OPINION

Higher ed undervalued

Re: "University challenge", (BP, Aug 12).

As a university teacher here in Thailand and someone that possesses four degrees, the problem of decreasing enrolment has two main factors that if addressed properly would make higher education more viable.

The first issue is to eliminate discrimination over age within the job market. I only have students that are in the 18-23-year-old range.

Never have I had a working adult as a student. Since Thailand forces people into retiring at 60 years old there is no financial incentive for someone over 35 to learn a new skill set or change fields.

In the US, only a third of the students are from high school. The majority of the students are working adults.

Middle-aged students are swayed to take on the financial expenditure because they know they can work into their 70s if they want in order to offset the personal investment.

Eliminating ageism would also alleviate some of the pressures of having an ageing society because the seniors would be more self-sufficient rather than dependent.

The second issue is something that I do not have an answer for but it needs to be addressed, and that is the transition over time of learning for the sake of knowledge itself to learning is only for jobs.

Unless a university offers doctoral programmes, then they are not about "higher learning". They are really just training institutions -- not collegial environments.

Harvard was founded in the US in 1636. Over a 150 years before the country was founded and it was not about "jobs". Western culture has a long history and tradition valuing knowledge and has created today's idea of public education.

Thailand is new to this having only allowed higher learning to be available to the general public for less than 100 years. The culture here needs to value learning and intelligence for universities to thrive and to make up for the time lost. There are no Neil DeGrasse Tysons, Michio Kakus, Stephen Hawkings or Carl Sagans within Thai popular culture yet.

Valuing knowledge is something that needs to be supported in order for learning to flourish and for society to increase its collective intelligence.

Re: "Look to global tourists", (PostBag, Aug 11).

Edward Kitlertsirivatana in the letter above makes a good point. Most Chinese tourists come here on hugely discounted group tours, where they are shuttled off to predetermined sites, not going anywhere on their own.

They only seem interested in talking to their fellow Chinese brethren and do not seem to care about Thai culture.

They especially seem to enjoy going shopping, looking for products that they can sell back home, or buying hugely popular brand name items that are hard to find in China.

Further, it seems that the tour guides are Chinese, and that the tourists stay at mostly Chinese controlled businesses. So basically, Thai people benefit little from these tourists.

Hence, the tourist industry is not as strong as the numbers seem to suggest. The Prayut Chan-o-cha government likes to brag about how the country keeps breaking new records each year in terms of the number of tourist arrivals.

But based on my personal experience and talking to other expats, it seems to be the case that there are far less white tourists coming here compared to 10 or even five years ago.

As the above pointed out, the Thai government needs to make a more concentrated effort in attracting this segment, as they travel individually or in small individual groups and enjoy visiting small Thai businesses.

Eventually, the Chinese are going to tire of coming here, or even if they do continue coming to this country in great numbers, it isn't going to benefit Thailand much, as the Chinese continue travelling together on group tours.

Therefore, it is important that the Thai tourist industry caters to as wide a segment of tourists as possible for the good of the economy.

Contact: Bangkok Post Building 136 Na Ranong Road Klong Toey, Bangkok 10110 fax: +02 6164000 Email:

postbag@bangkokpost.co.th

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