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Jake Van Der Kamp

Fewer youngsters with degrees land middle-class jobs
City, August 4
Who needs long pages of text to tell a story when a picture will do it much better. I have two such pictures for you.
In the first one, the blue line shows you the percentage of degree holders among total employees, up from 13 per cent in 1998 to 28.5 per cent as of the latest data. In straight figures, this is more than one million job holders who have successfully completed a full course of studies at a tertiary institute of education.
The contrasting red line shows you the percentage of job holders who might need degrees - managers, administrators and professionals - and I'm not sure about the first two of these three. The best managers I knew never went to university.
In 1998, higher education was pretty much matched with the number of jobs requiring it. Things are so no longer. There is a wide and growing mismatch and the second chart shows you one of the results. In 2000, degree holders accounted for 6 per cent of our unemployment rolls. The figure is now more than 22 per cent.
Right, boss, you can now fill the rest of the space of this column with empty air.

Oops, sorry, I take that back. I need some of the space after all, specifically to quote the last paragraph of our report on Tuesday of a Chinese University of Hong Kong study conceding the mismatch between jobs and degrees. Here it is: "The academics called on government to introduce more subsidised university places to help young people."
Yes, the mind boggles. If we had, let us say, 50,000 licensed and qualified bus drivers on hand but jobs for only 20,000 of them, would we address the imbalance by training more people to drive buses?
Chinese University would. Such centres of keen reasoning, our universities.
What we are now doing is enticing large numbers of young people to waste the most important years of their lives in futile studies, all the while impoverishing them and their parents with heavy burdens of debt that significantly reduce their living circumstances and may not be paid off in decades. It's a tragedy.
I also think it shameful that academics who have belatedly discovered the extent of over-education in our society should so blatantly ignore their own findings and advocate self-serving measures that will make things worse.
They also got one other finding wrong. They said political unrest among the young was not related to their growing lack of prospects.
What nonsense. Everywhere else across the world and throughout all history frustration in livelihood has invariably stirred political unrest.
I think we are looking at academic self-interest here again. Tell the government that over-education will put placard wavers on the street and you may encourage the government to pull the plug on education funding.
But clearly this would be the right course to take now, certainly where higher education is concerned. We are wasting public money and, more than that, the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people. It is time to chop these university budgets way back.


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Jake's View

Time for Hong Kong to slash university budgets amid job mismatch among young people

Hong Kong is enticing large numbers of young people to waste the most important years of their lives in futile studies. Photo: Sam Tsang

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Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


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Jake's View | Time for Hong Kong to slash university budgets amid job mismatch among young people