Four decades of mismatch

A mismatch is a combination of things that do not go together well. A conundrum is a confusing problem, one which is very difficult to solve.

I first heard of the relationship between education and training and the employment market in Sri Lanka being described as a ‘mismatch’ in 1971, just as I had graduated from university.

Soon after the first youth insurrection, the government of the day obtained the services of a team of economists led by Professor Dudley Seers of the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Sussex, one of the foremost experts on economic development at that time, to study and report on the reasons for the youth unrest; the expenses were met by the UNDP, if I remember correctly.

The lengthy report in two volumes presented by the Seers Committee laid the blame fairly and squarely on what they identified and described as the ‘mismatch’ between what the process of education and training brings to the employment market and the skill mix which the employers and the market require.

The resultant educated unemployed and those in the process of education who could not see any reasonable job prospects at all in the near future were the frustrated young people who were led to revolt.

The fact that the profile of Sri Lanka’s population at that time showed a youth bulge, without a sufficient number of mature, educated adults who could be a stabilising and moderating influence on the vast majority of young hotheads, was another factor. The virus of youth unrest which was spreading all over the world in the late ’60s and the early ’70s also added fire.

Steps to improve employability

The Seers’ report saw the light of day four decades ago. Since that time, every administration has tried to take positive steps to improve the employability of young people, primarily through economic growth and creating real jobs in the economy, rather than make work Government employment and improving the skills with which young people are equipped when they access the job market.

What is claimed to be top-of-the-line technical and vocational education facilities have proliferated in the country. Increased employment in the armed services has provided an opportunity to learn skills and trades on the job, at a level virtually unparalleled in our history since the mass mobilisation of World War II.

The West Asian oil fuelled boom has created a humongous demand for Sri Lankans with technical and vocational skills, but also for unskilled house maid and labourers. The mechanisation and the spread of sophisticated electronic technology to otherwise mundane household activities, microwave ovens, washing machines, dishwashers, blenders and mixers, etc., have even turned the humble housemaid into a technician of sorts! So also the effect of agricultural mechanisation on farmers.

The Information and Communication Technology revolution has opened up a whole new employment vista for computer literate young people. Mobile phones have provided the proverbial ‘bottom of the pyramid’ service providers even in rural areas, not to mention urban technicians, with connectivity, which has them on virtual 24-hour demand and call. Motorcycles and trishaws have given them a mobility to reach the location of any client with ease with their tools and equipment.

All this, based on our virtual first world social indicators and very high female participation in the work force, have created humongous employment opportunities outside small holder agriculture, plantations and the traditional income generating cottage industries.

In fact all labour intensive sectors of the economy are facing human resource shortages at the semi and unskilled levels, across the board, plantations, agriculture, garments, construction, etc. Employers in these sectors have to provide all sports of expensive attractions and incentives to recruit and hold employees.

In this context it is indeed surprising and even depressing to hear experts of various hues, in both the Government and business sectors, at seminars and talk shows still talking about the ‘mismatch’ between the product of education and the employment market, today in 2011, four decades later. Why is this? I will venture to hazard a few guesses.

Government jobs

The first would be the attraction of Government jobs. Permanent and pension-able Government employment has been a South Asian attraction probably from colonial times. Natives who would took the foreign Emperor’s salt and helped him in running the colony were always well rewarded, more so if they converted to the Emperor’s faith, to put his loyalty to the foreigner beyond all doubt!

Even in pre-colonial times, those who were fortunate enough to be able to earn a share of the Raja’s gold, by hook or even by crook, were always considered as ‘heaven born’ beings. The lack of challenge and low expectations of State employment is another attraction, one is rarely driven to perform nor deliver, other than one’s personal commitment; one just survives until eligible for pension and retirement, a culture which has earned the wondrous sobriquet of ‘shape niyaya,’ roughly translatable as the ‘doctrine of least resistant survival’.

The possibility of being able to inveigle a home station transfer after a putting in a minimum amount of years of work in a so-called ‘difficult area’ is another attraction of working for the State. Generous leave facilities, they are wide and various, maternity, sick, casual, no pay, duty, vacation leave, the possibility of aggregating lapsed leave, etc., railway warrants, salary free from income tax, duty free car permits and a plethora of Government holidays, scholarships and assignments abroad also add value.

