Monday, April 16, 2018

What went wrong with getting a degree in Singapore

“TODAY highlighted employment discrimination against private university graduates. Only 47.4 percent of the current batch of private university graduates secured full-time jobs six months after graduation, compared to 60.1 percent from the last batch.

Everybody knows the Big Three: National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Management University. There’re three newer ones–Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore University of Technology and Design–who enjoy the prestige of being placed under the ambit of the Ministry of Education. Being Singaporean and government-approved, their degrees are recognized everywhere you go in this tiny island.
 

Other schools — Kaplan, Singapore Institute of Management, PSB, INSEAD, James Cook University –don’t enjoy the same cachet. Some aren’t even known at all. But when the rest of your life is staring at you and all you see is a wasteland of bills and broken dreams, you pick the best option you can find and roll with it....
 

Reality kicked in soon after. I had just over twenty people in my classes at Kaplan. A grand total of two people, over two years, were job-seekers....
Eight Years of Silence
 

I’ve sent out dozens, hundreds of resumes. Every month, every week, every day, I applied for job after job after job, hoping that someone would notice. Until then, I crunched numbers and copied clauses, wrote story after story, and picked up whatever freelance job and short-term contract job I could find.
 

I did this for eight years.
 

In eight years, I received nothing.
 

Less than one percent of my applications made it to the interview stage. None of them went anywhere. The other ninety-nine-odd percent was greeted with silence....
The Singapore Dream is dead to me. But I’m not going to give up, and I will not surrender my own dream.”
 

Benjamin Cheah

Benjamin Cheah wrote the above in an article published in the TRE to highlight the plight of Singaporean graduates trying to get a job in Singapore, a little island that could provide 2m jobs to foreigners. He is warning Singaporeans not to anyhow apply to join a not fully recognised university or schools and waste time and money for a degree that would not land one a job.
 

What Benjamin forgot to explain is the ease in which the foreigners are able to get jobs in Singapore with funny degrees from schools or universities worse than those he listed above operating in Singapore. Other than the job market being under the control of foreigners, ie foreigner owned employment agencies, they could also decide who they want when they are employed in Singapore companies or organisations in management positions. The HR dept would be held at ransom when these foreigners insist on hiring only foreigners and rubbished all the Singaporean applicants. They just said Singaporeans are not good enough. Period.
 

Other than this abuse that has been going on without anyone daring to do something about it or talk about it, the other thing of course is to get the same kind of funny degrees like the foreigners to get employed in Singapore. But I am only joking. When the whole hiring process is controlled by foreigners and the daft in charge did not know what is happening or powerless to do otherwise, Singaporeans would not be able to get a job in his homeland. Foreigners are favoured and given more chances for employment under the nose of daft Singaporean management.
 

This is how pathetic Singaporeans have become, losing out to foreigners in their own country for employment unfairly, cheated. Can you believe that? They don’t even know that they are losing their country to the foreigners. The foreigners are taking over their country.
 

PS. Only the 'stupidity has no cure' people would allow a no condition open economy with legs open so wide for everyone to screw. Trump would not do that. The only time these 'stupidity has no cure' type would put up conditions and barriers is when their own interests are affected. Otherwise you die your business.