affiliate, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a Qaeda splinter group. While some are uneducated and poor, others have university degrees and leave behind jobs, homes, cars, wives and children for a cause they believe will bring them rewards in heaven.

For most, it is a one-way trip, either because coming home could mean jail time or because they die abroad. Every few weeks, a Zarqa family holds a “martyr’s wedding,” so-called because achieving martyrdom is not seen as a cause for sadness, but for gathering and celebration.

While analysts say Jordan’s stagnant politics and economy encourage marginalized, devout men to seek glory on foreign battlefields, Islamist leaders, fighters and their relatives describe decisions motivated by intense conviction.

Many fighters are driven by the Syrian government’s extreme violence and the sense that the world is doing nothing to stop it. At the same time, they see Syria as a launching pad for their project to erase the region’s borders, found an Islamic state and impose Shariah law.

“There is no such thing as Syria for the Syrians,” said Munif Samara, a doctor and prominent Islamist in Zarqa. “If there is Islamic land, it is our duty to implement Shariah.”

Mr. Samara, who knows many Jordanians fighting in Syria, said he would not discourage his own son, a dentistry student, from going to Syria if he chose to.

“How long do we live?” Mr. Samara asked. “Do I give him the world or do I give him the afterlife?”

To illuminate why local men fight in Syria, Mr. Samara arranged a meeting in his clinic between reporters and Abu Abdullah, who said that growing up in Zarqa, he had long been aware of jihad as a potential career path. Men he knew had fought and died in Chechnya and Iraq, and he began growing his beard as a sign of devotion after the death of Mr. Zarqawi in 2006.

After the Syria conflict started, gruesome images on TV and worries about spreading Iranian influence led him to jihad, he said, providing only his nom de guerre to avoid arrest by the Jordanian authorities.

Friends already in Syria put him in touch with a smuggler, who led him across the border at night with 16 other Jordanians, he said. All carried medical supplies, mostly pills and needles. He took only a spare pair of cargo pants and some extra underwear.

Over 30, he was in worse shape than his younger colleagues, so he performed poorly at military drills, he said. But since he had run his own business, he was put in charge of the group’s supplies, buying food for fighters and destitute Syrian families.

He called home often, and after hearing his wife complain that raising their two children alone was hard, and that his 8-year-old daughter was troubled by his absence, he said, he decided to return home.

The Jordanian authorities detained him at the border but released him a month later because they lacked evidence that he had been a fighter, he said.

Now, back in Zarqa, he said that he missed his old life and that the police watched him closely.

“Here you feel like you are in a small cage and can’t move,” he said.

His account could not be independently verified, but Marwan Shehadeh and Hassan Abu Hanieh, Jordanian experts on Islamic movements, said its details corresponded with the stories of other men who had fought in Syria.

In many cases, the fighters’ sudden departures deeply affect their families, leaving many torn between support for the cause and mourning their personal loss.

Sitting in his book-lined living room, one Zarqa father, Mohammed Abu Rahaim, proudly swiped through photos on his phone and spoke of his two sons who had joined the Nusra Front in Syria.

There was Hutheifa, 38, an athletic college graduate who left a wife, three children and a teaching job. One photo showed him in silhouette, wielding a machine gun. A video showed him adjusting the scarf over his face after a rebel victory.

“He disappeared suddenly, then called and said, ‘I am in Syria,’ ” Mr. Abu Rahaim said, recalling his son’s departure.

And there was Harith, 32, who also left a wife, three children and a steady job. One photo showed him with a rifle at his side, heating water on a wood fire. The next photo showed him dead, his bearded face protruding from a body bag. Mr. Abu Rahaim said he had been driving when the phone call came with the news. “I got out of my car and bowed to God,” he said, proud that his son had achieved the martyrdom he so desired.

Mr. Abu Rahaim, a professor of Islamic culture, said the family had often discussed “the affairs of the Muslims,” including the wars in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, but that Syria felt more personal. His wife’s family fled Syria in the 1980s during the government’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, and some of their relatives had been killed.

Like many others, he saw jihad in Syria as a noble effort to replace the countries created by colonial powers with an Islamic state. “Western countries allowed sects, misled groups and misled parties to rule the Muslims,” he said. “Will this last forever? Impossible!”

When news of his son’s death spread, hundreds of mourners came to the house for the martyr’s wedding. In a large tent draped with black flags, attendees listened to sermons, sang religious anthems and chanted, “Our path: Jihad!”

But Mr. Rahaim’s wife, Huda Wazan, cried as she spoke of her sons, recalling how attentive the younger had been to his infant daughter and how she had once hidden the elder’s passport to prevent him from quitting school for jihad. “You worry because the environment and the friends really impact the way these young men think,” she said.

While she believed it had been her son’s fate to die in Syria, she was still crushed by the loss.

“There are people who say it is a wedding for the martyr instead of a funeral, but I don’t agree with this,” she said. “It is a funeral for me.”

Rana Sweis contributed reporting from Zarqa.

Read in the NYTIMES