Alebachew Tesfaw , 23, graduated from theUniversityofGondarlast year with a cumulative GPA of 3.86. A year on, he is still looking for job. What’s worse is that 67,595 new graduates have now joined the job market, too. Old graduates crowding popular open air vacancy announcement areas, around Arat Kilo and Legehar, will soon have new company, once the graduation festivities are over.
Alebachew moved to Addis Abeba after giving up hope of finding a job in his hometown of Bahir Dar, the capital ofAmharaRegionalState. A job has, however, remained elusive.
“I am not lucky,” he says, thinking of all the places where he has applied.
He has submitted an application to six places, and none have called him for interview, or a written exam.
“The situation is disappointing. I never understand. How can such a situation happen with graduates in a country where there is scarcity of skilled manpower?” He said.
He believes he would have had a better chance if he had studied natural science, instead of joining the social science field.
The government adopted a new education policy in 2009, which required that 70pc of students go into natural science fields and the remaining to social science fields. Forty percent of students in the natural science realm also have to go into engineering. A quarter of the students going into social sciences had to go into business and economics.
That target is to be achieved by the end of the GTP period, in 2014/15. It has now reached a 68:32 proportion, according to the available data at the Ministry of Education.
This year, engineering graduates total 9,185. But, what the universities are training and graduating does not seem to be in line with the demand of the employers.
No higher education institution has so far undertaken fully fledged employers’ satisfaction and graduate tracer studies, according to Sisay Teklie, an audit expert at the Higher Education Relevance & Quality Agency (HERQA).
“There is no such trend at all,” he exclaimed.
The first and last available survey undertaken by the HERQA on employers’ satisfaction was in 2010. It indicated the only thing that employers considered positive about new graduates was that they could be hired cheap. The survey revealed that engineering, medical and management graduates were insufficiently qualified for the job.
The survey found out that there is a wide gap between employer expectations and performance of graduates, especially in quality of work, productivity, specific job related knowledge and specific job related skills. Forty percent of employers responded that higher education institutions did not respond appropriately to their needs, in terms of the competencies if new graduates.
The government priority areas of management, medical sciences and engineering have been the most dissatisfying to employers.
“This is a visible headache to quality education; it makes the government’s plan to provide the economy with qualified manpower from the science streams questionable,” says an expert who preferred anonymity.
He feels that this is also a blow to women’s empowerment, as female students have a larger share of the proportion of students in the dissatisfying fields than in others. Management and medical fields accommodate 55pc and 42pc of female students, respectively.
Asgedom Tesfaye is policy studies expert at the Higher Education Strategic Centre (HESC), an institution established to work on national quality frameworks. He commented that most of the policies and program designs are not good enough to take the market demand into account and to produce a labour force with the expected standard.
The university-industry linkage is a big missing link, according to Asgedom.
In the rush to realise the 70/30 policy, visible deficiencies are observed. A number of new universities, even those whose constructions are not completed, offer engineering and medical science courses that require sophisticated laboratory systems.
To this effect, universities are set to have clusters. The old ones offer the new ones technical support, including laboratory and other related services. Students from newer universities are expected to have a long journey to an older university found in their clusters. Given the cost of transportation and related inconveniences, they do not usually go to the university where they can access those facilities.
“They are forced to wait four or so months to visit a laboratory,” says Ahmed Siraj, a public relations officer at the Ministry of Education.
The issue of using laboratories effectively is a big concern for Haben Gebreselassie, too, who is a graduate of engineering fromAdamaUniversity, where, he claims, laboratories are nominal.
“Until our fourth year, we were not familiar with the laboratories. A number of students were confused even after a bulk of theoretical courses,” Haben told Fortune.
It is also visible that there is scarcity of lecturers in the newly prioritised sectors.
“Unlike the case in other departments, in the departments of engineering we are forced to hire lecturers from abroad, which incurs higher costs,” Ahmed says.
Especially in new universities where the courses are given, such asSemeraUniversity, a number of foreign lecturers, mainly fromIndia, are engaged.
The only option left is, according to Ahmed, simply to struggle with the available infrastructure.
Among the major responsibilities of the HERQA, which was established through the Higher Education Proclamation 351/2003, revised later with Proclamation No 650/2009, is to audit the qualities of higher education institutions and the competency of graduates coming out of the institutions. This is so as to recommend what they should do to ensure quality. The agency, which is mandated to assist quality assurance by guiding and regulating the higher education sector, is itself not qualified for the job and its researches are problematic, says an expert working there, requesting anonymity.
“How can one who himself is unqualified assist in quality assurance?” Exclaims the expert.
The expert, who stresses that the audit must be undertaken in a qualitative data, blames his own agency for giving deaf ears to qualitative research. He describes the audit as ‘playing with numbers’.
An external evaluation of the agency, which looked into its performance from 2006 – 2011, has reported a lack of efficiency. Adding that its institutional sustainability was ‘fragile’.
“Since 2008, I have been taking the issue to the attention of concerned bodies, including Demeke Mekonnen, former minister of Education; no one heard me,” the expert sullenly told Fortune.
There are only seven audit experts in the institution that do not have any branches and have the responsibility to audit 33 public universities and 75 private higher education institutions. The shortage of human resource clearly shows the little attention the government pays to the issue, says the expert.
There are a number of higher education institutions that were not audited, after they were audited for the first time in 2006. The proclamation requires that the audit takes place every five years for every higher education institution.
It is unusual for the institutions themselves to study labour markets. To the knowledge of the agency, there is no higher education institution that either conducted a labour market study or a graduate tracer study.
“No one cares and knows where those graduates go after they graduate,” says Sisay, the audit expert with the agency.
Alebachew, pressed with the challenge of finding a job, regrets going into social science. Natural science, he thinks, would still have been a better choice for job opportunities.
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