Back in the late 80s and early 90s, when unemployment was high, we had the same problem of unemployed graduates.

My ex-uncle-in-law who worked at Pusat Islam told me a story that some government departments were given a budget to employ these graduates at a salary of RM400 per month. A desk but nothing to do a stereotyped government job. Some of the more enterprising graduates opened burger stalls and drink kiosks by the roadside.

Graduate unemployment is not new. We read about it in the past year. Recent figures indicate that the number is around 80,000 and rising.

Blame on this problem has been passed around like a soccer ball, from the tertiary institutions for offering courses that are not needed in the marketplace to economists for predicting the wrong demand sector.

But the economy has been in growth mode for some years now, unemployment is at a record low, and employers are recruiting foreign workers by the thousands. We might think that the current drive to repatriate illegal immigrants would open up jobs to locals, but it is more complicated than that. Tertiary graduates have higher expectations about jobs that they apply for.

They avoid the 3Ds dangerous, dirty and demeaning, or in other words (jobs that don't bring prestige. By eliminating jobs by this criteria - construction jobs, factory and farm work - their choices become limited.

Well, this is just a generalisation; there are quite a number of graduates who would do anything given the chance and a good salary. Nevertheless, for the rest it has to do with expectations, what society expects of them and their attitude towards hard work.

As a society, Malaysians still have remnants of feudal attitudes. We groom our children to think that certain jobs are beneath them. Even worse, we pressure our children to achieve whatever we couldn't achieve ourselves, eg ballet lessons or medical school.

It doesn't matter if the kid is not interested, '... he or she will get used to it', we say. We always want them to aspire for the better things in life. Well, there is nothing wrong with that if we can be realistic when things don't turn out as we plan.

Life is not a bunch of roses. Employers aggravate the graduate unemployment situation by offering low, 'starvation-rate' wages and limiting their workers upward mobility. The government and our elected representatives do their part in worsening the situation by letting employers exploit workers with impunity, suppressing union movements and opening the gates to immigrant workers from neighbouring countries to keep wages low.