Education system contributes to rising jobless rate
Education system contributes to rising jobless rate
JAKARTA (JP): The swelling ranks of unemployed university
graduates at a time when Indonesia needs more and more skilled
workers can only mean one thing -- something is wrong with the
education system.
Prof. Conny Semiawan, a noted education expert, said
Indonesian colleges and university are producing too many social
science graduates and not enough experts in the natural and exact
sciences.
The present high level of unemployment has partly been caused
by the education system, the former rector of the Jakarta
Teachers Training Institute (IKIP Jakarta) told a seminar on
unemployment on Wednesday.
She said that either the education world has been alienated
from the working world, or it has not kept pace with the changes
Indonesia has been undergoing.
"The working world will require more engineers, architects and
those with expertise in natural sciences. The problem is how do
we get the younger generation interested in exact sciences," she
said.
Although unemployment is officially put at around two percent
of the work force, government officials have acknowledged that as
many as 38 percent are either unemployed or underemployed.
This comes at a time when the industrial community is
demanding more and more skilled workers, which the education
system cannot supply in sufficient number.
Indonesia, in its Second Long-Term Development program
recently launched April 1, is determined to shed its image as a
country of cheap, unskilled labor by strengthening its human
resource development.
Conny said the education world should adjust to the needs of
the nation, including the burgeoning industrial sector.
"The educational sector plays a pivotal role, not only in
developing the character of students, but also in channeling them
to become productive members of society," she said.
She hailed the new, more streamlined, education curriculums
for primary and intermediate schools, to be introduced in the new
school year beginning in July, designed to bring the education
world closer to the needs of the working world.
The unemployment rate could be reduced if the education system
could produce more skilled and adept graduates and even
entrepreneurs who, in turn, would create job opportunities for
other people, she said.
She said the new apprenticeships program to be introduced at
intermediate vocational schools is a welcome step in the right
direction.
She said the present education system is still producing
graduates whose main goal is to find white-collar jobs,
preferably in the government, where jobs are secure for life.
But with the government's own budget already strained, the
civil service has been limiting new recruitments and, beginning
this year, will only recruit about 50,000 new employees, equal to
the number of people going into retirement.
"There is no alternative but to encourage graduates to develop
an interest in working in the private sector," Conny said. (rms)