The State of Higher Education in Malaysia

Expensive race to higher education

SAT, 10 JUL 2010 06:00

By Ken Vin Lek

SPECIAL FOCUS KUALA LUMPUR: Higher education is a passport to a better life, but unfortunately many Malaysian students do not enjoy easy access to it. More often than not, it is a goal they seek but cannot attain. It has seemingly become a privilege and not a right.

If given a chance, many would want to enter and graduate from top-notch universities in the US and UK. But the reality is that the route to these prestigious institutions is out of reach and many are left stranded at home.

What future do they have in Malaysia? Access to higher education to local public institutions of higher education is limited. A quota system introduced under the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1970 and spiralling fees in private institutions have not helped matters.

There are currently 20 public universities and 627 higher education institutions (IPT), with Universiti Malaya being the oldest university in the country.

According to PJ Utara MP, Tony Pua, this was more than double in proportion to the population when compared to Singapore.

Under the 10th Malaysia Plan (10MP), the government does not intend to establish any more new public universities, while the private sector will not be prevented from setting up private institutions of higher learning.

FMT takes an indepth look at the trend emerging in Malaysia’s higher education system.

Only 29% obtain higher education qualifications

According to a report published by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (Unesco) in 2005, only 29.9% of Malaysians obtained higher education qualifications.

In contrast, both Singapore and Thailand have a higher percentage of population with tertiary education qualifications at 46% and 41% respectively, while in South Korea a whopping 89% of its population boasts higher education qualifications -- three times the percentage of Malaysia.

Said Professor James Chin, head of Arts of Monash University Malaysia: “Malaysia can never be a developed country if the rate remains this low. On the one hand, we have the problem of quality; on the other, the problem of percentage.”

“Quality is obviously harder to improve, and we are nowhere near becoming a knowledge-based economy,” he added.

FMT did a study of the many publications of the Higher Education Ministry and came up with a startling fact: only one in 60 secondary school students in the 1960s had access to higher education, and this trend is still rising today.

Malaysia, however, has set a target: it wants to see 40% of the population in the 19-24 age group enjoy access to higher education by 2020.

Fahmi Reza, a Student Power activist, has over the years been vehemently advocating that higher education be made a right and not a privilege.

“Everyone in this country deserves to get access to higher education... we must realise that obtaining a degree gives an individual an edge over another person who probably had no access to higher education... this is blatantly unfair,” he said.

Going corporate

Under the 10MP, it appears that the government is moving towards corporatising public universities in Malaysia.

According to a report by the Higher Education Ministry, some 50% of public funds for higher education will be disbursed based on the needs of the government by 2015 and 25% of all public university places will be fee-paying seats.

Currently, the government subsidises all seats in public institutions of higher learning at the rate of 90%. Students only have to fork out a meagre fee for critical courses. The government sets aside as much as RM8.5 billion a year subsidising fees of these institutions.

A medical student, for example, only has to pay RM19,000 to complete the course, with the government subsidising RM181,000. An engineering student only has to pay RM10,760, with the government subsidising RM94,644.

When asked about the trend to make seats fee-paying ones, Chin said the government has no choice but to move towards this direction.

“This is a worldwide trend, especially in countries like the UK where the numbers of seats have been dropping and the US where higher education is viewed as a privilege and where one benefits substantially from having a degree.”

“The only problem is that if we take this route, there will be repercussions -- if one has to pay for a service, the quality has to be there and quality has always been a problem faced by IPTs in Malaysia,” Chin said.

According to a report released by the Ministry of Higher Education, between 2001 and 2010, 15% of the students who had access to higher education were enrolled in public institutions, while another 15% were studying in private ones.

It is predicted that by 2020 as many as 90% of higher education students will have to go through a private institution to obtain their degree.

But if the education system is moving towards a corporate, fee-paying culture, how many Malaysian families can afford to send their children to institutions of higher learning?

When FMT did a random survey of fees charged by universities, it was found that for an individual to pursue medicine at the International Medical University (IMU), he would need RM351,000 or RM5,850 a month to finance his studies, excluding the cost of living.

Considering that more than half of Malaysian households earn a monthly income of less than RM3,000 (according to the Department of Statistics), few students can afford to pay their way to a tertiary education without getting a scholarship or a bank loan.

Mushrooming of private institutions

Private universities did not come into existence in Malaysia until 1996. Prior to that, many Malaysians who could not obtain a place in local public institutions but who had the money, would pursue their tertiary studies overseas.

In the 1990s, only 7.2% of Malaysians at university age were enrolled in local tertiary institutions, compared with 35.8% in Argentina and 54.8% in South Korea.

Private institutions emerged because of the lack of places in public institutions. Moreover, Malaysians who pursued overseas studies had also caused a large outflow of currency.

