Thoughts on education in a wider sphere

Having survived the cold and wet of a west-coast Canadian winter, I'm now struggling to cope with the heat and mugginess of a Queensland summer. The trip was wonderful, and gave me a chance to think about education in a broader context than just my little corner of the planet. In my last post, I mentioned figures given in the final keynote address at ASCILITE regarding the growth of tertiary education in China. While en-route to Canada, I read a series of articles on the state of higher education in fast-developing countries such as India and China. One article discussed the need to improve the quality of tertiary education in India in particular, and quoted one Indian chancellor as saying that 90% of university graduates are unemployable due to extreme underfunding of universities. It made me think about educational institutions in developing countries needing to change the way they operate in order to produce graduates that will be globally competitive.
When I spent a month in India last year, I was excited to see the number of young women attending the local university in a city I worked in for a week. I was then saddened to hear from my hosts that a number of them only attend in order to improve their marriage prospects. My western mind struggles with this.

But the main purpose of my trip was to spend time with family I hadn't seen in years, my older sister in particular. She has spent considerable time in the Canadian university sector, both as a student and as a tutor. She told me about the high number of graduates who go into debt living off student loans, only to find that the only jobs they can get upon graduation are only barely within their field of study and grossly below their qualifications. She told me about students she had who excelled in the most challenging areas of their computer science degrees, only to have to return to university to complete more lower-level IT degrees in order to find paying work. It almost seems like the economy is not at the point where it is able to utilise the advanced skills of the graduates that universities are turning out.