Usama Ajlan
Al-Madinah
I do not understand why our universities only focus on the local market and want to graduate students with specializations that meet the needs of the market. If we look at our increasing population, of which 60 percent are young men and women, we will realize that one day we will have to export labor not import it.
Today we have oil and we earn a lot of money from selling it, but tomorrow we might no longer earn such a large amount of money because the rest of the world is looking for alternative sources of energy. If we look around us, we will see that most countries are working day and night to find alternative energy sources while we continue to waste our time. Why don’t we consider exporting scientists, doctors and engineers to other countries? We should focus on these important jobs.
As I have said many times before, universities should teach majors that will be in demand in the global market and should not restrict their plans to the local market. Our market cannot accommodate the large number of young men and women who graduate from our universities. That is why colleges should reduce the number of theoretical specializations that are not important to the market such as poetry, literature, management and the like.
I urge universities not to listen to the Ministry of Labor’s contradictory statements. At one time, the ministry said it had created 1.5 million job opportunities over the past five years while the ministry’s official reports indicate that only 83,000 job opportunities were created in 2014. If their statistics are correct, then 300,000 jobs were created each year. I very much doubt that this is true.
The ministry also said it sent 10,000 young men and women to work in bakeries. Is that what we want our young men and women to do? These are jobs that do not require education or skills. My message to the ministry is that it should stop focusing on such jobs for Saudis and focus more on regulating the labor market which is full of expatriate workers.
I personally believe that exporting a doctor who will remit thousands and thousands of dollars and recruiting 100 bakers at a cost of hundreds of dollars is better than killing the ambition of Saudi youth and sending them to work in bakeries. We should look at the countries from which we bring doctors to work in the Kingdom. These countries have cared about education from day one and have focused on developing human beings. If we look at the countries from which we bring drivers and maids, we will find that these countries have not utilized their financial resources and have sent out their nationals to do low-skilled jobs, killing their ambition. We should not follow the latter and we should not kiss a young Saudi man on the head because he agreed to work as a waiter. We should know how to utilize our resources to create a strong and highly-qualified cadre of Saudi workers.
