The pace at which competition evolves in the global economy requires anticipation and educated guesswork in order for countries to be prepared for successive rounds of technological and organizational change. This is not manpower planning derived from centrally established production targets. It is human resource development guided by national economic strategies. Given the long lead time required to increase human resource capacities in technical fields such as engineering, material sciences, and biotechnology, constant communication and coordination are required among government, the productive sector, and higher education if the high-level skills necessary to implement national development strategies are to be made available in a timely manner. In this context, the economic subsectors prioritized by government are major reference points for higher education. Consequently, national development strategies and university institutional development strategies need to complement each other. The following paragraphs briefly review how this plays out in the three focus countries.
Bangladesh
The country’s Second Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper provides a frame of reference for short-term planning during 2009–2011. It is complemented by the medium-term budgetary frameworks from 2010–2011 to 2012– 2013. These documents guide near-term efforts to reduce poverty, improve income distribution, and shore up weak institutional capacities. Lacking a reference for longer-term decision making, the government has drafted the Perspective Plan, 2010–2021, which awaits cabinet approval.
The plan seeks to elevate Bangladesh to middle-income country status by the end of the decade. To this end, it emphasizes human resource development through education and training, especially technical education. A vision of a “digital Bangladesh” lies at the heart of this plan, with emphasis on information technology capacities. For example, computer training will be compulsory in secondary education, and will eventually become mandatory for primary education as well. Six other pillars complete the framework, targeting agriculture and food security; human resource development; transportation and communications infrastructure; better environmental management; a broader industrial base with emphasis on textiles, leather, and food exports; and energy self- sufficiency. Cross-cutting themes are good governance and sound macroeconomic policy.
The skilled human resource requirements to implement this plan are implied, but not made explicit. For example, increasing food security and moving up the value chain in agriculture exports are likely to require specialists in areas such as agricultural marketing, postharvest storage and processing, food technology, and irrigation management, in addition to traditional needs for agronomists, plant breeders, and plant pathologists. Similar skill implications can be deduced from the other plan objectives. What appears to be lacking is a unified national human resource development strategy that would coordinate the education and training programs of various government agencies. Such a strategy would provide a useful reference for institutional development strategies within the universities.
The distribution of university enrollments across the various academic disciplines matches up only partially with the goals of the plan. The overall numbers for science, technology, and engineering appear reasonable. However, the very low enrollment shares found in agriculture (5%), commerce and management (3%), and health sciences
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vative Strategies in Higher Education for Accelerated Human Resource De
(3%) will make it very difficult to attain the plan’s agricultural, industrial, and human resource objectives until the requisite skills are generated to support these initiatives. In this context, the Bangladesh study notes that public universities currently have few links with the labor market. Consequently, course offerings and content frequently do not provide graduates with the knowledge and competencies that the labor market seeks. The private universities, although more responsive to labor market signals, are focused almost entirely on meeting the short-term training demands of students and employers; anticipation of longer-term demand is generally not part of their business strategy. In addition, in an attempt to provide quality control, new course offerings at private universities must first be approved by the University Grants Commission, which often calls upon public university professors to evaluate these proposals. In short, Bangladesh faces significant challenges in achieving greater relevance.
The international labor market is also an important reference point for Bangladesh. In 2010, an estimated 5.4 million migrant workers, representing 7% of the Bangladeshi labor force, sent home $11.1 billion, which represented 12% of national GDP (World Bank 2011, 13–14, 31, 68). Of these, 4.3% held higher education credentials. Conscious efforts to provide these workers with internationally competitive skills could help the country through increasing remittances.
