Cooperation among Educational Institutions and Industry: Supply Chain Perspective

INTRODUCTION In the 21st century, the global market conditions have changed significantly. Such changes have affected the operations of not only private profit oriented organizations, but also public institutes and non-profit organizations. Most notable of these are an ever-increasing interdependence among organizations and fiercer competition in the market, which together is a paradox because they contradict each other and cannot be understood within a traditional mindset. Thus, the new millennium demands a new paradigm which signifies the importance of a tight cooperation among organizations in order to stay competitive in the market. However, there are still organizations or even the whole industries that are blindly following the rules of the old mindset, which should be considered "history". The life-span of "blind" organizations tends to be short-term, thus resulting in their almost no value-added to the economy of a country. Thus, the "myopia" of these organizations and industries has lead to a slow economic growth of a country and a lower competitiveness of a nation. Unfortunately, the labor market of the Kyrgyz economy is an example of this case. As was noted six years ago by Aisha Aslanbekova (2001), ". most of the graduates cannot find a job after graduation" Currently, most of the students in Kyrgyzstan are still finding it difficult to find an appropriate job after their graduation. Consequently, some of them are holding jobs that are different from their professions. These jobs tend to be of low salary and lack future vision. Others are losing hope and giving up searching for jobs, thus increasing the number of the unemployed. Of course, there are myriads of reasons why graduates are facing this problem and each of them is as important as another in explaining this issue. However, the lack of cooperation between the educational institutions and industry is at the center of this issue. In particular, educational institutions in Kyrgyzstan are operating without being sufficiently aware of the current market conditions. Consequently, they have become ineffective in matching the market demands for the labor force with ample supply of graduates with the preparation and skills that are appropriate to the demands of the labor market. Currently, labor markets in Kyrgyzstan face imbalance between demand for a particular labor force and its supply because educational institutions are graduating annually more students in one profession relative to the demand, (a labor surplus in this market) and, at the same time, not enough graduates to meet the demand in another labor market (a labor shortage). HIGHER EDUCATION AND LABOR MARKET DURING AND AFTER THE SOVIET PERIOD During the Soviet Union all the issues concerning the educations as well as economy and politics were managed by the central government located in Moscow. Thus, the education system was under the tight central control, that is, the central government decided on how many universities to establish, enrollment procedures, academic course plans, employment after graduation, to name only a few. The existence of the tight central control can be understood from the following table: According to the table, the numbers in each category differ significantly as one compares those for the years 2001 and 1992, one year later after Kyrgyzstan became an independent nation. For instance, the number of higher education institutes in 1992 was only 13 while it increased 138 in 2001. Over the same period, the number of students enrolled in higher education institutions increased significantly from 53700 to 207400. So, it can said that, during the Soviet era, there was more or less some coordination between labor supply and labor demand. However, as was mentioned by Askar Djakishev (2007), unemployment or labor oversupply still existed; for instance, jobs in industrial sectors would be filled by the personnel brought in from other member countries and leftover graduate students with humanitarian science degrees would be sent to agriculture sector or other sectors that are irrelevant to the individuals' professions. …