If you’ve read the success stories, you may notice Steve Jobs dropped out of college after six months. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of his sophomore year. Richard Branson famously left school without any qualifications. So you might ask yourself, “Does an entrepreneur need a college degree?”
According to the survey conducted by the Statistics Department in 2019, 5.8 per cent of Malaysians have never been to school. Further, 72.1 per cent of Malaysians chose not to continue their studies after the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM). Isn’t this alarming?
Nik Akmal, a career consultant, shared on Twitter this alarming issue and called for all business founders, entrepreneurs, traders or anyone to stop telling people that you can be successful and rich without a college degree.
“Please, we need to tell the younger generations the pros of getting a formal education. I feared this will have an impact on the country’s productivity”.
The career consultant further said that we need to idolize the right group of entrepreneurs – those who are educated, have stable finance and benefit the community.
“Formal education might not 100% produce an educated person, but it is the best way to be educated in our country.”
It will have an impact on the country’s productivity
Director of the MPC’s Development, Productivity and Competitiveness Division, Mohamad Muzaffar Abdul Hamid, said the survey done by the Statistics Department involved respondents aged 15 to 64 to find out the performance of Malaysians educational achievements.
The findings showed a large part of 72.1 per cent of the people in the country chose not to continue their education to a higher level after the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM).
He emphasised the percentage is worrying and will have an impact on the country’s productivity when job opportunities created in the country cannot be filled by young people.
“We believe that this group of people who have never been to school are mostly from poor families, the Orang Asli community or in Sabah and Sarawak who have limited access to education,” he said.
Commenting further, Mohamad Muzaffar said, if there are still many employees with low skills, it causes productivity, innovation and competitiveness to decrease. Thus, causes new job opportunities to be difficult to create and impact on the low wages employees.
“Compared to a highly skilled workforce, it has better job opportunities that offer high wages and eventually boost the country’s productivity and innovation.”
Furthermore, he also said that the study also recorded that only 22.1 per cent of students chose to continue their studies to a higher level after completing SPM.
“If we look at the data, in 2019 there were 560,000 students who took SPM. But, only about 170,000 continued their studies to the next level,” he explained.
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