To what extent has our liberal foreign labour policies contributed to the low salaries of graduates?

I refer to the article “Here’s a look at the average salaries for graduates at Singapore’s private education institutes” (Straits Times, Nov 21).

It states that “Taking into account just full-time permanent employment, the employment rate was 60.1 per cent.”

As I understand that the percentage of part-time students who were already working may be significant – does it mean that perhaps about half of the graduates had difficulty getting a full-time permanent job?

As to “The survey also showed that the median gross monthly salary of the graduates from PEIs in full-time permanent employment was S$2,550 … fresh and post-National Service polytechnic graduates at S$2,180 and S$2,517 respectively.

The following are the median gross monthly salaries for fresh graduates in PEIs:

Air Transport Training College – S$2,000

East Asia Institute of Management – S$1,950″ – I only reproduced the two lowest salaries above.

Isn’t a salary of $1,950 kind of low for university graduates?

The above statistics may indicate that our liberal foreign labour policies may have depressed the salaries of our university graduates.

Leong Sze Hian