70% of Public University Graduates are Jobless....

Some 70% of public universities and institutes of higher learning graduates in the country are unemployed. This is in contrast with 26% for private institutions of higher learning and 34% for foreign graduates. I think even the most cynical amongst us out there would have been shaken by such a staggering number of unemployed graduates. I mean how can more than half of our graduates be unemployed?

I suspect that some incompetent statistician somewhere took the total number of unemployed graduates in the country who could have graduated in different years and divided the number by the number of tertiary education students in a year to obtain the silly percentage. If however, the "70%" statistic is indeed true, then I think we might as well shut down half of our public universities.

What was more interesting however is the additional breakdown of unemployed graduate numbers by universities provided by the Ministry. Note that the following breakdown refers only to the 20,217 who have registered themselves with the Ministry of Human Resources, and does not include those who haven't bothered with the Ministry.

It is most interesting to note that Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) contributes by far the most number of unemployed graduates amongst all the universities in Malaysia. The number of unemployed produced (3,278) is more than double the next highest university, Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) (1,532). To put it into context, it is hence extremely laughable that UiTM as recently years ago, declared itself to be a "world class university" and deny it to be open the intakes for Non-Malays.