The Finance Minister’s Vision in Today’s Lankadeepa. (MAGE DAKMA)

As Edited by Chaminda Munasinghe of Lankadeepa! The Finance Minister has a weekly column in the Lankadeepa, and I presume as he is short of time to write it himself. He could be making a call to the journalist about what he wants to say, and the journalist writes it with the FM not knowing what was written under his name! Someone correct me if it is done another way.

Anyway the subject was the question “adyapanaya venasak onada?” or Do we need a change to our Education System?

In the body of the letter he says that it costs the Govt. Rs4M to train an Agricultural Graduate who DOES not use this training by going into Agriculture and use productive and latest developments to make farming efficient.

He goes on to say that the Teaching Carder (presumably of the State) is currently 235,000 and there is a shortage of 35,000 teachers. Note my blog entry yesterday, where a potential graduate teacher is waiting in the wings to for a placement!

http://kalpanakaranna.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-misconceptions-of-our-youth-we-can.html

He also refers to the area of Logistics, where he owns a company in this field, and says that the State System does not produce Graduates in this field, where as there are many vacancies for graduates, and only a small number qualify in the Private Sector, presumably, and are snapped up by Logistics Companies!

Of course the misguided government line of forcing students to stay in Education for 13 years of formal school education is also parroted in this prose.

All this goes to show that they are aware of the problems, but have been hitherto unable to provide a practical and TIMELY solution to the problem of fulfilling the education needs of the Country with Graduates NOT being able to match their skills with their desired employment. 

This goes to the heart of my argument that ALL our graduates enter Universities to follow courses, that they are HIGHLY UNLIKELY TO BE SUITED TO DO as a career, and therefore the state waste’s its limited resources in training those people in the wrong fields, forcing US TO FACE THIS HUGE EMPLOYMENT MISMATCH, namely, there is NO ONE to fill the needs of the Employers who now have 250,000 vacancies, whilst there are possibly the same amount of people waiting for employment, but who can’t get it, as they are in the Public Sector, where there is a supply that exceeds demand!