The influence the Government bureaucracy wields across the board, no reply, school admissions, care in State hospitals, scholarships for progeny, recruitment in to the Government sector, the ability to move closely with powerful politicians and play pooja to them for personal gain, etc., is also important to make Government employment attractive. These factors distort the demand for jobs.

Employment outside Government

Employment outside Government is always only a staging post on the way to the final Shangri-La of permanent, pension-able, Government employment. So all this creates a bias towards white collar jobs in the Government sector. The openings here are necessarily limited, not by the taxpayer’s payments alone, but even if governments borrow with gay abandon, running up huge deficits, burdening unborn generations.

Restricting Government recruitment is a sacred cow, which only bold administrators will consider. But since the aspiration is for Government jobs, large numbers train themselves and sit for the various competitive exams. But since only a small fraction of those who aspire actually get in, ‘apply, apply – no reply’ has been the perennial battle cry of the unemployed graduate; those left out do not have a skill set nor attitude which ‘matches’ the skill and attitudinal requirement of other sectors in which there may be openings. Hence the ‘mismatch’ continues, it is endemic.

Blue collar bias

Another cause would be the blue collar bias. White collar desk jobs are preferred, for a variety of reasons. Parents aspire for the traditional ‘doctor, lawyer, engineer’ qualification, which used to be in demand for the ‘attractive daughter with dowry’ in the old time matrimonial notices. This bias had led to step-motherly treatment to the vocational and skill training sector by white collar education managers.

It is said that the C.W.W. Kannangara reforms, which introduced free tuition in Government schools, among other things, had a whole section of vocational education and training. Selected pedagogues were sent to Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere under the Colombo Plan to be trained in vocational training. However, the sector was perennially underfunded as those who controlled education funding allocations were biased towards academic education, which they wished for their progeny.

It was only in the late ’70s and early ’80s that new institutes like the Technical Training Institute, Katunayake, the Apprentice Training Institute, Katubedda and the National Apprenticeship Scheme were introduced. The National Youth Services Council set up a large number of vocational and technical skill training centres islandwide.

Until then it was only the old Technical Colleges, which were given what they claimed were business skills, English language, typing, shorthand, book keeping, etc. It is only when the neighbourhood carpenter, plumber and electrician went to West Asia, earned good money, came back, built a nice house and set up their children in good marriages, that parents’ attitudes changed; they would bring their sons to inquire about a ‘good’ carpentry or plumbing course! Money talks!

Inflexibility

The inflexibility of the education and training sectors, mainly due to budgets being controlled by bureaucrats, who hate change, was another cause. Syllabuses were rarely changed to meet the demands of the employment market. There was no link between the process of education and the demands of the job market.

It was considered the policymakers’ job to create an economy in which students with unmarketable skills for which there was no demand could find jobs! The educators’ responsibility was to educate, forget the job market!

Things changed only when parents took matters in to their own hands, arranging for private tuition, which has today evolved into a private tuition sector which contributes heavily to revenue, out which the State education is funded, when they realised their children were not learning in the State system.

Before the schools takeover in 1961, parents supported Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim education institutes. After the ban on fee-levying private schools, after a lapse of some years, parents turned to supporting market driven ‘international schools’ outside the legal regime governing education, as corporate entities making profits.

Even the institutionalised State vocational training sector was isolated from the job market and trainees were produced with archaic skills, trained on archaic equipment, by trainers who were virtual dinosaurs themselves! The lack of this linkage between the process of education and the job market opened up an opportunity for a human resource development industry, which was paid by employers to retrain school leavers to help them to think competitively and face up to challenges.

The much-criticised bias of private companies towards schoolboys who had excelled in sports and other so-called extracurricular activities was because of this decision-making ability ingrained in sports persons and talented performers in the fine arts, which was sorely lacking in the more academically-oriented students.

