While our universities and
colleges are churning out graduates by the tens of thousands, we are
saddled with a serious problem: the number of unemployed graduates has
doubled since 2008.
How about teaching our students more useful living skills and showing
them how to start their own small businesses. Why are we training so
many graduates to meet the needs of industry when clearly industry can’t
absorb them fast enough? According to an analysis in the Edge Daily, 12 per cent of graduates are unemployed as of 2009. And 60 per cent of the unemployed are graduates.
That’s 98000 unemployed graduates and 76000 unemployed diploma holders. Clearly the government has a problem here in meeting the expectations of graduates who expect to find white-collar or well-paying blue-collar jobs.
Now we hear that the duration of non-technical polytechnic diploma courses in commerce and hospitality will be shortened to two and half years from the current three to save time and cost. The government wants to create 1.5m skilled workers. And it is aiming to churn out 680000 diploma holders by 2020. (See NST report: ‘Polytechnic courses to be shortened by up to a year‘)
Or is the problem related to the quality of these graduates – a sad reflection of the state of our institutions of higher learning today?
Why not teach our young people more useful skills that will enable them to survive in today’s world? How about more college and training institutes that will teach relevant skills to enable diploma holders and graduates to be self-reliant and self-employed? - Anil Netto
Graphic credit: The Edge Daily
That’s 98000 unemployed graduates and 76000 unemployed diploma holders. Clearly the government has a problem here in meeting the expectations of graduates who expect to find white-collar or well-paying blue-collar jobs.
Now we hear that the duration of non-technical polytechnic diploma courses in commerce and hospitality will be shortened to two and half years from the current three to save time and cost. The government wants to create 1.5m skilled workers. And it is aiming to churn out 680000 diploma holders by 2020. (See NST report: ‘Polytechnic courses to be shortened by up to a year‘)
Or is the problem related to the quality of these graduates – a sad reflection of the state of our institutions of higher learning today?
Why not teach our young people more useful skills that will enable them to survive in today’s world? How about more college and training institutes that will teach relevant skills to enable diploma holders and graduates to be self-reliant and self-employed? - Anil Netto
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