In a surprising but welcomed move by the Ministry of Higher Education, Datuk Mustapa Mohamed announced that "the Government will only sponsor post-graduates for top prestigious schools abroad under a plan to produce quality professionals and to raise the standard of university lecturers."
Even the universities which undergraduates are being set to are also being reviewed, although the Minister did highlight that the rule will be more strictly enforced for postgraduates programmes.
As far as I'm concerned, this is an excellent move, if implemented accordingly. The next thing which is necessary, to encourage transparency and some form of consistency, is for the Ministry to announce the Universities which are pre-approved for specific postgraduate programmes.
A good mechanism which will take away "arbitrary" decisions by the often bungling Ministry officials, is to rely on certain set international benchmarks. For example, these top universities can be defined as universities which are recognised as the Top 50 in either the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) or the Shanghai JiaoTung University global university rankings table. These tables are not perfect, but they will certainly be a lot more objective than any list compiled by the local officials.
I can imagine however, the level of resistance to this policy which may come from vested interest parties, particularly those local academics who are unable to secure places in these instutions. The backlash may happen if the new ruling results in severely dampening the government's efforts to increase the number of PhD holders in the local universities.
I, and I'm certain my blog partner, Kian Ming, will implore Datuk Mustapa to stick to his guns and avoid pursuing a short-term and detrimental policy of increasing the quantity of PhD academics at the expense of quality.
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