Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 30 May 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
I keep telling my son that he must study harder so he can get into a decent university but he says he doesn’t need a degree to be a club DJ. I don’t want my son to be a DJ at my golf club. I would die of shame!
Daddy Cool

I was working with two interns recently. One was studying at a local university and the other at a prestigious UK university. The local undergraduate was clearly the brighter of the two and he quietly questioned if his CV would always be put at the bottom of the pile compared to a UK graduate. I could not argue against him and it was sad to see how his ability and spark were steadily being overcome by a sense of disappointment. The UK grad was good, very enthusiastic and charmingly confi dent, but the ideas were not that great.

It is important to get an education, isn’t it? There are universities and then there are universities. Some universities off er degrees that will give their students a chance to shine in competitive local and global job markets, and some do not. Some universities are completely worthless and should either be shut down or should have their entire schooling method overhauled because all they do is raise their students’ expectations only for those hopes to be dashed when they discover that the real world operates by different standards. All students enter their universities in good faith, assuming that the education they are about to receive has been tested for the real world. They deserve the best but too often, they are cheated. But even the “good” universities have their drawbacks.

A university education is expensive. The cost of studying at US universities has risen 500% since 1985 and yet, as a recent Guardian article pointed out, “In the US in 2010, 20% of jobs required a bachelor’s degree, 43% required a high-school education, and 26% did not even require that. Meanwhile, 40% of young people study for degrees.” The US job market is finding itself awash with graduates who have been trained for a knowledge-based economy and who are now competing for a repetitive low-skilled service-based economy. Competition is so great even for relatively lowly management positions in the service sector that young people are putting themselves into debt to get a degree for jobs that should only require a high-school diploma. Sadly, this does not mean that things are opening up for the uneducated because the job market is being squeezed from the top down. Why choose a high-school dropout as a Starbucks manager when you can have a qualified computer engineer? But that’s the US, and Malaysian employers will pay for anybody who can write an email in complete sentences. Oh, and in English.

I have friends who work in British universities and they all complain about the constant contraction of funding and the pressure to either monetise their programmes or to promote their degree courses as being sure-fire money-spinners for potential students. They have targets and key performance indicators that create a narrowing down of their esoteric subject matters into right-or-wrong answers. I chatted with some of their students who came from all over the world. They were all terrified of the job market. Most did not know what they wanted to do and were hiding from their homelands and their future for a little bit longer. Who can blame them — they were barely in their twenties.

Who knows what the future will bring. I have heard of university professors who did a roaring trade studying the Soviet Union during the old Cold War days but then they suddenly had to find other work with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Funding was pulled from Russian Studies, but then Vladimir Putin started behaving badly and now it is popular again. At the moment, we all believe that we live in a knowledge economy and everything is business, management and MBAs, but a recent US study found that students of philosophy, history and English had “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study”.

There may be flaws in all university educations but not getting one is too big a risk (and this is coming from somebody who didn’t go to university). But sadly, perhaps the name of the university and the business-minded narrowness of the degree are the most important things when potential employers glance at CVs. In my universe, employers would be killing each other for history and sociology graduates. But that’s just me.

Dear Kam,
Is it my imagination or is Earth constantly being invaded by aliens in the movies?
Space Cadet

I just watched the trailer for the latest instalment of Independence Day and once again, Earth is being invaded by aliens. Earth is always being invaded by aliens in the movies and they always go straight to the US, although probably destroying Paris first. In alien invasion movies, Paris always gets destroyed.

The first and still greatest alien invasion story was The War of the Worlds by H G Wells. Written all the way back in 1897, it’s about a Martian attack on Britain, which was then at the height of its empire. America is now the world’s greatest power, so it thinks that people, sorry, aliens want to invade it. They should build a wall and get the aliens to pay for it. In The War of the Worlds, the aliens could not be defeated by mankind’s weaponry but were eventually killed by the simple flu virus. Today’s Americans beat their aliens with lots of fighting.

I’ve never understood why aliens instinctively go to the US first. Why don’t they visit Malaysia instead? They could come here and have a good time and as long as they don’t go topless on our beaches or mountains, they can happily leave. I mean, they’d leave happy. And if they do get troublesome, then I’m sure they’d be allergic to the smell of belacan or durian. As we’ve shown with pesky foreign journalists, we can beat any alien invasion.

Reprinted with the kind permission of