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Jake Van Der Kamp

'To facilitate fresh university graduates to enter the job market, the [Labour] Department will mount a special two-day job fair for them at the City Hall on June 28 to 29. Some 3,200 vacancies, mainly from the aviation and airport related services industry as well as the information technology and telecommunications sectors, will be offered by about 50 employers.'

Government press release

June 19

QUESTION: HOW MANY JOBS made available at a government-organised job fair in the field of aviation and airport-related services are likely to require skills possessed only by university graduates?

Answer: Hold up one hand. Now fold back two fingers.

Okay, this may be a bit harsh. There may be more than three such jobs. You may raise one of those two fingers that you folded back. Don't raise the other.

I hugely doubt that such a job fair will feature jobs as flight deck crew and maintenance engineers, or even front-office jobs as accountants or administrative personnel. Airlines fill these sorts of jobs through other channels. So does our airport.

What we mean by aviation service jobs at a job fair are at best of the flight attendant sort.

Now, let me say immediately that I have nothing against flight attendants. I value their services when I step on an aircraft. But I cannot see why a university degree is needed to make a demonstration of how to put on a seat belt or to tell passengers that 'the chicken comes with rigatoni, sir, and the beef course with creamed potatoes'.

I suspect that much the same will be true of the jobs on offer in information technology and telecommunications. Qualified techies get their jobs through recommendation or through job ads, not at job fairs, and they don't need to go to universities to get their qualifications.

What we have here, I think, is probably telemarketing jobs and you don't even need to finish grade school to hold one of these. Why do we have university graduates in mind for them?

I shall tell you why. Look at the chart. It shows you the proportion of jobs in Hong Kong held by people with tertiary education degrees, not just people who attended some classes at a university or vocational institute but real graduates.

We have 705,000 such people now employed in Hong Kong, more than 20 per cent of the total workforce and, as the chart shows, that figure has doubled over the past 10 years. In fact, these graduates account for all of the increase in employment over the past  10 years and then some.

Total Hong Kong employment has risen by 354,000 people since March 1996. Employment of graduates has risen by 361,000.

These are  the sort of statistics I expect to see in an economy that is making huge strides forward in highly skilled industries, California at the peak of a defence or Silicon Valley boom, for instance.

But, in such circumstances, I also expect to see such people find jobs suitable to their educational attainments.

What is this, then, about 3,200 vacancies earmarked for graduates in low-skill aviation or telemarketing jobs? For that sort of work, you require at most a few weeks at the company's in-house school and then some on-the-job experience, sort of like journalism (sorry, Boss).

What we have here is evidence that the Hong Kong economy does not require a tertiary degree for one in  five jobs it has on offer.

By pushing higher education so heavily, we have betrayed the aspirations of people who  invested time, effort and  money to acquire their degrees in the hope that it would make a real difference to their careers.

In far too many cases, it clearly has not done so and I shall not accept the excuse of education establishments that higher education is its own reward because it sharpens the mind.

So does eating fish, I'm told, and fish is cheaper. It is not why people go to university.

What we have done is employ a lame excuse to create jobs for professors, pity about the students.

But apparently we are to continue making this mistake. Today, the Legislative Council is to debate a motion that we spend yet more money to make Hong Kong an education hub.

Having betrayed our own students, we are now intent on attracting others to betray as well so that the educators may find work and promotion.

This is madness. The first item on the agenda should be to re-orientate the curricula of our universities to the opportunities available to graduates who hold Hong Kong ID cards or to cut back enrolments if not enough worthwhile opportunities exist.

And they clearly do not exist as long as we have to hold low-skill job fairs to find work for people with tertiary degrees.



Pity the university graduates, but job fairs are for low-skilled people