My paper presents new findings from a comprehensive socio-anthropological study that seeks to explain the accelerated expansion of higher education in the occupied Palestinian territories since the establishment of the PNA in 1994 and the social consequences of this process. We found the advance in Palestinian tertiary education worthy of research because of its persistence and further progress in the years that past since the outbreak of the second Intifada, an era that witnessed unprecedented intensification of the Israeli military rule in the oPt. Given the steep decline in living conditions, the soaring unemployment and poverty rates, the precariousness and the human suffering that underlined this time period, the marked development in higher education emerged as paradoxical The first phase of our research (which I presented at the 2008 MESA meeting) underscored institutional policies that facilitated the spread of tertiary enrollment and pointed at the changes in the social, demographic and gendered composition of the student population over the past 15 years. Our findings were based on an in depth study of a representative sample of nine institutions of higher education, including three universities, the Open University, four community colleges and one university college. The current research aims at an analysis of the predicament of the tens of thousands of university and college students that graduate each year. Our starting point is the apparent disparity, which clearly emerges from statistical data of recent years, between the continuous growth of tertiary enrollment and the extremely limited capacity to absorb the highly skilled graduates in the public and private sectors. Given the underlying scarcity of employment opportunities, our fieldwork set out to examine the concrete manifestations that this scarcity receives in the work and work-related experiences of graduates, differentiated along gender, geographical region, marital status, institution, specialization, and additional factors. Our research population encompasses a representative sample of graduates of the nine institutions that we studied who graduated between 2000 and 2009. A special questionnaire was designed for the graduates of each institution in attempt to capture the impact of its unique features. The questions address a wide range of topics, including the considerations and motivation that direct the choice of specialization, material and moral support of family during studies, the search after work, the option of migration, the toll of unemployment on self and family and ways of coping, the work experience and its impact on gender relations and family patterns.