Unemployed graduates the cause of Social unrest in Muslim nations

I have just heard from CNN news analysis. In Tunisia, it all started
when an unemployed graduate, while working as a labourer, was beaten
by the Police because he did not have any work permit or license.

In Egypt, the current demonstration is led by youths that have no
clear leaders. Graduate unemployment is rampant in Egypt.

There are many dictators in the Muslim world, Saudi Arabia, Oman and
Brunei are a few of them but resentment is not high so it is not the
lack of democracy that led to the demonstrations but lack of work or
economic opportunities.

Unemployed graduates are the most dangerous because they can read and
use the internet to organise among themselves.The other youths will
just follow.

Another reason is that graduates have much higher hopes after working
hard and spending a lot of money studying, only to find that the jobs
that they get are not compatible to the education that they had
acquired.

You may thing that this is happening only in Egypt but it is also
happening in Malaysia, only to a much lesser extent. The government
keep on blaming the students for being choosy and not equipping
themselves with the right education, and yet allow students to waste
their time studying and spending money on useless education.

Many male students would rather work than study. This is one of the
many reasons why women outnumber men in Malaysian universities.
Another danger sign of the graduate unemployment in Malaysia.

If we don't do anything about this, we will suffer the same fate. The
biggest loser will be the establishment and businessmen that rely on
the establishment in order to prosper. We should not produce so many
graduates then or burden them with debt such as the PTPTN when we all
know that they cannot get jobs later on.

We should concentrate on educating graduates that can get employment
quickly. Medicine is the most saleable profession and yet we don't
have enough places for medicine. We still need to send students
overseas and import overseas doctors. University places for Medicine
had been increased, more effort should be made until there is no more
need to import any doctors from overseas. If the effort is too little,
it won't be sufficient to address the problem of unemployed graduates.
Please note that Malaysians send students overseas to Egypt in order
to do Medicine and yet Egypt is still suffering from unemployment of
graduates.

Egypt produces a lot of graduates through the AlAzhar University.
These graduates are usually self taught like the old traditional
universities. Students are not even encouraged to attend lectures
because lecture halls are not enough for all students. This allows
AlAzhar to produce a lot of high quality graduate students much faster
than what the job market can absorb.

Malaysa tend to produce spoon-fed graduates that have the knowledge
but not the ability to gain new knowledge especially by themselves. As
a result, standards have gone down but employers can detect by asking
simple questions to these graduates. As a result, many are still
unemployed. The government may be able to take many of them but having
these sub-standard graduates will reduce the efficiency of our
government machinery.

That is why it is vital for educationalists to evaluate students
fairly and only allow the really qualified ones to graduate. If we
don't, we shall have riots like in Egypt and Tunisia.