10/18/2007
Wrongful allocation of resources
One of the major strategic error of our education system is the allocation of university places to less financially rewarding courses. Every year thousands of fresh undergrads were admitted to the Arts, Social Sciences, or even Engineering Facualties and only a few hundreds to the extremely lucrative Law School. And when these students graduated and go into the job market, the law graduates on the average are going to earn 10 times more than the other graduates after a few years in the profession.
What the system should do is to reverse the intake. Send a few thousand students to take up law and a few hundred for the other courses. Then we will produce students that are highly marketable and in demand. The legal profession will be happy, the civil service will be happy as there will be no shortage of lawyers, the parents will be happy and the graduates will also be happy.
Now, why should we continue to send so many students to pursue courses that are economically to their disadvantage? And the students and parents knew but could not get them into Law School because of an artificially created small number of places available. There is no shortage of students wanting to study law and all of them will be very qualified for the course.
Or are we underpaying the graduates of the other courses?
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4 comments:
As long as you have CENTRALLY PLANNED public education system, there will be disastrous misallocation of resources.
The financial rewards from jobs are a market phenomenon, and thus are demand driven, ultimately by the demands of the (Sovereign) consumer.
Who can really predict the future? So how can some dickhead civil servant determine that "we need 1000 engineers" or "500 doctors" or "10000 IT exponents". Only the market can determine that.
For e.g. : If 1000 engineers are needed at anytime, employers simply bid for them on the market—the engineers might be local, or from overseas.
By this bid and offer process, the likelihood of EVERYONE getting a FAIR DEAL is apparent.
The public education system will turn out people who's skills command very low market demand, or too many of a certain skill such that the market price for their labour FALLS, and the public education system can do this because it is run by "free" money, wielded "open-chequebook style" by some "experts" on the govt (also tax funded) payroll.
when you have artificial quotas you cannot have an efficient market system.
Right, and the market works anyway.
If there are say only 50 engineers and 3000 arts graduates, you can bet the wages for the engineers will skyrocket (unless "cheaper" engineers from overseas are chosen—but even they are commanding high salaries now), and the majority of arts grads will end up flipping burgers at McDonald's
As long as govt is involved, quotas will be arbitrary.
Solution:
1 Private education system
2 No quotas. Every child gets to decide for himself what he wants to be, and his attainment of the required education REMAINS a matter between him and his parents/guardians.
i.e. Get The State THE FUCK OUT of families!
wow, we agree!
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