Foreign students: benefits in the workroom

Leanda Lee - PhD. Assistant Professor, School of Management, Leadership and Government. Coordinator MBA Program and Coordinator Career Centre, USJ

Just as competition was deemed to be good in the casino industry, so too, competition is good for our students. Our public higher learning institutions are getting ready to develop Macau as a world class centre of education with support to both local and non-local students. Within this vision of higher education, all we need is to ensure that educational safety-net opportunities are made available elsewhere in the system for those who do not make the grade at the selected centres of excellence.
Some may scoff but indeed our local institutions should and can achieve world class distinction given the abundance of financial resources and governmental will. With the right intellectual and organisational resources and structures, education has the potential to be that industry to offer diversification to the Macau economy. It is also the industry that will deliver the most valuable resource to any service-based economy, a resource in which Macau is sorely lacking – skilled, knowledgeable and motivated human resources.
The level of resources that we invest into such a system will be undermined, however, if our students have not been prepared to value the offerings. I have suggested in an earlier column that competition in the classroom and exposure to diverse behaviours, beliefs, values, motivations and needs within the student body will imbue in our local students a heightened sense of value in learning particularly if they are competing for places, grades and academic time. A little bit of competition is a keen driver. We value more that which we might potentially lose.
I would go a step further in order to create a competitive environment to drive our students and that is in the workplace. Unlike many countries that offer places to overseas students, Macau does not allow individuals on student visas to work. This limits the pool of students that we can attract to those who have the financial backing to maintain themselves over the period of their degree. Quality students are not limited to this pool and we will increase the applications and thus the quality by allowing work to those who need some additional financial support. Hardly any country is as fortunate as Macau to have the unemployment figures that we do and in those environments work-experience becomes a major factor in finding a position after graduation. The existing situation of foreign students not being able to undertake work-experience during their studies in Macau would certainly be a disincentive to coming here. We would attract a greater number and better students if we would allow foreign students to undertake, say, a maximum of 15 hours of part-time work per week.
As the community and customer base continue to diversify due to economic growth and government led diversification, Macau cannot be sustained by local full-time labour alone, in terms of number, diversity and depth of skill.  These motivated, intelligent, casual, part-time workers from amongst foreign students are the perfect fodder for our MICE industry. Where there are peaks and troughs in business due to seasonal fluctuations as we see in tourism and hospitality, casual workers remove the scheduling stresses from operations.
There is a raft of other benefits consequent to allowing foreign students access to the workplace. These students develop a closer bond and relationship with the community and the workplace which they take back home with them after they graduate. These are the connections that create future business opportunities and social ties. Our business operators also have the benefit of learning from these students. Moreover, what these students learn in the classroom can be transferred to the workplace and vice-versa. In addition, our local students gain the benefit of a slight increase in non-threatening competition in entry-level, part-time jobs. This will drive our local students to continuously improve their game and contribute more to the workplace and our community.

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