A surprising feature of Taiwan’s present economic troubles is that, despite a severe shortage of labor in the manufacturing sector, the youth unemployment rate remains high. This problem urgently needs to be addressed.
Premier William Lai (賴清德) is addressing the imbalance between supply and demand in the job market by introducing policies to tackle the lack of workers and skilled labor in the industrial sector.
Industry and academia have both put forward suggestions. The Professor Huang Kun-huei Education Foundation has proposed that higher education and technical colleges come together to develop a uniform seven-year vocational training strategy to improve the practical abilities of their teachers and students, and reform the current technical and vocational teaching system.
Technical and vocational education was a key factor in the creation of Taiwan’s economic miracle. A technical and vocational education in the industrial, commercial and marine industries attracted and produced a large number of skilled workers.
During the course of Taiwan’s giant leap from a poor economic backwater to a flourishing export economy, employers and employees alike, from basic workers through to the management class, came through the technical and vocational education system.
At the time, graduates from National Taipei University of Technology were highly employable and highly valued in the nation’s industrial sector.
However, as in Taiwan’s general education system, years of overexpansion have produced an imbalance between supply and demand within the technical and vocational education system, with many students’ qualifications unsuited to the jobs available.
As every Taiwanese knows, a culture that emphasizes university diplomas and educational background means that the practical skills of vocational or technical education are being undervalued.
The essence of vocational or technical education is study for the purpose of a specific application, training students to become proficient in a particular skill. Through hard work, application and lifelong study, students become masters of a specific skill and can pass on their craft to the next generation.
However, in a society that values the accumulation of university diplomas, technical and vocational education have become too focused on academic credentials, an attitude that has extended into the regular higher education system.
The result is that vocational school graduates are branded as academically weak or “poor students.” As vocational schools have been elevated to university status, there has been a corresponding decline in practical skills. Vocational education is becoming hollowed out by higher education.
A large number of technical and vocational colleges have been upgraded to technical university status. However, the practical experience and skills of the teaching staff at these institutions has not necessarily received a corresponding upgrade.
This has meant that apprentice students outperform students of technical universities on exams, because the technical universities emphasize theory and disparage practical learning. There is therefore a large disparity between the employability of their graduates and apprentices who have trained on the job.
The inevitable result is that technical university graduates are seen as “inefficient workers” by employers.
The nation’s dwindling birthrate has caused an even more serious problem. The fertility rate and the total birth rate as a percentage of the population are among the lowest of any country in the world. Taiwan’s declining birthrate is not a short-term anomaly: The crisis has been slowly deepening over a number of years.
Despite this, successive governments’ education policies have failed to address the problem properly. While the youth population has dwindled, higher education has actually been expanded. Education policy requires long-term planning, yet Taiwan’s policy has been blighted by short-termism, creating the problems that we face today.
From elementary schools to universities, the impact of the declining birthrate is already becoming evident. Schools are struggling to fill places, cutting classes, closing or merging departments, merging, suspending classes and even closing down. Teaching staff are being made redundant.
Technical and vocational colleges have not been able to escape the repercussions of the low birthrate, and schools are becoming ever more frenzied in their attempts to attract students from a dwindling supply.
According to regulations, departments at vocational and technological colleges, and universities are free to select exam candidates from three different student categories, which means that departments steal students from each other by not asking for students’ educational background, thus canvassing for pupils from entirely separate disciplines.
This has resulted in an absurd situation where a civil engineering or law college will poach students from their school’s college of hospitality management, or a college of performing arts will recruit students from the colleges of electrical engineering and computer science.
Often, no assessment is made of students’ educational backgrounds, the difference between two academic disciplines and the potential for learning and teaching difficulties.
This bias against technical and vocational education is bad not just for the students themselves, but also for industry and for society. Overall skill levels in Taiwan have fallen from their previous, impressively high levels, which used to allow the nation to compete well in the global skills race.
Meanwhile, as the domestic manufacturing industry rushes to upgrade its technology, Taiwan’s technical and vocational education system has failed to keep up with industries’ changing requirements and is producing graduates that are unqualified for the available jobs.
Lacking practical training, many graduates are unwilling to accept lower-level positions, yet are unqualified to carry out managerial positions. Many graduates cannot find a job in the field within which they specialized and are forced to accept salaries that fall well below expectations.
Fortunately, the market appears to be gradually adjusting to meet the new situation.
In an opinion poll released earlier this month by the Professor Huang Kun-huei Education Foundation, 75 percent of those interviewed said that studying for a technical or vocational qualification would give young people a bright future.
However, 42 percent stated that they believe the elevation of vocational schools to university status, which currently stands at 80 percent, has had a detrimental effect on graduates’ practical skills and their ability to find work.
The percentage of respondents who believe that technical and vocational schools have a future and who value practical skills perhaps shows that attitudes are changing. This needs be capitalized on through the active promotion of technical and vocational education. There is much that still needs to be done in this area to revolutionize the nation’s education system.
Technical and vocational school students’ employment prospects are still a major concern and are having an effect on the country’s economic and social development.
If Taiwan does not sort out technical and vocational education, the country’s development will be stunted. The revolution in education that this requires cannot be brought about by the Ministry of Education alone. It requires a coordinated effort by officials from the Ministry of Finance, the National Development Council and the Executive Yuan.
Reforming education is so vital for the nation’s future that it is by no means an overstatement to say that Taiwan’s success or failure depends on it.
Translated by Edward Jones
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