1136 



habits, and institutional forms of the old imperial order. One value 

 most appealing to the new leaderships was belief in the regenerative 

 power of educational reform as a means to speed modernization. As 

 admirers of liberal democratic ideas which ascribed to education a 

 power to transform man's environment, they sought material salvation 

 through education. The defect of their approach lay in their failure 

 to master concepts of orderly and rationalized manpower manage- 

 ment. Pursuing illusions of prestige and other false goals hanging 

 over from the colonial past, the LDCs created educational systems 

 largely for the sake of education, essentially unplanned (at least in 

 a sufficiently rational way), and most important, unrelated to the 

 larger goals of national development. 



The result was predictable. A surplus of an educated elite was 

 created, notably at the university level. Graduates could not be ab- 

 sorbed by the underdeveloped economies. Thus in July 1965 The 

 London Times could report that 40 percent of the engineers trained in 

 Burma in 1961 had not found employment in engineering 18 months 

 later. Graduates of Khartoum University in the Sudan engaged in a 

 near-riotous siege of their Government as pressure to provide them 

 with jobs. A household survey in the Philippines in the early sixties 

 disclosed 35,000 college gradr.ates without jobs. In Thailand, more than 

 1,000 candidates, including university graduates, could be expected to 

 appear for three clerical posts in the government. According to an- 

 other report, a 1961 census in India revealed that 10.4 percent of all 

 scientific and technical personnel were unemployed, and 18.6 percent 

 were employed outside the occupations for which they were trained. ^^^ 

 The persistent surplus of an educated elite is shown by the report in 

 The Washington Post on January 21, 1973, stating that neither gov- 

 ernment nor industry in India can absorb even half of the 600,000 

 graduates each year who move into the job market.^^^ 



Educational reform fulfilled manpower demands during the transi- 

 tion from colonial status to independence, but the systems have con- 

 tinued to turn out students, many poorly trained, at a progressively 

 increasing rate (10 percent a year) often far beyond the absorptive 

 capacity of the nations' economies. This dilemma of overproduction 

 and underabsorption has often been compounded by the tendency to- 

 ward indiscriminately stressing in education of quantity over quality, 

 thereby creating a mismatch in manpower supply to demand. Follow- 

 ing the tradition of educational preferences held by the former colonial 

 mentors and often those traditions existing in their own societies, many 

 students pursued the law and the humanities, liberal arts and medi- 

 cine; they shunned the more practical related studies of science, en- 

 gineering, agronomy, and the other technical arts so crucial for na- 

 tional development. As a result, an imbalance was created in their 

 nations' educational structures, adding to the accumulating surplus of 

 educated talent. Specialists on brain drain refer to this waste of talent 

 as "overflows," An example of this waste is seen in the case of the 

 Philippines where in 1967, 70 percent of all registered scientific and 

 professional people were reported to be in the medical field. According 



=2« Adams and Dlrlam, op. cit. Brain Drain, p. 251. 



=21 Lewis M. Simons, "India's Colleges Slide Into Choas," The Waahinaton Post, Jan. 21, 

 1973, p. 05. 



