Education As Apparatus For Change: Dangerous Discourse On Graduate Unemployment, Employability

The framing of employability as both the problem and solution is the Problem.

- Anushka Kahandagamage and Shamala Kumar

Widespread unemployment will, unfortunately, remain our the reality for some time, as the pandemic continues to grow with its resulting economic devastations at national and local village levels within the country.

Discussions on unemployment, and its converse employment, have historical ties to education and have broad implications for universities.

However, under the present government, employment, unemployment and university education have been inextricably tied to ‘skills’; a narrative that is problematic in itself.

Furthermore, the official government narrative troublingly also serves to both justify educational reforms and to scapegoat universities for the national unemployment problems.

Pointedly, the President states, ‘If a large number of graduates who received their education at the expense of the public money are unemployed for a long time, it is certainly a fault in the education system.’ The Budget Speech 2021 echoes similar sentiments, ‘If the best and brightest of our students who complete university education are left with a legacy of unemployment, then surely priority should be given to reform that education system.’ We oppose attempts to frame unemployment as a ‘legacy’ of university education since we believe that unemployment is a legacy of weak and short-term policy formulations based in part on simplistic and one-sided analyses of national problems (including for education) -- as revealed in the above excerpts. Such narratives address neither the numerous crises confronting education and higher education nor the problems of employment facing the nation as a whole.