Aligning education to national economic goals

As I return to my usual routine after my return from Kuala Lumpur, I noticed some jottings I made during a presentation at the Asia HRD Conference by a magnificently titled YBhg Dato' Seri Professor Dr Ibrahim Abu Shah, who is Vice Chancellor of UiTM. Now you know that learning and development professionals are always being advised to align their work to business objectives, well Malaysia is clearly a place where they apply the concept to education as well. In his presentation, The convergence of education and training - the third age (I never did find out what the first and second were), the speaker announced the intention of his university to align its work more completely with national goals. What this means is less social science and more 'proper' science, engineering and business skills, and a halt to any research which is not obviously commercially applicable.

I was interested to ponder how such a policy would go down in the UK where, by and large, people study whatever takes their fancy, however obviously this accords with national economic goals. According to this BBC article, however, the market seems to be reasonably self-regulating. The most popular subjects in 2006 are almost entirely vocational, with English the one exception in the top ten. True there's little in the way of science and engineering, but then the UK is now predominantly a service economy and we can always import the expertise we want from our ex-colonies - you know, places like Malaysia. Sorry guys, but "you train 'em, we take 'em", seems to apply as much to countries as it does to companies. As I said yesterday (Human capital? I don't think so), retaining talent now seems to be the number one priority.