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Imagine you have just finished university. You can't afford to enroll in a master's program. You send out application after application and hear little back. Months pass without a job offer. Meanwhile, prices keep rising and the savings you have scraped together lose value every week.
Then you hear that investment funds are paying returns well above inflation, so you put your money in. One day, the funds are frozen, and the money is out of reach.
Berkay U., a 25-year-old software developer, thought he had found a way to stop chasing work. According to DW Turkish, he began putting small amounts into Turkish investment funds in October 2025. As the returns arrived, he invested more, encouraged relatives to join and eventually took out a loan to put in still more. Then the funds were frozen. He had stopped working because he trusted the passive income, he said. Now, with no cash left and credit-card debts to pay, “I’m unemployed,” he told DW Turkish, and he is looking for a job.
His story is personal. The numbers behind it are national.
Türkiye's unemployment rate rose by half a percentage point in September to 8.4%, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat). The number of jobless people grew by 198,000 in a single month to 2.97 million, the sharpest monthly rise in 13 months, since a 208,000 jump in August 2025.
The headline rate hides a tougher picture for young people. Unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds climbed to 14.8% from 13.2% a month earlier. For young women, it reached 23.3%, more than double the 10.4% for young men, based on TurkStat data compiled by Türkiye Today.
Unemployment figures count only people who are actively looking for work. Eurostat uses a wider yardstick known as NEET: young people who are neither in employment nor in education or training, whether they are searching for a job or have stopped looking altogether.
In the European Union, 11% of 15-to-29-year-olds were NEET in 2025, Eurostat reports. Among member states, the rate ranged from 5% in the Netherlands to 19% in Romania, the highest.
Türkiye's numbers look very different. In Eurostat's 2025 data, Türkiye's NEET rate for 15-to-29-year-olds was 26.3%, the highest of any country in Europe, ahead of North Macedonia at 23.4% and more than double the EU average of 11%.
Turkish figures point the same way. Citing TurkStat data for the last quarter of 2025, Türkiye Today reported that the country has 24.1 million people aged 15 to 34, and that about 5.4 million of them are neither studying nor working. Türkiye also ranks first among OECD countries, with a NEET rate of 31.3% among 18-to-24-year-olds, more than double the OECD average of 14.1%.
The group is not simply idle. It includes people with health problems or disabilities and those caring for children or older relatives. Others are held back by structural barriers, the outlet says: job ads that demand at least three years of experience, and low starting salaries.
A recent graduate of a private Turkish university, who asked Türkiye Today not to publish his name, has been job hunting since June without success. Experience is the obstacle, he said: aside from one internship, he has none, and it has not been enough to get him hired. He wants to work to save for a master’s degree abroad, but so far the plan is not working.
About 23% of young people who do have jobs feel overqualified, the report adds, feeding a cycle of “diploma unemployment” in which graduates eventually stop looking.
With inflation high, many savers turned to investment funds that advertised returns above it.
That bet collapsed in September.
On Sept. 17, the Capital Markets Board (SPK) suspended trading in funds run by seven portfolio management companies and ordered 131 funds liquidated.
More than 455,000 investors were affected, with combined assets estimated at ₺936.3 billion ($19.1 billion) at the time, and Borsa Istanbul had its worst month since 2008.
The investigation reached a former minister on Friday. Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, who served as minister of family and social policies, was arrested early in the morning, and a criminal court of peace ordered her held in pretrial detention.
According to the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, she is accused of violating capital markets legislation and of membership in a criminal organization.
Prosecutors had questioned her over suspicious transactions in shares of Ozata Denizcilik (OZATD), one of the companies whose stock delivered unusually high returns amid alleged manipulation by some funds.
More than 200 suspects have been investigated in the wider probe. The regulator says the liquidation will take about six months, and investors with up to ₺1 million in a fund are expected to be repaid in full.
Young people who are neither working nor studying are unlikely to have had much savings to lose. The investors in the funds were mostly small retail savers trying to protect their money from inflation, and some were probably young workers, graduates or students with modest nest eggs.
What the two stories really share is the message they send to a young person in Türkiye: the job market offers little, and the safe-looking route to protecting what you do have has just failed.
For some, the two shocks arrived together. Berkay U. had stopped working because he believed the funds would pay him a passive income.
Hazel Kose, a recent law graduate in Ankara, told BBC Turkish that she and her mother had put in savings meant to help her open a law office. They believed the state stood behind the funds, she said, and she described the loss in stark terms: “They stole our dreams, our labor.”
Now the two groups wait on very different clocks.
The liquidation is expected to take about six months, so many savers will not know how much they will get back until spring.
For the graduate looking for a first job while dreaming of a master’s abroad, and for Berkay U., looking for work with credit-card debts to pay, there is no such timetable. What lies ahead is little hope and unanswered applications until further notice.
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