by Dr Jayaratne Pinikahana
( February 19, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Ministry of Higher Education has decided to make the vice chancellors and the academic staff answerable for the unemployment problem among the graduates. Dr Sunil Jayantha Nawaratne, Secretary to the ministry has announced that the relevant amendments to the UGC act are being drafted to allow the vice-chancellors and the academic staff to make employment-oriented degrees/courses in future. This seems to be a timely move made by the ministry with a long term vision on our ever-increasing unemployment problem among the graduates.
The unemployment among graduates is not a new phenomenon and it has been with us since 1970’s. According to some estimates, about 36,000 graduates are currently unemployed and the number is increasing every year. In view of this, there is a pressing need for the education authorities to look into the cause of unemployment among new university graduates and find solution to address this problem. This is not entirely a Sri Lankan problem either by any means and it can be seen even in developed countries. For example, according to the Higher Educational Careers Service Centre (Hecsc) in UK , the unemployment among graduates in 2010 was 8.9%. And yet, it is not confined to arts graduates only and can be seen across all disciplines. According to this survey, the unemployment is higher in engineering, architecture, and IT graduates in the United Kingdom than in social sciences such as sociology, economics or psychology. This survey found that the unemployment rate among civil engineering graduates was 11.9%, architecture, 10.9%, electrical engineering, 13.3% and the IT graduates, 16.3% whereas sociology graduates, 9.5%, economics, 11% and psychology, 8.3%.
It is clear from these statistics that the Sri Lankan situation is different from UK in relation to the types of disciplines. Although accurate statistics are not available in Sri Lanka, anecdotally, it is well known that arts graduates are badly affected in the employment market whereas the medical, and engineering graduates are doing better compared to other disciplines. In many countries of the world, the students who are doing ‘professional courses’ like medicine, engineering, physiotherapy, radiography or nursing find it easy to get an employment quicker than the graduates of ‘academic disciplines’ such as history, physics or political science. Then the question is whether we can or should transform all the ‘academics courses’ into ‘professional courses’ in order to resolve the unemployment problem among graduates. The short answer to this question is resoundingly no. But we can make more job-oriented courses within the academic disciplines using their subject material. Academic disciplines like economics, sociology, history or physics should not be completely eliminated from universities and no university in the world has done it. The academic departments are vitally important in producing scientists and scholars in all physical, biological, and social sciences who are the top brains in any country.
The job-oriented courses should be different from academic degrees in the sense that they are practical and applied courses. The knowledge gained through these courses should be readily transferable to the job in hand. What the universities can do in the face of higher unemployment among graduates is to create more job oriented courses within the academic departments. This should not be a complete replacement of academic disciplines but a reshaping the entire disciplinary areas to fit into the modern needs of the world. Producing more graduates with pure academic knowledge does not meet the modern requirements of our society. The fundamental cause of unemployment among graduates is the incompatibility in the focus of higher education institutions and the needs of labor market. The pure academic knowledge they have gained is not usable in the job that they might get and as a result they get frustrated too by not being able to make use of the knowledge gained through hard work over a four year period.
Designing more employment oriented, applied professional courses needs a careful scrutiny both in terms of the employability of the graduates of these new courses and the practical value of the knowledge these graduates might gain through new professional courses. I am not in a position to speak for other disciplines and instead, I would like to concentrate on my own discipline, sociology to see whether any job-oriented courses could be designed using the subject material embodied in the huge knowledge base in sociology.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the unemployment problem among graduates is a worldwide phenomenon. In many countries, departments of social sciences and humanities are either being down-sized or amalgamated with similar disciplines. For example, departments of sociology, social work, social policy, social inquiry are amalgamated in some universities and even the departments of political science and psychology are linked together with sociology departments in order to balance the budget cuts in some universities. In my view the best opportunity to create more employment oriented courses in sociology is to introduce social work as a separate or joined degree program within the existing departments of sociology across the country and rename these departments as ‘Department of Sociology & Social Work’ as may be the case in many western countries. The social work is a professional discipline like nursing or physiotherapy so that the graduates of social work will be able to find work in many different sectors in future.
Social workers are involved in improving the quality of life of people by engaging in developing the potential of each individual, group and community of a society. Social workers perform interventions through research, policy, community organizing, direct practice and teaching. Research is often focused on areas such as human development, social policy, public administration, program evaluation and international and community development. Social work bases its methodology on a systematic body of evidence-based knowledge derived from research and practice evaluation, including local knowledge specific to its context. It uses the same research methodology that is used in sociology. It recognizes the complexity of interactions between human beings and their environment influenced by bio-psychosocial factors. The social work profession draws on theories of social and human development, social theory and social systems to analyse complex situations and to facilitate individual, organizational, social and cultural changes. In a number of countries, registration or licensure of people working as social workers is required and there are mandated qualifications. In other places, a professional association sets academic and experiential requirements for admission to membership.
