Although there has been growing enrollment in the education system, the country has a feeble capacity to create wealth from the hidden potential of students. It's worth noting that to drive prosperity by unlocking the latent potential of the students, we need to redesign the country so that the knowledge and ideas that are likely to be generated by graduates could be profitably traded.
UPGRADE DEVELOPMENT THESIS: Besides corruption and unfairness, wrong beliefs and development thesis appear to be significant barriers to harnessing students' potential for creating wealth. There has been no natural correlation between conventional development indicators and the capacity of a country to create wealth from the latent potential of students. For example, investment in infrastructure and liberalisation of technology imports does not necessarily empower students. Similarly, advancement in human capital development does not naturally open wealth creation opportunities by engaging graduates. The development thesis should offer clarity and establish a linkage between the knowledge and the ability to create knowledge and ideas of graduates to improve products and processes in a globally competitive manner so that the intellectual outputs of graduates could be traded at a profit in the global market. Referring to spillover effect or exogenous factor is no longer acceptable. Similarly, referring to the correlation of relevant indicators prevailing in advanced countries is insufficient. Often, investment in justification of such correlation leads to wasteful investment and the formation of barriers to creating wealth from the capabilities of graduates in less developed countries.
CHANGE THE FOCUS OF EDUCATION FROM GRADUATE PRODUCTION TO WEALTH CREATION: The higher the education, the better the future will be. Such a thesis has been the underlying belief in support of expanding investment in education at the national, family, and individual levels. However, growing unemployment among graduates in less developed countries has offered an opposite reality. Hence, it's time to shift the focus from graduate production to empowering students to produce wealth. Instead of copying the curricula and content from advanced countries, and racing for ranking as the best practices, we need to figure out the linkage between the capacity we are developing among students and how wealth creation occurs in a competitive market. We need to go back to the basics of wealth creation from human capabilities like innate abilities, the knowledge they capture through education, and the capacity we develop among them to generate knowledge and ideas.
TRUST, FAIRNESS, AND DEMOCRACY FOR CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: The challenge of creating wealth from the competence of the graduates has been to empower them to generate knowledge and ideas and profitably trade them in the global market as products and process features. The evolution of all products and processes through incremental advancement and reinvention has the potential of creating the endless market of the latent capacity of the students. However, to harness it, there must be trust and fairness supporting the sustained and systematic accumulation of intellectual assets to fuel innovation waves. On the other hand, democracy is needed to reflect public opinions in state affairs to prevent corruption and capital accumulation in the hands of a few through cronyism. Besides, sustained public policy support is crucial for opening a new wave of growth. As such new waves unleash creative destruction effect on the accumulated wealth of special interest groups, democracy opens the window to needed policy reform.
SHIFT DEVELOPMENT FOCUS FROM LABOR TO IDEA ECONOMY: Although progress has been made to graduate from raw natural resource trade to labour-centric industrial value add, policies and investments made for such graduation have not opened the window of adding value through knowledge and ideas. Unfortunately, in many cases, such a change has created barriers to creating economic value from students' latent capacity of knowledge and idea production. For example, although tax differentials offered to import substitution-based industrial economies have created a market for low-skilled labour, they have also erected a barrier to pursuing innovation. As a result, firms are not showing interest in investing in R&D to unlock the potential of graduates to drive revenue and profit. Similarly, as the government keeps lowering taxes and giving cash incentives to offset eroding profitability, export-oriented producers are unwilling to investing in R&D to reduce costs and increase quality through locally produced knowledge and ideas. Hence, overall economic strategy and policy framework should be redesigned for creating both the supply and demand of graduates' competence.
INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT FOR TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER AND INNOVATION: The infrastructure development strategy has been to borrow from external sources and offer contacts to foreign firms. If we disregard corruption, inflated pricing and inefficiency issues, does such an approach open a new window of wealth creation from the competence of a growing number of graduates? Although such infrastructure development facilitates communication and movement, and makes it easier to access imported energy, the country loses the opportunity for technology transfer so that their graduates can design and build better versions next time. For example, the development of one metro rail line should lead to sufficient competence development so that our graduates can design and build the following lines, which would be better and cost lower. Unlike most less developed countries, Japan, China, and other advanced countries leveraged their infrastructure development investment to absorb foreign technologies and advance them further. Hence, the infrastructure investment strategy must be changed to unlock the latent potential of the students.
INCENTIVES FOR IMPROVING COMPETITIVENESS THROUGH IDEAS: Incentives for the industrial economy must be changed from tax differential and other forms towards incentivising competitiveness improvement through local idea production. Of course, such a change will hurt easy profit-making opportunities. However, engaging students in the industrial economy is vital to drive competitiveness by unlocking their hidden potential.
PATRONISE THINK TANKS FOR GIVING DIRECTION AND WORKING AS LYMPH NODES: Producers have continuously fought to win the cost reduction and quality improvement race. Besides, there has been a battle between maturing and emerging waves of products and processes. Furthermore, there has been an endless race between human and machine competence. Consequently, opportunities for wealth creation through knowledge and ideas, labour, and natural resources have been in flux. The role of think tanks is indispensable for monitoring, interpreting, predicting, and advising. Besides, to counter toxic thoughts and ideas, must play the role of lymph nodes so society keeps winning the endless battle against harmful waves.
The unlocking of the hidden potential of students to produce knowledge and ideas offers the opportunity to drive prosperity. However, there has been no natural correlation between the number of graduates, the quality of education, and the prosperity we can enjoy. To unlock the hidden potential of students to drive prosperity, we must bring significant changes in our belief, development thesis, governance, and policy instruments, which affect how we create wealth so that profit-making competition of engaging graduates for producing and commercialising knowledge and ideas intensifies.
M. Rokonuzzaman, Ph.D is academic and researcher on technology, society and policy. [email protected]
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