I'm doing some agriculture research lately and was reminded of a case study undertaken to probe on the counts, causes, and correlates of poverty in the poor country of Lesotho. But the salient point that struck me was this - while most women in the sample has had some access to education, their subsequent qualification was irrelevant when they want to get into the job market. For example, a case study of 3 women who initially received weaving training were subsequently forced to work in a farm as labourers as the cooperative venture plan to start a textile company failed due to the lack of mangerial capabilities.
While there is definitely more to education than just producing 'commodities' for the job market, we cannot deny the importance of integrating education to the needs of the market, especially in a developing country context. In Malaysia, industrialization has continued to dictate the shape and direction of our human capital formation. The bottleneck in skilled workers in science and technology has often been cited as an impediment to further technological upgrading in the industrial sector. In a paper by Henderson and Phillips, Malaysia only has 0.13% of its population as tertiary science and engineering students in 1998, the lowest compared to its NIE and ASEAN counterparts. Yet, we continue to hear stories of our science and engineering graduates going into sales or unrelated fields in droves.
What is wrong? I think someone should start compiling the profiles of our local graduates to analyze and further improve the education-employment integration in Malaysia. Or is someone already doing it?
1 comments:
The education-employment integration in Malaysia is precisely as described by Robert Dore in the book "The Diploma Disease". When I reading it, every situations and descriptions illustrated were a perfect mirror of what is happening in the country. The entire system is obsessed with qualification.
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