Artificial Obsolescence

In an effort to make our graduates more “marketable”, the government, as reported in the media, is pushing public universities to review “irrelevant and outdated” courses and threatens to cut subsidies for them. I find this disturbingly puzzling, if not simply wrong.

What makes our graduates “marketable” is not just a matter of taking the right courses. A few years ago at the peak of the tech boom and all the hype with the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), the “in” program was computer science (CS). So many students flock into CS programs, many without knowing what CS is, or even liking computers in general. We produced a lot of CS graduates, for sure, but many of them failed to find employment in the area. Apparently, many of our CS graduates failed to meet the standards demanded by the industry. I can relate first hand to this. During the compulsory English for Occupational Purpose (EOP) course in my senior year at IIUM, we had a series of mock interviews, when the class was split into two, and we took turn interviewing one another. There were a lot of CS students in the group. Some were what I considered “real” CS students, who took the extra effort to take MSCE courses and learn the latest programming languages on their own. Others, as we saw during the mock interview, didn’t even bother to learn anything beyond the C++ in the program curriculum or even cared much about computers. They were those who took the program simply because it was “what the market wants”. Now it’s biotechnology.

There is so much that goes into being “marketable” than the courses you take, and many of the other factors are not the kind of things you can formally teach in a course. If we simply want to cater to the needs of the industry, instead of building more public universities in every state in the federation, the government should build more technical schools, as the demand of the industry is mostly for diploma level education rather than degree level. The ever changing structure of the economy and development of new technology also means that the reactive approach of trying to cater to industry needs ultimately futile. We’ll forever be playing catch up.

What happens to the notion of learning for the sake of knowledge? I am a firm believer that the primary purpose of education is to develop critical and independent thinking; the specialized technical expertise within the respective fields secondary. A good student, a good graduate should find no major problem finding employment no matter what degree he or she did. What are these “irrelevant and outdated” courses, by the way? History? An interesting recent article in the New York Times reports a growing popularity of philosophy in top US universities. I am not aware of any of our public universities offering a philosophy program; but if there are any, chances are it qualifies as being “irrelevant and outdated”. Perhaps those top American students are not too concerned about their “marketability”.