Over 70% agree vocational education good for careers: poll

Taipei : More than three in four Taiwanese agree that vocational education will be good for people’s careers in the future, the Professor Huang Kun-huei Education Foundation (黃昆輝教授基金會) said Saturday.

The foundation, which conducted the poll, said 46 percent of the poll’s 1,074 respondents agreed and 29.7 percent strongly agreed that students with a vocational education had a good career future, signaling that 75.7 percent support vocational education.

Only 11.3 percent of respondents said vocational education would not help students have good futures.

Respondents cited the main attributes of vocational education as “opening up job opportunities after graduating,” followed by “getting a professional license that guarantees a job” and “guaranteeing the chance to study at a public technical university after first getting a job.”

Foundation Chairman Huang Kun-huei said the survey shows a shift in the public’s mindset on the importance of vocational education in landing a good job.

Huang, who served as Taiwan’s education minister in the early 1980s, said the poll showed a majority of people in Taiwan are no longer fixed on the pursuit of college education and even a higher diploma.

The government has failed to pay enough attention to the importance of vocational education in setting education policy, and such ignorance has led to a long-term gap between the job market and higher education, Huang said. As a result, he said, it is difficult for members of the younger generation who receive a university degree to find a suitable job at the same time as many enterprises have trouble finding technically skilled employees.

According to the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, the jobless rate for people holding a college or higher degree stood at 5.22 percent in September, the highest among all education groups.

The overall unemployment rate for the month was 3.77 percent.

About 65.5 percent of respondents said they supported the idea that upward job mobility and raises depended on whether an employee will be able to earn more professional licenses. The percentage even went higher to 80 percent among the respondents whose children are studying in vocational high schools, the survey found. The survey, conducted from Oct. 22 to 26, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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