Companies Eager to Pour In Find Dearth of Skilled Workers; Rot at
Once-Strong University Embodies Leaders' Challenge
YANGON—The University of Yangon
was once one of Asia's best colleges. Today, abandoned buildings rot away on
its overgrown campus, with some walkways deserted except for dogs.
Its state of affairs embodies a
crucial challenge for leaders as Myanmar opens to the outside world. The
military junta that dominated the country for five decades all but destroyed
the university system after a series of student protests convinced its leaders
that schools were breeding grounds for dissent.
But now that the lifting of most
Western sanctions has paved the way for an expected wave of investment,
companies are finding a nation largely bereft of skilled workers. Doctors and
lawyers often lack up-to-date training, and other professions are desperately
short of qualified staff with even basic critical-thinking skills, employers
say.
The lack of expertise in the
country was sometimes used by military leaders as a justification for handing
big business contracts to associates of the regime. A small number of Myanmar
students went overseas to study. Only over the past year, since the military
regime stepped down, has the government actively encouraged those educated
abroad to return and share expertise.
"There's a huge, huge
shortage" of trained workers, "and going forward it will be even more
so," said Suki Singh, managing director of Myanmar Hotels International,
which runs several of Yangon's most prominent hotels and has been looking to
fill human-resources and engineering positions for months. Parami Energy, an
oil and gas firm, has been trying since July to fill human-resources jobs and
other posts, but keeps finding applicants can't speak English.
"Most of them, I'm sorry to
say, are unqualified," says Tin Cho, an adviser to the company. Some
computer-science students don't even know how to turn computers on, he said.
Twenty-year-old Zin Nyein Htwe
wants to be an architect "to make more beautiful buildings." But she
says the college she attends—the University of West Yangon, among rice paddies
on the outskirts of Myanmar's biggest city—doesn't normally let students into
its library and only sometimes allows access to computers. There often isn't
enough water to flush the toilets. She complains that some instructors can't
explain what they're teaching and rarely fail anyone. "I want a better
education," she says.
The weak education system also
means the government lacks enough trained technocrats to fully implement
reforms. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi said recently that Myanmar's
"ruined" education system had made it harder to recruit talented
young politicians.
In the decades after Myanmar's
military regime took over in the 1960s, it closed the University of Yangon and
other campuses repeatedly to keep student protesters at bay, at one point
keeping schools closed for nearly 3½ years in the late 1990s. To further
prevent students from congregating in urban areas, the regime scattered much of
the University of Yangon to remote sites, while new schools were opened far
from city centers. Funding dried up, with Myanmar spending more on defense than
education and health care combined—the only country in developing Asia to do
so, according to the Asian Development Bank. Instructors were told to stick to
rote lesson plans vetted by military leaders, teachers say. Some students were
left with 40-year-old textbooks.
When Kyi May Kaung, now a
Washington-based writer, was a student at the University of Yangon, then known
as Rangoon University, in the early 1960s, students hung out at poetry readings
and teachers held degrees from places like Harvard and M.I.T. But by the time
she became an economics lecturer at the school, professors were ordered to stop
teaching political science and instead lectured on the "socialist
experience" in the Soviet Union. Teachers had to borrow light bulbs to
ensure there was enough light during storms.
Foreigners still aren't allowed
to enter the sprawling premises of the University of Yangon—which now offers
classes mainly just for graduate programs—without special permission. A recent
visit by a Myanmar national found a largely deserted campus covered in lush
overgrowth.
Officials at Myanmar's Ministry
of Education didn't provide responses to questions. President Thein Sein has
vowed to improve education, which he says is necessary to bolster Myanmar's
human resources.
"The government is quite
aware" of the problems and will make improvements, said Nay Zin Latt, a
presidential adviser. The government "has a strong idea to support
re-establishing the University of Yangon," he added, but he was "not
in the position" to disclose details, he said.
Efforts to obtain comment from
the University of West Yangon, Ms. Zin Nyein Htwe's school, were unsuccessful.
A lecturer there said the school struggled to keep facilities open due to
funding shortages, though students could ask permission to visit the library.
Very few students are interested in the library, though, he said. A degree
"is easy to get," he said, since teachers coach students on how to
pass exams.
Fixing schools will require huge
investments and a willingness to let students gather more openly and
potentially debate sensitive political issues, educators say.
The government has more than
doubled its education budget and increased teacher salaries, and universities
have been ordered to trim enrollment to boost standards, teachers say.
Officials have held discussions with Johns Hopkins University—which had a
Southeast Asian studies center at the University of Yangon in the 1950s—about
working together to improve university programs in the country. The government
has also launched a "comprehensive review" of the education system,
though the process isn't expected to be finished until 2014.
A chemistry lecturer interviewed
by The Wall Street Journal said she is now more optimistic about prospects for
reform than any time in years.
But many of the old problems
remain. She said that while each department at her school has a computer, many
of them don't work, and many teachers don't have permission to use the
Internet, which must be obtained from administrators. "There is still a
military-dictatorship style of rule in some departments," she said.
Another pressing question is
whether schools should have independence to develop their own curriculums,
which could frighten more conservative elements in the government.
Universities "one day will
get full independence as the rest of the world is practicing," Mr. Nay Zin
Latt said. But another official said Myanmar "needs more comprehensive
review" before relaxing its grip on schools. Schools don't have the
financial means to run themselves, so must rely on central government oversight
anyway, the official said.
Ronald Findlay, a Columbia
University economics professor who studied and taught at Rangoon University in
the 1950s and 1960s, said he was dismayed when he went back to visit the school
recently and saw his former two-story residence. "It was beautiful
housing, and we thought surely somebody must be living there," he said.
"But it was a jungle. There was nobody living there—it was abandoned. It
made you cry, it was awful."
Patrick Barta
Celine Fernandez, Minh Zaw and
Swe Min contributed to this article
Business & Investment Opportunities
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