MOE making a mess
Let’s face it: The unemployment rate is going to rise even higher if the Ministry of Education (MOE) keeps trying to do things right rather than doing the right things.
While the Executive Yuan urges various agencies to take action to create more job openings for newly graduated students, only 20 percent of vacancies were filled in a recent series of job fairs (“Job fairs filled just 20% of vacancies, labor council says,” June 10, page 4). This signifies that the jobs offered were either not suitable for new graduates or that the offerings were only intended to boost the participation rate, serving as nothing more than advertising tools to promote the corporate social responsibility of participating companies.
What’s worse, the MOE is actually creating a roadblock for graduating students with the implementation of an internship program providing a NT$22,000 monthly subsidy for every intern hired on a one-year contract.
Some of the possible setbacks of this program can be foreseen: companies will take their pick from certain schools, which would lead to inequality. In fact, some prominent companies have signed up only to take in students from “top tier” universities. Those from less popular schools may end up nowhere.
Moreover, the program will hinder job seekers’ odds of finding full-time employment. The companies participating in the program are not obliged to offer a long-term position after the internship, and their contracts prevent interns looking for a more suitable offer elsewhere before their contract expires.
With the implementation of the program, the MOE is disrupting the supply and demand balance on the employment market and merely creating the illusion of an increase in job vacancies for graduating students. Companies are likely to create redundant positions, which would benefit the government and the companies, but unfortunately not the students. The government gets the numbers and the companies get financial support with the benefit of an additional labor force. But the graduates’ future might thus be jeopardized.
At the hardest time in recent history to pin down a job, the MOE should take serious action in dealing with the problem for the sake of Taiwanese students rather than naively doing things that just make the numbers look good.
JOY LIU
Taipei
Bring back Al Jazeera
A year ago a story in the Taipei Times announced the addition of Al Jazeera English to the MOD service of Chunghwa Telecom (“Al Jazeera English TV makes debut in Taiwan,” July 16, 2008, page 2). This channel, along with its Arabic sister station, is one of the foremost respected information sources and among the most watched news channels in the word.
Yet this valuable, internationalizing media outlet has apparently been replaced by a no-name channel of stock market quotes, video reruns and other useless trivia.
Is there no one in Taiwan who can convince Chunghwa to quickly fix this mistake and restore this valuable news source?
JOHN HANNA
Taoyuan
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