Why do we send young people to university?

Two months ago on these pages (“Getting to 4.0: Why the revolution is not digital”), I asked: “How did Thailand, 50 years ago the favourite in the Asian development sweepstakes, end up stuck in the middle-income doldrums while South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, everyone’s picks for failure, are today rich countries?

The answer I offered is “education”. Today, I want to detail how our university system fails to train the young citizens required to build us a better future and suggest the direction it must go.

Let us start with two clarifying points that will help us understand the real problem.

First, many focus on our universities’ perennially poor global rankings. For many reasons, it is bad that no Thai institution ranks in the top 500 universities globally. But these rankings do not measure how well our universities teach; they measure how well recognised Thai professors are in the global research community. Our universities operate in Thai, they lack international research resources and connections, and our professors do not publish internationally or participate globally. We are therefore like the proverbial frog under the coconut shell; international measures of quality do not notice us. These characteristics matter educationally when it comes to our universities’ ability to prepare young people for a more globally engaged Thailand, but they do not affect our universities’ ability to teach.

Second, Thai higher education is not limited by the quality of facilities or content available to students. Much of today’s discussion of higher education for the “4.0 economy” focuses on the need for more computers and better networks. These would be nice, but they are not essential. Our universities are capable of teaching any important subject in the world. There is nothing our young people might need to learn that cannot be taught here, nor do our students lack access to the equipment they need.

If university rankings do not matter and if our universities are capable of teaching anything, what should we be asking about?

Let us start with a simple question: Why do we send young people to university?

The simple answer is: To get high-quality jobs in modern companies in globally competitive industries or to build new companies that can compete globally and forge a developed economy for our country.

This leads inevitably to a second, equally simple question: “Are we getting our money’s worth from higher-education spending?”

The answer is, “No”.

In recent years, a majority or near majority of Thai university graduates have been unemployed or found employment only in low-end, service jobs better suited to M3 leavers. At the same time, multinationals and top Thai companies have been unable to hire young professionals trained in the same skills in which they are nominally educated. (Case in point: the large supply of computer science students graduating annually and the chronic shortage of employable, entry-level, IT professionals.)

What’s wrong? Why are our university graduates not qualified for jobs in good companies?

There are two ways of addressing these questions – from the direction of the university or the direction of the employer. Let me start at the university.

When I consulted, I always began with a simple question: “Who is your ideal graduate?”

No matter whom I asked, from ministers of Higher Education down to individual professors, everyone dismissed the question as trivial. They all had well-rehearsed answers.

Their ideal graduate is a master of his/her discipline, well-versed in critical reading and thinking skills, a trained problem-solver and researcher, a fine public speaker and effective writer, and (naturally) ambitious, dedicated to success, hardworking and caring.

Ask here in Thailand and you get the same answer.

The answer you get here is as meaningless as the answers I got in all those other places. Why?

Because there is nothing about the actual practice of education at our universities that teaches any of these things. 

 

Thai universities vs employers 

What do our students actually learn and how do our universities teach it to them?

Students sit through endless hours of lectures, most days of the week. They are not assigned to do much outside of the lecture hall – read, write, conduct research, intern, volunteer or whatever. Outside of lectures they are expected to memorise what they heard in lectures – a tiny portion of the available information about a subject – in order to be able to repeat it back verbatim. In effect, we teach them that “knowledge” is a body of already established truth that a superior, the professor, holds and that as students it is their function to accept passively as the truth. We assess the quality of their performance by giving them exams that measure how well they have learned to mimic their masters.

Where in this format do students learn things that can be learned only by doing, specifically things such as how to become “well-versed in critical reading and thinking skills, a trained problem-solver and researcher, a fine public speaker and effective writer,” to say nothing of acquiring such critical personal values as ambition, a solid work ethic and the essential values of citizenship?

Nowhere – and here lies the problem.

Here, too, is where we need to ask: What do globally competitive companies require in their workers? From thousands of employer surveys conducted around the world, including annual surveys of multinationals operating in Thailand and top Thai companies, we know that employers want, first, employees who work hard, arrive on time and leave only when the job is done, are committed to quality and outcomes-oriented. They should also possess an internal motor that never stops, want something out of their lives and want recognition for performance at work.

Employers also demand employees with critical “soft” skills (meaning not the capacity to run equations, but actually to do something), employees who: 

l Will search out and assess the quality of a wide variety of data and opinions and then assemble it into a reasoned whole (critical thinking).

l Are comfortable in environments where there are no knowns and no standard operating procedures, and where intelligent creativity is at a premium (problem-solving).

l Arrive ready to work, able to stand up at moment’s notice and speak articulately, make quality professional presentations, and write concise, compelling memos (professional competence).

l Can work easily with international partners, interact with foreign data providers, and impress clients around the world (global awareness).

Today university educational practice might as well be designed to stifle the actual learning required to produce our ideal graduate. Until what actually happens at our universities matches the rhetoric of higher education, our universities will continue to produce large numbers of service workers unemployable in 21st century jobs.

What do we need?

We need universities that (1) provide our students the cross-cultural exposure and language skills necessary to function in the greater world economy; (2) teach our students not intellectual subservience, but to think for themselves, (3) challenge our students not to memorise yesterday’s news, but how to solve problems that have no answers yet; and (4) engage our students as citizens responsible for Thailand’s future.

 

Michael Shafer is director of the Warm Heart Foundation, based in A Phrao, Chiang Mai.