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)