The Relationship between Public Expenditure for Technical and Vocational Education and Employability Skills of the Graduates of Vocational Colleges in Malaysia

Enah Ali,Mohd Ridwan Abd Razak,Ridzuan Che’ Rus

doi:10.6007/ijarbss/v8-i8/4633

Abstract

Public expenditure for technical and vocational education is important for Malaysia to produce high skilled workers to achieve the status of a developed and high-income country by the year 2020. The objective of this study is to measure the relationship between public expenditure for technical and vocational education and employability skills of the graduates of vocational colleges in Malaysia. The SmartPLS path model analysis revealed two important findings: first, recurrent expenditure was significantly correlated with employability skills. Second, development expenditure was significantly correlated with employability skills. These outcomes demonstrate that the ability of technical and vocational education administrator to provide and manage adequate financial allocation may lead to enhance graduate’s employability skills. In addition, discussion, implications and conclusion are described.

Highlights

Public expenditure in education and training is an important issue in an era of knowledge based economy (k-economy)
Public expenditure for technical and vocational education is commonly observed as a combination of recurrent and development expenditure organized by government to provide adequate education and training facilities in order to produce high skilled workers. (Adamson, Åstrand & Darling-Hammond, 2016; Adetula, Adesina, Owolabi & Stephen, 2017; Fan, Ma & Wang, 2015)
In the perspective of this study, majority of the respondents view that the levels of recurrent expenditure, development expenditure and employability skills are high

Summary

Introduction

Public expenditure in education and training is an important issue in an era of knowledge based economy (k-economy). It was argued by many scholar in various fields such as education (Harris, Chisholm & Burns, 2013; Shirley, 2017), human resource management (Bornemann & Wiedenhofer, 2014; Ognjanović, 2016) and training and development (Alagaraja & Arthur-Mensah, 2013; Nafukho, 2013). An analysis of recent literature about public expenditure for education, highlights that public expenditure for technical and vocational education consist of two important elements: recurrent expenditure and development expenditure (Bateman, Brown & Uera, 2015; Bateman, Cassity & Fangalasuu, 2015; Maglen, Wall & Rokovunisei, 2015). Development expenditure is generally viewed as any payment to provide education facilities such as cost for construction, renovation and repair of buildings, purchase of vehicles and heavy learning equipment (Chude & Chude, 2013; Devkota, Chaulagain & Bagale, 2016; Jones, Sutcliffe, Bragg & Harris, 2016)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion