As I sat in the Café Galilee sipping my mocha latte at the Bishan library the other day, I couldn’t  help but wondered if the students studying frantically for their exams are wasting their time.

We all knew how our famous NUS (rank 34) and NTU (rank 174) have moved within  the top 200  university  rankings these past few years. SMU has also made its mark early, even though it is a new entry,  by continually attracting many of our top bright students with its’ out-of-the-box innovative learning style.

New boys such as the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) , Yale-National University of Singapore College and Lee Kong Chian School of  Medicine will boost up close to 10,000 new places for the tertiary education when they set up shop here.

Many of these new higher institutions want to promote  broad-based learning as traditionally our local varsities have produce straight-pathed graduates such as engineers, architects or programmers.

For example, SUTD wants to produce “technically grounded leaders” who can excel in engineering and architecture but are also well prepared for jobs in business, financial institutions and consultancies because of their broad-based education (ST 15 Sep).

The need to be versatile so that you can blent in to the fast-changing industrial need is never being felt so pressing before. Our semi-con industry enjoyed a 10-year boom from early 2000s but it is now into near demise as companies pack and relocate to cheaper neighbouring countries such as China, Vietnam and Indonesia. Even Malaysia is considered too expensive now to relocate.

Introduction

However, many of our local graduates will  eventually become jobless once they reach the age of 40 years old with many  questioning whether  it was worth their effort to slog  so hard at our local universities for their coveted degrees.

Under employment is a more worrying problem for our population as people struggle to find any value in what they do and question whether  they are contributing to the best of their abilities.

The social cost is also daunting as many families, struggling with issues at home with  the unemployed bread winner, breaks up over the years. One in three families eventually break up here with financial reason cited as the chief reason.

Many displaced executives with masters’ degree took to cab driving in order to survive – feeling disenchanted and discouraged that their best years are left behind when they only reached 40 years young.

Ageism is  a big issue here in high-GDP Singaporefamous for only employing executives above the age 0f 40. Employers can afford to do so as they have a wide pool of  well-educated executives to choose from all overAsia.

Only the government sector continues to aggressively recruit older middle-aged PMETS into the workforce.

The more abled ones have all emigrated toAustralia,New Zealand,Britain, US and China.

Overall educational system a failure?

Moreover, the rote-learning method used in our educational system here is also contentious as our local graduates continued to lack practical career survival skills in the area of trouble shooting and creative thinking.

The current boom in the service industry also does not require many of us to be well educated and the fear is that many graduates will not find ready employment in the near future. Already, Transitioning.org has received many emails from jobless engineers and IT specialists who could not find work easily after retrenchment.

Many  lamented that the current easy access to cheaper foreign professionals  is also another barrier faced by our  current crop of unemployed local PMETs.

Singaporean executives  are also deemed to be very good administrators or even managers in a big corporation but when it comes to being an entrepreneur or out-of-the-box executive, we all fail miserably.

The current critical lack of business representation in the surrounding region is a testimony to this critical shortage of the right skillsets among our local PMETs.

Why is this so?

Transitioning.org  has rceived an email from a local NUS graduate – Mr S Chua –  few months ago  questioning the market value of his esteemed degree  in his article    “I am a failed product of our meritocratic educational system”.  The article is viewed by more than 21, 000 readers.

He has  complained  that if his esteemed degree from a famed first world local university is unable to land him a job as compared to our third world foreign professionals who continue to easily find jobs in our country, he   indeed  is a failed product of our meritocratic educational system here.

He further reiterated: “I have heard of foreigners earning $5000 when I could barely earn above $2000 and I hailed from the prestigious world-classed  National University of Singapore! Something must be wrong somewhere…

Local home-grown HR managers have told me that foreigners were being hired simply because these people were foreigners. Everyone liked the idea of a diverse workplace until they were badly affected by their adverse work ethics and knowledge.”

Granted that there could be many other  factors in play here when it comes to the hiring policy of HR managers but Mr Chua did have a point here when he argued that if our educational system is that renowed and established there is no reason that he could lose out to foreigners peddling degrees from dubious third world universities.

Our educational system is  fiercely meritocratic as each year only close to 20% of our primary school cohort will enter the local universities. Many more venture abroad to study and pay school fees amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to secure their future through a well-minted degree.

Developed countries like the US has a population whose workforce  boasts of around  50% local graduates.

Nevertheless, their high unemployment arte of around 9 % currently does not augur well for those who have a tertiary education. In fact, it can work against them as employers continue to look for workers with the right skills sets and not just head knowledge that higher education often brings.

As for Singapore,  the plot thickens when our government also sets aside a certain allotment of spaces for our foreign counterparts – with school fees often paid for entirely and with a monthly living allowance thrown in.

For example, the polytechnics have set aside close to 15% of the  annual intake places for our neigbbouring countries’ students  to study here. The varsities also have their own allocation of places for foreigner students thus denying many thousands of eligible Singaporeans from studying here.

When we conducted our fourth  forum two weekends ago  at Quality Hotel –  “The changing employment needs of Singaporeans”,  there were a few questions pertaining to the validity of our educational system here.

The questions were understandable as our government has continued to bring in loads of foreigners to work here on the pretext that the country lacks credible workers with the right mix of skills.

For example, many banks hire mainly foreign Indian professionals with programming skills as Singaporeans prefer to study arts and social science nowadays.There is a critical shortage of programmers in our work force as banks continue to re-locate their operations here.

Programmers working in foreign banks are pay in excess of $5000 monthly and this does not include housing allowances. The irony of it all is that our local graduates have shy away from studying IT programming as they feel  that they will be marginalised in the work palces as employers prefer to hire foreign Indian programmers.

This brings to question whether our government has efficiently manage the tietiary education  well here. They have all along encouraged Singaporean students to study engineering few years ago in view of the booming semi-conductor indy=ustry but with their near demise recently, many local engineers either have to switch line totally or move abroad to look for work.

Singaporeans who studied programming  have complained that such jobs have often favoured foreign Indians who are known to be very good in their work and most importantly, their services are available at about half the cost of our local programmers.

The IT faculty I know has the smallest intake in recent years for many of our local universities here as many Singaporeans felt  that they could not find ready employment ironically when many foreign Indian programmers are being hired by the tens of thousands to work in banks and other IT sectors in recent years

Failure to think critically

One major complaint of our educational system is that it is still sadly mired  in  rote earning despite years of trying to reshape it.

When you can mug very hard and answer questions from an examination script well and  get an “A” grade, the whole educational system  is classified as a failure.

I have met many people with good grades but when you speak with them they are either unable to articulate their thoughts well or could not think critically for themselves. They will provide text book replies that many people know about.

Though some universities here have try to do away with allocating 100% of the marks from examinations by making students complete assignments, it is a futile exercise as the whole educational  system is still geared towards  reading from the text books and answering questions.

We all know that there is a right and left brain theory  and it is obvious that our educational system over taxes the left  brain more. The left brain thinks in a sequential analytical way  and processes information in a logical manner.

Over time, when we are put to use our right  brain in the work place long after we have graduated, we are left perplexed and anxious.

We are trained to think logically, box ourselves into a set pattern and dare not venture into the unknown.

We do not take much risk for ourselves or the companies  we are always using the left  brain to function right from the start.

When call to deliberate and manage risks especially in a foreign land, we are always found wanting. We are thus poor entrepreneurs but very good administrators.

Nevertheless, the urgent need right now is for local entrepreneurs to venture out into the region to create a business and jobs for the country.

We have over depend on foreign MNCs to create employment for Singaporeans.  When they pull out from their operations during a financial crisis, we will be left in a lurch.

During my trip to Wuhan China recently, I was discouraged to discover that there is not one visible Singaporean company that has operate any business here.Wuhanis a prosperous second-tier city that boasts of a 10-million population with a strong mining culture.

There are many entrepreneurs from Taiwan,Hong Kong,Australia, US,Europe and even India, but none from high-GDP bi-lingual Singapore.

Failure to be confident and articulate well

Many human resource specialists have told me how miserably ineffective our local graduates have being when it comes to handling job interviews.

The lack is more glaring when we are interview together with other foreign graduates.

Perhaps, we are all along taught to be humble and  not to boast of our achievement by our parents and teachers.

We are also not able to articulate well and lacking very much in the expression of our thoughts.

This could be due to the fact that in our educational system, we are train to listen and speak less in the classroom from young. We are left very lacking when the need to express ourselves is called upon.

Perhaps,  it is also due to our lack in the mastery  of the English language which has curtailed us from speaking out when we want to.

At home, we are also silently trained to be seen and not heard by our parents. When we argued with our parents, we are deemed to be a trouble maker and sometimes the cane will come to shut us up.

For guys, the shut-up process is more acute as during army time, we face serious punishment if we question the judgement of our superiors in the army camps.

For two years, Singaporeans young men are trained to be obedient, obliging and even suffer silently as we must follow orders – even if it is wrong.

When we enter the workforce, we are merely followers of the work system and seldom do we see someone questioning the jugdement of his superiors – even though it is plainly wrong.

I even heard that nowadays foreign workers are the ones that speak up in the work places  often putting the local ones to shame.

We are slapped with a gag order if we speak out against the government and can only do so in limited public places such as the Speakers’ Corner.

We habitually follow the order of someone authority  be it the parent, teacher, commanding officer or the boss till we are very emptied out on our  independent thinking process. We also set out our ownOBmarkers and do not dare to cross  them for fear of being criticized or worse penalized by the law.

It is no wonder that when we are asked for our opinion on an issue, we seldom display enough confidence to answer articulately thus hurting our employment opportunities at job interviews. Our foreign counterparts, who do not have such inhabited reservations, often outshine us in interviews as they are more expressive and confident. They simply speak their mind but we could not as we are trained from young that if we do so we may be penalized.

All in all, our educational system has generally failed to produce a bright and intelligent population who can speak his mind confidently. More can be done to allow our young students to speak out in class and even in public. The government can also help by easing out and allowing the population to speak freely on issues that affect their well being.

Conclusion

As Singapore grapples with high unemployment among our well educated middle-aged graduates, let us hope that changes can be made to our educational system.

We need to foster a spirit of free learning in our school environment – allowing our young ones to exercise their creativity to their maximum and learn to the best of their inability.

We do not need our schools to limit our children by making them sit in exam-style environment and classify them as scholars and non-scholars when it comes to result time.

Many people who may be good at other stuff are labeled for life as “incompetent” simply because they fail in their exams or do not do as well as others in their class. Those who are technically competent should be rewarded as much as those who are academically talented.

We also are better off if  our government loosens up a bit and allows the citizens to speak their mind without the fear of being intimidated.

Sometimes, the fear mentality is worse than the actual punishment itself.

As for me, I have being a non-graduate all along and suffered for the most part of my career. I could not attain certain positions in the government sector because I don’t have a degree – even though my work performance was among the best in my department.

The emphasis on a good education here has been my stigma all along.

However, I saw that the tide has changed for me in this new economy which treasures people who are entrepreneurial and innovative.

My survival skills plus ability to sieve out opportunities have put me in good stance when it comes to sourcing for business abroad.

Years of living abroad have toughened me up a lot and I have learned how to survive in a hostile environment independently. I learned to listen to my intuition alot and always tried to see the glass half full than half  empty as I have no choice especially if you need to thrive all on your own.

I will want to put  my skills to good use in future and it is most likely that I will not be working for people but more for myself.

The lack of a university degree has not hampered me much and sometimes I find that more to be a blessing…as if not I will always want to look for a job so that I won’t be wasting away my degree.

Moreover, I am also heartened to know that big-shot innovators like Microsft’s Bill, Apples’s  Steve  and Facebook’s Mark do not have any high-levelled tietiary education and yet still make it big in life.

Written by: Gilbert Goh