Malaysia shifted to the Malay tongue, Bahasa Melayu, from English as the language of teaching in 1970. Now, universities are producing graduates who don’t make the grade in the workforce. In a country with 237,000 job vacancies, about 45,000 college grads are unemployed, mainly because of poor English, according to the government. Many of those who have found work aren’t using their degree skills.

“The cause of the under-employment? I’ll give you one reason for it: English,” said Rafiah Salim, vice chancellor at Universiti Malaya, the country’s oldest university. “The only industry that’s really using Bahasa is the government service.”

The glut of graduates was confirmed in 2005, when the government’s Economic Planning Unit asked the unemployed to register for a survey to gauge who was out of work and why. Nearly 60,000 jobless grads — equivalent to a quarter of those who finished their higher education this year — signed up.
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Source: Bloomberg

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