University graduates find it hard to get by

By Sri Wahyuni

YOGYAKARTA (JP): By training, Marco (not his real name) is a social scientist who graduated from Gadjah Mada University's School of Social Sciences.

By trade, he is a newspaper vendor and has been one for over five years.

The resident of Bantul, some 15 kilometers south of here, has gradually worked his way up and now has five other newspaper vendors working for him, but he still sees himself as a failure.

"I didn't go to the university for this kind of work," he said, full of regret, adding that with his diploma he deserved a more decent job.

Bambang (not his real name) graduated from a teachers training institute here, as did his wife. Instead of teaching, Bambang now works as a broker involved in various transactions and earns his livelihood from the commission he makes.

"My wife is also unemployed," said Bambang who also mentioned that he has sent hundreds of applications to different companies and gone through many job interviews without success.

Sociologist Dian Paramita of Gadjah Mada University's Center for Women Studies said job scarcity often forced university graduates to grab any unskilled job available.

"It's psychological pressure from people surrounding them that force them to do so," Dian said, citing how parents even sold their rice fields to pay for bribes so that their sons or daughters could get jobs.

A recent survey conducted by the center found that less than 30 percent of respondents located employment within a year of graduation, another 16 percent remained unemployed, while the rest found jobs within 10 years of graduating.

The survey was conducted from September 1996 until June 1997 in Yogyakarta with 523 university graduate respondents of different ages and academic backgrounds.

The survey was part of a national study involving 9 other major cities, including Jakarta, Medan in North Sumatra, Padang in West Sumatra, Bogor and Bandung in West Java, Semarang in Central Java, Surabaya in East Java, Ujungpandang in South Sulawesi and Mataram in West Nusa Tenggara. Each city conducted the same survey with approximately the same number of respondents.

The study in Yogyakarta also revealed that 76 percent of unemployed respondents were social studies graduates from general universities. Twenty-two percent of them studied at teachers training institutes, while the remaining were from agricultural, technical and religious schools.

"There's an oversupply of social and humanity studies graduates, and graduates of teachers training institutes," Dian said. "If graduates depend on the job market in Yogyakarta and Java, they'll find it difficult to find jobs."

She pointed out that the problem was a cause for concern as there are about 1,200 universities across Indonesia that provide social and humanity studies programs.

Beauty parlor

Yogyakarta currently has 6,325 unemployed university graduates. At a national level, the number is alarming, according to Dian.

She said that in 2020 there would be about 20 million unemployed graduates, or about 8 percent of the nation's manpower supply. "This number is four times larger than in 1990, when there were only 5.37 million unemployed graduates, or 3 percent of the manpower supply."

The situation is such that university graduates sometimes say they only have a high school diploma in order to get a job for which they would otherwise be considered overqualified.

"They say it's better than remaining unemployed," Dian said.

The study, for example, also found an agriculture graduate who worked as a bank teller, and a graduate of an international relations school as a clerk at a village office.

"We even found a male graduate of a math and natural sciences school who runs a beauty parlor," Dian said, pointing out that the situation would not have taken place had the respondent planned better before entering the university.

"The math graduate should have just taken a beauty course right after graduating from high school rather than wasting time and money at the university," she said.

"Better planning will help reduce the number of the educated unemployed, and the waste of money," Dian said. The government subsidizes each university student at an estimated cost of Rp 1 million (US$363) to Rp 1.5 million per year.

"Imagine how much of the taxpayers' money is being wasted because university graduates find jobs which do not make use of their training," she said.

Profit motive

There are of course university graduates who choose work not related to their training simply because it is more profitable. One woman in her 40s, for example, trained at Yogyakarta Teachers Training Institute, but she gave up teaching after realizing that she would never make enough to make ends meet.

"My salary provided only for ten days of the month," Mrs. Heru recalled.

She tried doing many other things, including opening a kiosk selling household items and a small restaurant for students. Now she has a small company selling property.

Her husband quit his job at a state-owned company in Surabaya, East Java, and joined her new company. Now they earn about Rp 10 million a year selling 10 to 15 houses with prices ranging from Rp 50 million to Rp 300 million each.