Thursday, November 11, 2010
Educated and "Educated"
I had actually typed out a nice blog entry, but it was so long it bothered on a short essay! So I've condensed it into something I hope is a lot shorter. Game Theory exam is tomorrow, and it's not bothering me so much mainly because it's an open book exam. I read an article which said that according to a research conducted by Gallup, Singapore would not experience a brain drain, but instead experience a huge inflow of educated individuals aged between 15 and 29.
As usual, the study comes with 2 caveats: (1) it measured aspirations, not intentions and (2) Singapore's small population meant that impacts of migration are magnified. I think a third and more important caveat is that the proxy for educated individuals is at least a bachelors degree. The article is in the context of a brain drain, so what are we supposed to infer? That Singapore won't experience a brain drain because more people with bachelor degrees want to come to us? Clearly a brain drain is in reference to the outflow of skilled individuals, and not just education. Everybody who goes to university will know that in this day and age, a bachelors is increasingly easier to attain. One day everybody will have a bachelors and we will look to masters as a proxy for skills. And with enough time will we look to PhD?!
With this rant, of course, will come some caveats (: First, I do not have an answer as to what is a good proxy for skill, and it could well be that with our given level of knowledge education is the best that we can do. If that is so, I believe that a lot more could have been done to put the study into context. Second, I could just be picking out a minor flaw in Gallup and making it a big thing because they rejected my application for an analyst (who btw could have been working on a study such as the one fore mentioned!!). Personally, I think its more the former than the latter (:
Dan
3:56 pm
