The status quo

The promise that Gen X grew up with, that success in education and a university degree, would guarantee a good life ahead and a steady job. Most Gen Xers were defined by the breaking of the promise, with the phenomena being illustrated by the "overqualified burger flipper", a college degree holder who could not find work befitting of said degree due to a mix of technological advancements, longer careers of the boomers who came before and the lack of jobs available due to those factors. I recall watching a news program back in the day where the lament from the Gen Xer interviewed was that his degree wasn't opening the expected pathways but also made him too expensive to hire for menial work. 

This phenomena was something that was, thankfully for me, something that seemed to be an American thing. Singapore seems to still chug along and the promise seems to be holding for the moment. 

The problem is that the promise seems to hold simply because there is a strong safety net here. The Singaporean government has supported and continues to be the advocate for Singaporean graduates and ensuring that unemployment is kept low. 

The assumptions that I think we all have is that the status quo is working and that it will continue. 

Is it working? While the majority of Singaporean graduates do find work, the issue that has been (and is) continuously brought up is the fact that a lot of their education seems to have very little bearing on their work. That the tasks carried out on a day to day basis seems to ignore the key things that were learned in University (if at all) and that there is a divide between the work that they do and the educational qualifications that were required to get said work. 

This first issue has to do with the fact that the work force currently suffers from the issue of academic inflation - that the competitive environment that we grew up in has driven arbitrarily higher academic standards and expectations that go beyond the necessary. This is reflected in the "what is learned" as well as the qualifications required for work that hasn't really changed that much over time. Academic standards have gone up in the sense that what is required to "do well" seems to go way beyond what is age appropriate and places rather high (or even impossible) standards on our children. The issue with these standards isn't quite that the standards are just high, but that they are higher than what is realistically doable and therefore the students end up utilising rote memorisation rather than understanding as a way for them to get through the assessments (which end up assessing...something). So, is it working? Depends on what one means by "working" People are being fed through the system and the ones that succeed do go on to get good jobs. But the process is so artificial that the "products" are not necessarily delivering on the promise implied by the qualifications. 

The second issue is the issue of what one learns through one's educational experience. Educational qualifications are supposed to reflect some sort of skills (content knowledge does play an ever decreasing part of that qualification - ref. the perpetually connected systems that we use) and abilities. The new economy does require a different set of skills however due to the fact that workplaces and work has become more complex and require more thought. Work that does not require this has started being (or been) taken over by machines that do the work better than human operators will. Work that requires either no thought or algorithmic thinking can already be completed more efficiently and accurately by AI than by human beings (who are prone to mistakes and unable to work efficiently for long stretches). So, is education actually equipping the individual with the right skills to succeed in the new economy? 

The status quo that we have in Singapore is a robust (and rigid) system that was designed for an economy that no longer exists. It is robust because our standards have always been exacting and our ability to guide, encourage and oftentimes force students to meet said standards have been successful over time. It is rigid because a system that succeeds its (arbitrary) goals is a system that is VERY hard to change. The combination of the two tends to be where we get stuck. IF we were to attempt to try to change said system (for whatever reasons we have), the 2 fronts that these changes will be fought over are those two - illustrated by 2 key questions: "Why are standards being lowered?" "Why change something that works?"