Education for the Masses
While I was reading a newspaper in Israel, I bumped into an article (in the Haaretz) about the state of undergraduate prospects in India. The story painted a very bleak, but realistic, picture. Since, I could not find the original Haaretz article on the web here is a NY Times article on the same issue.
The job market for Indian college graduates is split sharply in two. With a robust handshake, a placeless accent and a confident walk, you can get a $300-a-month job with Citibank or Microsoft. With a limp handshake and a thick accent, you might peddle credit cards door to door for $2 a day.
India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudgelike jobs.
Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability to communicate crisply in clear English, to work with teams and deliver presentations, to use search engines like Google, to tear apart theories rather than memorize them.
But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India’s upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.
Why does this article about another country strike me? The reason is simple. It is also happening in the Philippines. Right now in the Philippine Educational System, graduates who come from the top school in the country have a relatively easy time finding employment. If they don’t find employment it is usually because they are too picky, ask for too much or are not ready for work. On the other hand, there are college graduates in the thousands who are under-employed. However, in the Philippines, it is not always about the school your graduated from. It matters but some of the other deciding factors include: attitude and ability to communicate.
Attitude and soft skills are the things that differentiate those who get hired from those who do not. I have interviewed a good number of graduates from non-top schools who are very skilled technically. However, some are lacking in their ability to communicate (normally they have poor English). Others are very skilled but their attitude towards work is found wanting. Such a waste.
Of course, there are no easy solutions to these problems. Technical skill is still a very important deciding factor when seeking employment. However, having the necessary skills is only one part of the equation. The Imperial Equation. Also necessary is the proper attitude, the right exposure and enough means. Employers can help with the skills, means and exposure parts. However, attitude is harder to mold. This is something that should be developed bottom-up. There is also the question of having the appropriate soft skills. In our quest to create technically competent graduates, we might have forgotten to consider that there are other things that must also be developed.