Nepal
Following a period of political turmoil that led to a new form of government in 2006, national development strategy has been expressed in 3-year interim development plans. The first three-year interim plan covered 2007–2010 and the second addressed 2011–2013. Both plans have stressed dual needs for economic growth and poverty reduction with a strong emphasis on employment creation. These efforts will focus on agriculture and human services, with secondary attention to tourism. Proposed initiatives include promotion of cottage industries through microfinance programs, greater industrialization of agricultural products with a view to increasing exports, expansion of potable water systems, increased access to health care, energy grid expansion, extension of the road system, and more conscious attention to environmental management. Again, the corresponding needs for highly skilled persons can be extracted from these plans. They include business developers, accountants, water and waste system engineers, civil engineers, electrical engineers, food technologists, and environmental scientists. The university system in Nepal produces graduates mainly in the areas of social sciences, education, and the humanities. A secondary concentration is commerce and management. With less than 1% of enrollments in the agricultural sciences, only 4% in the engineering fields, and just 3% in the health sciences, it is probable that severe human resource constraints in these areas will hamper—and perhaps even prevent—implementation of the government’s development plan. The contradiction between an agricultural sector that generates 34% of GDP and the small number of agricultural graduates is glaringly apparent. A significant realignment of disciplinary enrollments, coupled with improvements in teaching techniques and some curriculum reform, would seem to be a necessary condition for achieving the country’s proposed medium-term development objectives. A useful first step would be labor market analysis from a higher education perspective, including employer surveys and graduate tracer studies. One concern is that the controlling structure of Tribhuvan University, which issues standard curricula, conducts uniform student examinations, and awards degrees to 90% of all higher education students, effectively stifles academic innovation of any kind.
An additional overlooked opportunity may be the preparation of Nepalese emigrants for better-paying jobs abroad so that they can produce a higher level of remittances. At present, roughly 1 million people are seeking foreign jobs, and this does not include the large number of Nepalese who undertake seasonal work in India. This represents roughly 10% of the national labor force and 5% of those with higher education. Foreign workers remitted an estimated $3.5 billion in 2010, triple the amount sent home in 2005 (World Bank 2011, 32). Significantly, this contribution accounted for 23% of the country’s GDP. If the government were to recognize
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that the need to seek foreign employment is a long-term structural problem in the Nepali economy and take steps to provide youth with the skills to compete favorably in overseas labor markets, the country as a whole would undoubtedly benefit.
Sri Lanka
The national development strategy for Sri Lanka is mapped out in the Ten-Year Horizon Development Framework 2006–2016. This plan takes an explicitly instrumentalist view of education, affirming that “Sri Lanka’s education system will be transformed into one that will provide the technological skills required for rapid economic growth and national development”(Government of Sri Lanka 2006, 144). The economic sectors that are privileged under the plan are tourism, infrastructure, agriculture and fisheries, information and communications technology, business process outsourcing, ports and aviation, and education and training. Unlike Bangladesh and Nepal, Sri Lanka is not burdened with a preponderance of enrollments in the humanities and social sciences. Nearly half of its enrollments are in the sciences, engineering, health sciences, and agriculture. However, with only 8% of students pursuing engineering specialties, it is possible that the country’s engineering capacities may be insufficient to support its ambitions in agriculture, infrastructure, ports, and aviation.
The government’s announced intention to encourage “reputable foreign universities” to set up shop in Sri Lanka in the hope of expanding university intake by 10,000 annually could introduce significant distortions into the disciplinary makeup of graduate output if care is not taken to steer the new institutions’ offerings toward areas of high-priority skills development. It is common throughout the world for private universities to gravitate toward low-cost disciplines (e.g., social sciences and business studies) in a demand-absorbing response to pent-up student pressure for access to university education. In catering to student demand, however, private provision may do little to lay the longer-term human resource foundation needed to attain strategic future economic objectives. Close coordination between the government and new institutions entering Sri Lanka’s higher education market may therefore be prudent to ensure that needed new skills are generated while sidestepping risks of increased graduate unemployment.
The international labor market plays an important part in this island nation’s economy. Some 1.8 million emigrants—20% of the national labor force—work in other countries, sending home $3.6 billion in 2010, or 8% of GDP (World Bank 2011, 228). Strikingly, 30% of those with higher education qualifications leave the country to seek work opportunities abroad. Because higher education in Sri Lanka has, until recently been provided largely free of charge by government, this scale of migration represents a sizable loss to the government on its investments in national human resource development. Greater policy attention to finding ways of retaining university graduates for productive work within the country could only strengthen national economic competitiveness.
In addition, the planned doubling of higher education enrollments by 2020, and the intended recruitment of 50,000 new foreign students by the same date, will require as many as 3,500 new academic staff with postgraduate qualifications (assuming current staff–student ratios are maintained). This implies a prorated annual output of 350 master’s and doctoral degree graduates who are successfully recruited into the higher education system. To achieve this target in light of the 30% attrition rate to emigration, postgraduate output would have to climb to 500 annually. Given that the country currently graduates about 250 doctorates a year (80% of them in the social sciences), the probable shortage of qualified academic staff in key disciplines poses a real risk to the fulfillment of these plans.