Foreign degrees no panacea for unemployment woes

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Urgently needed. Account Executive. Graduated from a reputable local or overseas university (master's degree advantageous), with good business sense and accustomed to working in a fast-paced environment.

Twenty three-year-old Yuri frequently remembers reading the advertisement for the job she longed for, run by a local advertising agency in Kompas daily several months ago.

"Most of the openings I was interested in demanded high qualifications. Even though I have a degree, it was still not enough," said Yuri, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in communications from the University of Indonesia in Jakarta a year ago.

"It took a while until my friends and I got jobs. Some have even had to wait six months or a year, or more," she said.

Yuri's experience is one shared by many college graduates with bachelor's degrees. High unemployment and an increasing number of graduates entering the market each year has pushed up the demand for higher qualifications and made it difficult for graduates to find jobs.

Darsana Setiawan, head of higher education at the Jakarta Middle to Higher Education Agency, said that the issue was not a lack of intellectual ability on the part of the student, but the lack of emphasis on creative thinking and the poor quality of education available at local universities.

"Universities are not adept at promoting the competence of their students. The level of competence achieved by their graduates is not always readily apparent," Darsana said.

The agency lists at least 3,000 people with undergraduate degrees in Indonesia as unemployed.

According to Darsana, there are many universities in Jakarta offering international programs in order to promote their accreditation level and to prove their accountability to the public.

The University of Indonesia (UI) has opened an international class program, known as the "double degree" program in medicine, psychology, computer science, engineering, and economics, which enables students to graduate with a degree from a university abroad and one from UI.

In the program, the students spend the first four semesters at UI and go on to continue their remaining four semesters at a university abroad.

UI director of education Muhammad Anis said the program had existed since 2000, and aimed to accommodate students who were searching for a cost-effective international study environment.

However, Anis said he believed students who graduated with a double degree had about the same academic competency as students graduating with a single degree from a local university.

"Students who join the double degree international program are likely to be better at speaking English and have wider international knowledge. That's all.

"That doesn't mean that they will find it any easier to get a job than local graduates," he said. "Networking and the establishment of contacts during their undergraduate years seem to be more important."

However, according to Darsana, the agency perceives double degree graduates as being more responsible and dependable than graduates of local institutions with international programs.

"However, the value of the double degree in the eyes of employers depends a lot on which universities the graduates attended," he said.