The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MoHESR) has issued a series of Cabinet-backed resolutions tightening graduate employment rules and outcome standards for UAE universities, marking the most significant regulatory overhaul of the sector in recent years.
Dr Ahmed Sultan Al Shuaibi, Undersecretary of MoHESR, said learning outcomes would be reviewed by subject experts drawn from industry, to ensure academic programmes produce graduates with skills employers can rely on. ‘When I hire a graduate with a certain certificate, as a business market, a company, I have a certain expectation that he has this certificate and certain skills and knowledge,’ Al Shuaibi told Khaleej Times.
What the new rules require
Three separate resolutions underpin the framework. The first, approved on 21 August 2026, governs review fees for higher education and TVET institutions, channelling those fees into a dedicated Review Fund that finances licensing, institutional review, and programme accreditation operations.
A second resolution, announced on 24 August 2026, sets updated Ministry service fees and financial guarantees. For existing institutions and currently enrolled scholarship students, the new fees apply from the fiscal year following the resolution’s effective date. Newly established institutions and incoming scholarship students face the fees from 12 September 2026.
A third resolution covers violations and administrative measures. Al Shuaibi said at the time that the sector is undergoing transformation aimed at building a system that combines flexibility with effective governance.
The Federal Decree-Law on Higher Education and Scientific Research underpins these rules, prohibiting institutions from admitting students to any programme before obtaining MoHESR accreditation, and requiring all licensed institutions to undergo periodic classification and evaluation by the Ministry.
MoHESR’s Outcome-Based Evaluation Framework University Guide sets out compliance KPIs built around two pillars: quality assurance, with an explicit emphasis on outcomes rather than processes, and institutional autonomy in decision-making to achieve those outcomes.
How Abu Dhabi University is responding to graduate employment rules
At Abu Dhabi University (ADU), the shift is already visible in assessment design, industry involvement, and data collection. Dr Mohammed Prakandi, Director of Academic Quality and Accreditation at ADU, said the change represents a move from evaluating processes to measuring results.
‘In the past, most of the regulatory bodies… look at how you’re doing it, they talk to your students, look at the faculty qualifications. So, they were looking at the processes and inputs,’ Prakandi said. ‘But the new regulation is mostly, I would say nearly 100 per cent focusing on the output.’
The output measure is direct: whether graduates find work, and whether that work is in their field of study within nine months of graduation. ‘If a programme’s graduates are not getting jobs, does it matter how good your curriculum is?’ Prakandi said.
ADU has set a target for at least 50 per cent of courses to include industry involvement, covering syllabus design, in-class delivery by practitioners, and research funding. Employers review syllabuses and provide documented feedback used to adjust course content.
To track the roughly 5,000 graduates whose employment status needs to be collected, ADU first deployed a team of about 30 staff making calls. It then developed an AI agent capable of contacting graduates simultaneously, reaching nearly 60 per cent of them within two days.
On assessment, Hamad Odhabi, ADU’s Vice Chancellor of AI, said the university had moved toward multi-stage interactions between students and faculty rather than standalone submitted assignments. An AI-based exam moderation system has reviewed more than 2,400 exams since its launch roughly a year ago, checking for quality, timing, and alignment with learning outcomes and industry relevance.
National infrastructure behind the framework
The Ministry has also licensed 16 higher education institutions in Dubai in cooperation with the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, allowing students at those institutions to obtain MoHESR recognition for their qualifications.
At a broader level, the UAE Cabinet reviewed progress on the Emirates Skills platform on 2 September 2026, an AI-supported national tool for anticipating in-demand skills and aligning education outcomes with labour market needs. The platform served more than 8,300 users during its pilot phase, according to the Dubai Media Office.
MoHESR has also partnered with Times Higher Education to benchmark UAE institutions against global universities and assess how institutional strategies align with world rankings metrics, with a landscape analysis under way as part of phase four of that collaboration.
For universities, the compliance clock is already running: institutions that cannot demonstrate graduate employment outcomes face programme-level consequences under the new framework.
