Fair enough, I trust UM Class of 78's judgement that the graduate unemployment problem is partly due to graduates being too picky about wanting nice, clean jobs in air-conditioned offices.

However, I don't quite agree with Dr Jeffery Chiang's implicit blame on graduates themselves for the high graduate unemployment problem.

While I agree with the need for graduates to be adaptable and move with the times, it is indeed a terrible waste for someone to graduate after four years of study at much expense to the taxpayers or their families, only to end up working at some unrelated or menial job below their qualifications.

I'm sure you'll find many 'inflexible' graduates serving you coffee in those franchised coffee joints around town.

While it's commendable that they are willing to take any job that comes along and not depend on mum and dad, it does no good for themselves, their families nor the nation in the long term for them to waste their expensively acquired talent.

What's at fault here is improper career guidance and poor projection of the job market four years down the road - when a student beginning a course will graduate.

Meanwhile, people are saying our graduates should 'upgrade themselves,''change with the times', 'be flexible' and other cliched postmodern, management gobbledegook. Upgrade and change to what, I ask?

How many can afford the time and money for further upgrades with no assurance that it will help them find work afterwards?

Focussing on the field of Information Technology (IT), I would say blame for the unemployed graduate problem should fall on the government, management consultants, career guidance counsellors and IT training schools, as well as the mass media.

They have created unrealistically high expectations in IT jobs prospects and created a glut of IT graduates four years down the road. I've also heard that some colleges pay career guidance counsellors a commission for getting a student to enrol in their IT courses.

So can we blame graduates for being 'inflexible' and 'reluctant to change'? What should graduates do - be flexible and start a course in medicine after completing a course in computer science?

At the end of the day, it's the old issue of supply and demand and no amount of re-training, upgrading, re-inventing oneself, changing, moving up the value-chain and other cliched advice can make much difference when problems are caused by the imbalance of supply and demand.

Of course, I too have no time for graduates who want an easy, white collar, pen-pushing or key-striking job.

Anyway, I'm glad that the present prime minister, Pak Lah, has better sense to adopt a more balanced approach to development by emphasising development of the agricultural and other sectors and not just IT.

While most may think of high-tech as synonymous only with computers and IT, there's also is high-tech farming, high-tech manufacturing, high-tech steelmaking and high-tech architecture.

Developing countries like Malaysia and Singapore are so beguiled by the promises of the post-industrialists, who claim that since the information economy 'logically follows' in the wake of the manufacturing economy, we should leapfrog the manufacturing stage straight into the information phase, and hopefully get a head start in IT.

But what if the post-industrial pundits and paperback writers are wrong? What if IT merely enables of manufacturing, agriculture and business and is not an end in itself?

Wouldn't the proverbial bullfrog be leaping onto a flimsy lily pad?

After all, it was the Anglo-American economies which bought that post-industrialists' drivel, while Japan, South Korea, Germany, France and other continental European countries stuck with manufacturing making Airbus Industries the largest aeroplane maker today, ahead of Boeing.

I never bought that post-industrial nonsense. Like that management poster about the elevator to the top being out of order, so use the stairs - there's no short cut to developing one's own

manufacturing technology and that's something our national carmakers should have learnt a long time ago.

So with Pak Lah in charge, we're hopefully going to have the first, second and third-wave industries developing in parallel while providing decent jobs.