World Bank Dictates, Public Sector Retrenchment, and Rising Unemployment among University Graduates in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Over the past decade the occupied Palestinian territories have witnessed an unprecedented increase of student enrollment at institutions of higher education and a corresponding growth in the number of university and college graduates. Tens of thousands of women and men from all social sectors and strata of society complete their academic studies each year, earning bachelor degrees in a wide range of specializations. However, in too many cases the impressive educational attainments are not realized in the realm of the labor market. A long array of statistical findings that were collected by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics indicate the prevalence of high levels of unemployment among graduates, with unemployment rates among female and among Gazan graduates greatly exceeding those found among their male and their West Banker counterparts, respectively. For several years now I have been engaged in a comprehensive socio-anthropological study of the expansion of higher education in the OPT and of the potential that this process bears in view of the persistence of extremely adverse conditions, namely, Israel's occupation and military rule and the critical Palestinian dependence on international assistance. I presented findings from my field research on institutions of higher education, students and graduates in two MESA meetings (2008, 2010). My proposed presentation centers on an analysis of principal causes that undermine large scale absorbance of graduates into the labor market. I will argue that ever since its inception in the wake of the Oslo accords, international assistance to the PNA was guided by the World Bank's flagship ideology, namely that economic growth can only be generated by the private sector, while the public sector is non-productive by definition and that therefore its expansion should be limited to the minimum level. This regardless of the fact that the OPT clearly lacked the structural pre-requisites for a private sector-led development. The continuation of this donor policy into the post-Oslo era, and its further escalation into a public-sector retrenchment dictate resulted in a socio-economic setback for Palestinian society as a whole and for the young and educated in particular. The arrested development of the public sector leaves the population deprived of a range of services that will not be provided by any private establishment and prevents tens of thousands of bachelor degree holders from materializing their skills and becoming gainfully employed citizens.