About 3,000 young Afghans filed out of Kabul University one morning after sitting their public university entrance exam. They emerged in two separate rows: girls to the right, boys to the left.

After picking up her mobile phone from the battered minivan used to store items banned from the examination room, Nooria, 19 – who, like many Afghans, goes by one name – explained why young people in the country are gravitating toward higher education.

“First of all, it is hard for poor people to find a job without education. Secondly, the people of Afghanistan have been in war for a long time. They want to move forward,” she said.

In Afghanistan, the path to education and a secure economic future is narrow. The number of young people striving for a coveted spot in one of the country’s universities is rising, but the number of jobs to support them on the other side is not.

The last round of this year’s public university entry exam, known as the kankur, has just taken place. For the first time in a decade, the ministry of higher education was not able to expand capacity to match the growing number of applicants. About 280,000 high school graduates sat the test, vying for one of the 55,000 places available.

While children of wealthy parents can opt for one of the 40,000 seats in the country’s private universities, which often have lower academic thresholds, public universities are the only option for poorer families such as Nooria’s.

“If I fail the kankur, I will probably sit at home, but many boys will choose crime,” she said.

As the desire for higher education has spread, the kankur has become more than a contest between the brightest minds: gaining entrance to university is also a matter of money and muscle.

The night before the exam, Mohammad Hassan, 20, saw an email chain from an unnamed sender offering answers to all the exam questions for 5,000 afghanis (£56). He said he had done well on the test without cheating, but perhaps not as well as those who did. “If there is still a place for me, I will get in,” he said with a laugh.

The competition is further rigged by some of the people who are expected to safeguard it. Obaid Ali, a researcher with the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Kabul, said the most serious challenge to a fair kankur process is interference from power brokers in the provinces.

“Provincial council members and parliamentarians try to influence the kankur process,” said Anwar Shams, director of the governmental kankur preparation committee. This year, Shams said, local politicians in Ghazni and Paktika provinces attacked invigilators. In Khost, an MP sent death threats to a supervisor, pressing him to award certain students a high score.

The kankur consists of 160 multiple-choice questions, granting a total of 332 points. Before the test, students choose their desired five fields of study. If their test results aren’t high enough, they are not admitted to university.

Most students choose fields such as law, economy and political science, but that is not necessarily where the jobs are. Only 4% of employed Afghans work in public administration, according to a 2012 report from the International Labour Organisation.

Meanwhile, very few universities offer degrees related to agriculture, even though it occupies almost 60% of the population, and is in dire need of development.

“There’s a real gap between the skills provided within the university, and the real market,” said Hervé Nicolle, director of Samuel Hall, a research company, and an expert on labour and youth issues in Afghanistan.

Without a degree, however, the future is even bleaker. Roughly 400,000 Afghans enter the workforce every year, many of them uneducated. While international agencies teach vocational skills, their programmes are often tailored to international rather than local employers, explained Nicolle.

“You teach people English and computer skills so they can get jobs with NGOs or USAid, rather than preparing them for the actual economic and labour market,” he said.

Unskilled workers should be aiming for jobs in agribusiness, the service industry or the construction sector, Nicolle added. “However, with the withdrawal of international troops and reduction of aid, these sectors are contracting.”

The number of kankur examinees has risen fourfold since 2007. In the same period, the number of female university students has increased by 40%. About a quarter of the students at Kabul University are women.

Zahra, 20, emerging from another throng exiting the university, hoped that she would soon be one of them. The first woman in her family to aspire to university, she had put down the faculty of humanities as her top choice.

“We want to educate ourselves,” she said. “We want to choose our own future.”