The co-ordination of policies for tertiary education and working life in Malta

Abstract

The days when a university degree almost guaranteed employment are long gone. Steady employment growth has produced an increasing number of university graduates. Consequently, employers seeking highly educated workers able to respond to the advancement of technology and industry, can now select from a larger and expanding recruitment pool. In the face of this heightened competition, it stands to reason, that mismatches between demand and supply of university graduates in the labour market, become more frequent. Unemployment and underemployment amongst graduates become also more common and these put tertiary education policy under renewed pressure. Unemployment and underemployment are not educational problems. They essentially develop due to economic forces and political res'ponses to those forces. They are however, a problem for education, since they challenge many of the basic assumptions built into the structure of the educational system. This dissertation outlines these challenges and analyses how different policy makers around the world and more specifically in Malta have reacted and have attempted to co-ordinate the policies at tertiary education and the labour market so as to respond to these two major problems.