Bridging the vocational-academic divide

The Budget for 2016 targeted a substantial increase for education with little attention paid to systemic changes

Wednesday, 30 March 2016

The separation of tertiary education as higher education and technical/vocational education is found across the world, but the new trend of youth preferring the academic track even in countries with well-developed and respected technical and vocational education and training (TVET) systems has led to a soul searching by TVET providers and policymakers.

As Jon Wakeford (2015) asserts “In UK, the vocational route, troublingly, is still seen as the poorer sister. Even when children are seven, 97% of their parents aspire for them to ultimately attend university.”

In Germany, the home of the TVET gold standard, TVET providers too are concerned about the trend of more and more young people choosing university over TVET (German Office for International cooperation in Vocational Education and Training, 2015)

In South Korea, students continue their studies after school till even midnight in tuition classes which are infamously known as Hagwons tutoring student for university admission examinations, while the government imports labour to fill their factories. 

In Sri Lanka the vocational-academic divide has been long institutionalised into a new caste system. A raw MMBS graduate expects to draw a higher salary than a senior nurse, no matter how distinguished the nurse. Doctors, nurses, midwives are organised into a feudal hierarchy. Engineers and engineering diplomates who have migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia, as the story goes, apparently are so segregated in some cities that they worship at different temples.

READ MORE