As one CEO told me, “When a sportsman sees the ball coming at him, he has to decide what to do, even to duck, whereas a bookish guy will want me to tell him what to do or look for a manual to guide him! I prefer the decisive guy, I can train him on what decision he should take, given the circumstances, but my shareholders and investors cannot afford the luxury of having to pay for people who are too petrified to take a decision.”

The education mafia, in a belated recognition of the importance of non-academic aspects of education for the job market, relabelled extracurricular activities as ‘co-curricular’ activities! A classic case of old wine in new bottles, with new labels!

The generous welfare programs and family support systems allow the seeker of a Government job to choose to be employed until Government vacancy occurs. In Cuba President Raul Castro has described such welfare programs as ‘disincentives to work’.

Voters know that the Government sector keeps expanding, whatever the consequences on the budget deficit. To get votes, politicians promise Government jobs. Policymakers who sensibly try to limit Government recruitment into make work jobs are pilloried, as betrayers of the most reasonable aspiration of our young people to serve the country, little realising that so many public servants sucking the resources of the country dry, with no productive work to do, put generations of future Sri Lankans into debt.

Foreign employment

Another cushion is this bogey of foreign employment. House maids and unskilled labour are sent abroad for employment, with horrendous social consequences, by economic managers, who use their hard-earned money to waste on supporting a Government structure which would otherwise be unaffordable.

On top of this, heavy foreign borrowing incurs more debt. And we are in a downward spiral of indebtedness and social degradation. All because of the inability and lack of political will to take the bold decisions necessary steps to reform education and vocational and technical training.

But to be fair, there are some changes, private tuition and international schools are under a regime of benign neglect, education administrators and politicians wish them away, pretend they do not exist, except of course when they have to inveigle the admission of their own progeny!

Government schools are beginning to teach in the English medium, even though there are horrendous teacher shortages. Tertiary level foreign professional courses are allowed to be offered, this is a huge safety valve to cope with the chaos in our universities. Even foreign universities are going to be allowed.

Free education currently is a myth, propagated by self-serving bureaucrats and politicians. Without exception, every parent in Sri Lanka who can afford to – and even those who cannot afford to – beg, borrow or steal and send their children to supplementary classes. Many charities and goodhearted persons provide free classes to poor children who cannot afford private fees for private classes.

Pressing need for further changes

But there is pressing need for further changes, if this 40-year-old curse of mismatch is to be eliminated. In the wider economy, reduce the size of the State; get the State out of everything other than policy, regulation and taxation. Provide space for entrepreneurs and business to create wealth and create jobs.

In education, ‘free education’ is well past its ‘sell-by’ date, no one will grudge the vital role it has played in the past. But now, give us ‘freedom in education’. Liberate education policy. Bring education, vocational and technical training totally under the discipline of the market. Allow private schools; repeal the ’61 amendment which banned them. Allow and encourage private teacher training institutes.

We have a unique species in Sri Lanka: ‘untrained teachers,’ untrained in vital pedagogic and psychiatry skills needed to be a real teacher; you do not find the species anywhere else in the world! Same as you do not find untrained neurosurgeons, neither here nor anywhere else in the world! But we entrust our children to them! We must be a brave nation! But there is hope, the Indians the other day found untrained airline pilots! Only in South Asia!

Cluster schools and set up elected regional boards of education and vest the authority for running schools in the boards. Give clusters full autonomy in recruitment of teachers. Set up a strong, autonomous National Education Inspectorate, to hold the school boards accountable for their services.

Divide the education budget by the number of students, and give the per capita amount per every school child in a Government school. National schools which take a disproportionate amount of the money presently will have to do their own fundraising to fund the deficit. These are bold changes.

Bravery needed

Recently in a BBC talk on the unrest in the Maghreb countries there was a comment on asking ‘politicians to be brave,’ that it amounts to asking them to ‘commit suicide,’ in a populist democracy! This is especially true of our sacred cow of education.

But we need brave politicians and bureaucrats to reform the sector. Maybe even a benign dictator, so that there may be a whisker of hope! Otherwise we will be mismatching on merrily into the future, betraying generation after generation, as we have been doing for the last four decades, even after Professor Seers identified and banded the problem! The people who perpetuate this mismatch are the serial traitors.