Apart from introducing social work into the sociology program, traditional sociology departments can offer a number of bachelors degrees for a number of subject areas such as Criminology, Social Research, Health Studies, Social Statistics and Sociology under the titles of BA (Social Work), BA(Social Research), BA(Criminology) BA (Social Statistics), BA(Health Studies), together with BA(Sociology). At the moment all the students who specialize in sociology are offered a Bachelor degree in Sociology without specifying any specialty or expertise. They are not specialists in any specific area like ‘social research’, ‘criminology’ or ‘health sociology’.
By offering a specialized degree not in ‘sociology’ but in ‘applied social research’, for example, the graduates might have more opportunities to find work as ‘social researchers’ in government or non-governmental sector. Researchers in Sri Lanka have become an ‘endangered species’ according to a recent report published by the Ministry of Technology & Research in Sri Lanka. This report revealed that Sri Lanka has only 287 researchers per million which is less than the world average of 894. The average number of researchers per million in the developed world and the developing world is 3272 and 374 respectively. It is clear from these statistics that Sri Lankan situation is worse than the average third world situation. The most alarming situation is that it is getting worse in recent years. For example, in 1996 Sri Lanka had 6000 full time researchers including university researchers but by 2006 this number declined to 4200, and even further in 2008 having only 4037 researchers! Research is a great career and the departments of sociology can reverse this trend by offering a bachelor degree in ‘social research’ for those who are interested in working as social researchers in many different sectors.
Traditionally, the majority of university graduates both arts and science entered the teaching profession after completing their studies. But in recent years the lack of teaching opportunities in schools created a situation where the majority of graduates could not find teaching positions in government schools whereby adding more graduates into the unemployment queue. In western countries teachers are almost exclusively the graduates of education (Bachelor of Education) and they are taught primary and secondary school curricula together with teaching methods, educational psychology, child psychology and so on. In Sri Lanka, Colombo, Peradeniya, Jaffna and Open university have established education departments for postgraduate training for teachers. At the moment no university in Sri Lanka offers a bachelor of education degree and sometime ago, Kelaniya University, the only university which offered a bachelors degree closed down its department of education. It is time now to commence a bachelor of education degree for those who want to be teachers in future in all streams. The number of students should be confined to the estimated number of teaching vacancies that might be available annually in our school system.
Teaching is a noble profession and a professional degree in teaching is long overdue in the our university system. Introducing a professional degree in teaching will contribute to ease the burden of unemployment among graduates in the long run since teaching is an employment oriented course by its very nature.
Designing job oriented degree programs for new university students per se would not resolve the unemployment problem among graduates. Any changes in new university courses should be incorporated into a broader plan where government, private and non-governmental sectors are committed to offer job opportunities for graduates passing out with these new degrees. In other words, there is no point in producing social work graduates if no body is willing to offer them jobs. In western countries, job opportunities for social workers can be found in social welfare sector, hospitals, child probation agencies, prisons, government departments etc. For example every hospital employs a number of social workers to deal with the social aspects of patients. Likewise, Sri Lankan hospitals need to create a job category called ‘social worker’ along with other categories such as ‘nurse’, ‘radiographer’ etc and absorb the new social work graduates. In the same way graduates specialized in ‘criminology’ need to be provided with jobs in the police department, prisons, bribery commission, armed forces and so on. For example, police department is dealing with very complex criminal investigations which need expertise in criminology and victiminology. At the moment police officers, some of whom with no tertiary qualifications are involved in very complex criminal investigations. If the police department is committed to offer employment for some of the graduates in criminology every year, that will ease the unemployment problem among new graduates in criminology.
After all, the unemployment among graduates is a product of under-developed socio-economic system in Sri Lanka. In developed countries, university graduates can be absorbed into their socio-economic system and more and more opportunities are created every year when their economies grow faster than many developing countries. When our economy begins to grow faster, more job opportunities will arise and the unemployment will come down. At the same time, the unemployment among graduates is part of overall unemployment problem in Sri Lanka so that it is not logical to distinguish it from overall issue. It is very clear from experience of other countries in the region such as Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and South Korea that the unemployment among graduates declined quite considerably when their economies grew faster over the last 3 decades or so. What is really needed in Sri Lanka is to transform our university courses to fit into the changing needs of our country coupled with the economic development. In this exercise, the higher education ministry’s decision to give some responsibility to vice chancellors and the academic staff to make university courses more employment oriented should be greatly appreciated.
The writer is formally a senior lecturer in sociology at Ruhuna University. He can be reached at jpinikahana@gmail.com
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