Pentingkah untuk mendapat segulung ijazah?

Lain orang, lain pandangan. Kita lazim mendengar orang-orang tua kita berpesan, "belajar rajin-rajin, lulus nanti senang dapat kerja besar-besar." Agak kasar jika kita mengatakan bahawa itu adalah persepsi yang konservatif. Kerana hakikatnya memang benar.

Ironinya segulung ijazah tidak menjamin kita mendapat pekerjaan berjawatan besar, bergaji mewah. Ramai sahaja jutawan dunia tidak memiliki ijazah tetapi mereka tetap berjaya dalam karier mereka. Kenapa? Kerana mereka punyai added value yang membuatkan diri mereka lebih dari orang lain.

Mari kita baca pandangan Farah Fahmy dalam artikel di bawah. Apa pula pandangan dia?

Do university degrees matter?
by Farah Fahmy

Early last month, one of my cousins flew into London for an overnight stop
before continuing her journey back to Malaysia. As I hadn't seen her for a
while, we agreed to meet for dinner, and over the course of dinner, she asked
what I do for a living. She was surprised when I told her I'm a software
engineer.

"But Farah," she said, "I thought you studied international relations. How
come you're not doing something related to that?"

This is a question I frequently face whenever I tell people what I do, and
what I studied. But whilst in Britain this question is accompanied by polite
interest - it is, after all, normal in Britain for people to study one thing but
forge a career in a different field; in my own workplace, there are former
physicists and at least one English graduate working as software engineers - in
Malaysia this question is usually accompanied by incredulity.

Do something you didn't study for? Why? How come? In Britain, my
explanation of how I got where I am today is usually accepted without much
question. In Malaysia, I get the inevitable follow-up: so did you do another
degree?

Whilst in Britain (and to a large extent, the Western world) a university
education is seen as not just specialisation but also a broadening of minds, in
Malaysia a university education is merely a stepping stone towards one's career
and making money. This is not a good situation, because it means subjects that
deserve further study are neglected (when was the last time a Malaysian did a
PhD in Malaysian history in a Malaysian university?).

It also means employers will automatically overlook a graduate without a
‘desirable’ degree. If I wanted to do IT in Malaysia when I graduated, nobody,
in all likelihood, would have hired me because I had the ‘wrong’ degree for the
industry. Yet in Britain you could spend three years studying Chaucer and
Shakespeare at university and still work in investment banking, whilst back in
Malaysia a degree in Kesusasteraan Melayu, it would seem, puts you at the top of
the unemployment heap.

There is also, in Malaysia, a snobbish attitude towards certain degrees.
The preferred degrees are medicine, engineering, law and accountancy. Social
sciences? They're for those who aren't up to studying for the ‘proper’ subjects.
When I was filling out my UPU (Unit Pemprosesan Universiti) forms all those
years ago, I was tempted to put down anthropology at UIA (Universiti Islam
Antarabangsa) as one of my degree choices. I talked it over with a friend of my
brother's who was a UIA student at the time.

"Anthropology? Why would you want to do that? That's what all the
matrics students who can't get into law do you know."

This was a viewpoint I was to encounter again and again. Why study
anthropology when you can do law? In the event, I went on to study international
relations, and yes, I was asked many times why I chose that subject when I had
the grades to study law, accountancy, finance or economics. I would usually say:
"because it interests me"; I would get the same statement back each time: "well,
I suppose you could join the Foreign Ministry and become an ambassador
somewhere".

Why study history?

Which brings me to my next point. Malaysians seem to think that studying a
degree because the subject matter is of interest a complete waste of time. You
go to university to get a job that pays well. Why study history? Historians
don't make money, and anyway there aren't many jobs for them. Ditto
anthropology, archaeology, geography, languages, music, literature, religious
studies and many other subjects. As far as (many) Malaysians are concerned,
these subjects are a waste of time, and a waste of money.

So what if we are ignorant of our history, have a complete lack of
interest in our geography and environment and allow its exploitation, and lack
any interest whatsoever in our literary and cultural heritage (who cares if
nobody reads works like Hikayat Malim Dewa and Sejarah Tanah Melayu anymore?)?
After all, the only thing that matters is making money, and as for culture, well
we've got Akademi Fantasia, haven't we?

Of course, merely having the ‘right’ degree by no means guarantees a good
job. No, you also have to be a graduate of the ‘right’ university - and not
necessarily a local one, either. In recent months, a spate of letters have
appeared in a Malay language newspaper complaining that employers are
discriminating against graduates from local universities. Why, some of these
letters ask, should employers continue giving preference to foreign graduates?
After all, our local universities are just as good as foreign ones.

Except of course, this isn't quite true. According to the highly respected
index of universities compiled by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, none of our
universities made it into the top 500 worldwide, or the top 100 from the
Asia-Pacific region. It is bad enough that our universities have not made it
into the list (the rankings are based on factors like academic or research
performance by staff, alumni and students, articles published in distinguish
journals like Nature and Science and research that is highly cited), what is
worse is the claustrophobic control exerted by university officials over the
teaching staff.

Earlier this year, Professor Terence Gomez had to
resign his post at Universiti Malaya after the latter refused to release him
to take up a post at the UN's Research Institute for Social Development. In any
other part of the world, an appointment like this is an honour to the
institution, but not in Malaysia. If a university would deny its own staff the
freedom to carry out his or her work, why should it grant this privilege to its
students?

This is a grave mistake, because in a competitive, globalised world,
employers want workers with initiative and the wherewithal to think for
themselves. An environment that does not encourage freedom of thought will not
be able to produce the workers that employers want; it will also not produce the
kind of work that would attract the best students and academics. Our
universities will never produce Nobel laureates if the staff and students aren't
given full support in the pursuit of their academic interests.

Do degrees matter? Even though the likes of Bill Gates and Richard Branson
have become extremely successful without degrees, a recent survey of job
advertisements in Malaysia's five leading daily newspapers in July found that
19.8 percent of adverts offered jobs to those with a bachelor's degree, so it
would seem that the answer to this question is yes. But of course, things are
not as clear-cut as they may seem. In Malaysia, it is not just having a degree
that matters, but also what and where you studied.