Disguised Unemployment Crisis Feared After Graduation

06 October 2020 Economics

The predicted admission crisis at the Kuwait University and some higher education institutions has reopened the file of harmonizing the outputs of these institutions and the requirements of the labor market, reports Al-Qabas daily. Today’s crisis has gone beyond providing seats for large numbers of students who have met the admission requirements, and has become related to how to manage these numbers so that the country does not wake up to an actual disguised unemployment crisis after graduation.

With such a case, admission policy must be developed for these students through an integrated system, as it is not easy to provide a seat for them without studying the dimensions of the impact of these numbers on the labor market later, for students who will be accepted this year are expected to graduate within 4 to 6 years or perhaps a little more, in addition to the actual numbers of students continuing at the university who are expected to graduate in succession, which casts a shadow of questions such as: Will the labor market need their specializations? Will it absorb or accommodate them all?

Needs
The Kuwait University is supposed to invest in the numbers of students it will accept for the next academic year 2020/2021 by directing them to the required specializations to go in line with the requirements of development in accordance with the Kuwait 2035 Vision, especially as it has previously been alerted to the importance of keeping its outputs in line with the needs of the labor market through the steps it has taken to prepare a comprehensive strategy.

The then minister of education and minister of higher education, Dr Hamed Al-Azmi announced in a statement published in Al-Qabas KUNA photos Left-right: Kuwait’s plane with 45 tons of relief aid lands at Khartoum airport. Kuwait dispatches more relief aid to Sudan on April 29, 2019, the formation of a committee to prepare a strategy for university admission policy, to develop the university’s outputs and match the annual admission plans to the needs of the labor market, provided that it submits a periodic report every 3 months, and the committee was actually formed in July of the same year and it is still practicing its work according to the records of the last university councils during the current year without referring any report or preparing a strategy or an announced result of its work.

The importance of this committee is now evident in directing the students who will be accepted by the university, to the required and desirable specializations, after their graduation, especially since the outputs of some majors at the Kuwait University suffer from delay in nomination for work, due to the lack of actual need for them, or work in administrative positions that are not related to their specializations.

Sources pointed to one of the most prominent examples of the need to manage the number of accepted students, saying: “The College of Education alone now includes more than 7 thousand students, and about 1,500 teachers graduate annually, and there is still a need for expatriate teachers,” explaining that “this need confirms the accumulation in national cadres of graduates in certain disciplines, and their scarcity in other disciplines, which makes it imperative to direct students during admission to the required specializations, and to close majors that are saturated with the numbers of graduates.

Statistics
Official statistics indicate an increase in unemployment rates among some engineering majors, while there are modern majors in the engineering labor market that can be included in the majors at Kuwait University, or at least twinned with already existing specializations, and the same applies to other colleges that are still teaching according to old graduation curricula, without keeping pace with the requirements of the modern era.

Sources indicated that the colleges of Kuwait University recently provided the university administration with the numbers that it could accept for the next academic year, but these numbers were determined according to the capabilities of the colleges, in terms of spatial capacity and lecture rooms, and the number of faculty members and academic support staff, while seats must be determined. In each major, according to the needs of the labor market for this specialization, so that the increasing numbers of graduate students do not create a new crisis in the labor market after their graduation.

Sources expected that the university student’s stay at the university will increase due to the student overcrowding that may be witnessed in the next academic year, recalling the closed sections crisis that the university faced previously after the admission crisis about 10 years ago, thus students’ graduation will be delayed, which affects their post graduate studies later.

 

Source: Arabtimes kuwait

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