According to a 1995 Unesco report, some 20% or 50,000 Malaysians were studying abroad and this cost the country about US$800 million a year in currency outflow, constituting nearly 12% of the country’s current deficit.

Given this scenario, the government enacted the Private Higher Educations Institutions Act in 1996, which gave birth to private institutions.

Since 1996, the number of private institutions had been mushrooming, starting with six universities in 1990 and growing to 69 in 2010.

Many government-linked companies and political parties saw the rapid growth of private educational bodies as an opportunity to make money.

Universiti Tun Abdul Razak (Unitar) owned by Umno was formed in 1998; Tunku Abdul Rahman College (KTAR), owned by MCA, was set up in 1969; Asian Institute of Medicine, Science and Technology University (AIMST), owned by MIC, was launched in 2001, and Gerakan-owned Wawasan Open University was established in 2005.

Chin sees the growth of these institutions in a positive light. “Malaysia made the right decision. A lot of people back then could not get places, the majority of whom were non-Bumiputeras,” he said.

Pua also concurred, saying that the move (to set up private institutions) has benefited the non-Bumiputeras because it is cheaper now to pursue a degree locally.

“The problem, however, is quality. There is nothing wrong with setting up private institutions but there has to be quality. Don't just think of making money.

“If you read the advertisements published by these institutions, all of them boast they are quality institutions.”

Pua suggested that an independent organisation be formed to rank these universities so that the public will be well informed of their competency.

It is worth noting that private institutions have a significantly lower percentage of academic staff with PhD qualifications than those in public institutions and this could affect the quality of education delivered.

An unintended racial divide?

When FMT did a survey of the vast distinctions between public and private institutions, it was discovered that a significant racial divide existed in these institutions.

Currently, private institutions consist of 95% non-Bumiputera students while 70% of students in the public institutions are Bumiputeras.

Said Fahmi: “Surely, the government did not intend it to be that way but this is clearly the outcome of the NEP, which made it compulsory for 70% of seats in public universities to be allocated to Bumiputeras.”

He added that this is completely against Article 12 of the Federal Constitution which states, “Without prejudice, there shall be no discrimination against any citizen on the grounds only of religion, race, descent or place of birth in administration of any educational institution maintained by public authority, in particular admission of pupils.”

Chin, however, was of the view that the blatant implementation of such a ratio in public universities left non-Bumiputeras with no other choice but to head to private institutions to pursue tertiary education.

The biggest loser

The group worst affected in the race to tertiary education is the poorer sections of the ethnic minorities.

They are left behind by private institutions because they lack funds to finance themselves. They are left behind by public institutions due to the quota system. Their only hope is to obtain brilliant results so that they can secure a scholarship, lead a better life and get out of the poverty trap.

Thoughts on the university admissions process

A friend of mine, Rajan Rishyakaran, has written a good blog post critiquing the Malaysian university admissions process. While I don't know enough about local universities to comment on many things he raises, there are a couple of points which I think are worth emphasising: the difference between policy in theory and policy in reality, and the importance of decentralising some decisions.

There are many illustrations of the difference between something in theory and something in practice, but Rajan's example of coursework is as good as any. In principle, adding coursework to the evaluation process for university admissions would be a good thing.

After all, a major problem with our education system is that it focuses a lot on examinations which only assess students at one point in time, and often encourage rote memorisation instead of actual learning. If you fall sick during exam period, it can dramatically change your life's course, because you might not get into the university you otherwise could, or not pursue the degree you otherwise would attain. And because the format and style of exams is so predictable, all you need to do is practice with enough exam papers from previous years to be prepared -- you don't necessarily need to understand anything on the exam (I have found that understanding too much can actually be detrimental to your marks in some Malaysian exams).

If we emphasised coursework more, then one-off incidents which might negatively impact your exam performance would matter less: you have a substantial amount of time to do your coursework. Because the key element of your coursework is usually a report on something you have researched, you actually learn something useful: you learn how to write academically, and you learn some basic research or factfinding skills.

That's the theory; the practical reality is something else altogether. When I was in school, nobody took coursework seriously. Or rather, they took it the same way they took an exam: they figured out the best way to game the system, and they did it. Everyone would Google their topic, and instead of writing up a report about it, they would plagarise the most relevant websites. If they were too lazy to do this, they would plagiarise from one another very openly -- there was no stigma to copying or cheating off someone else's work.

It's not that they were lazy; it's that they knew this was the most efficient way to get things done. Teachers don't really care if the material is obviously plagiarised -- to them the coursework system is often a burdensome imposition on them because they have to read through dozens, if not hundreds of reports. Students know this, so they intentionally put a lot of work into making their reports more burdensome on teachers. One teacher's son told me that he intentionally put lots of irrelevant diagrams and photos in his coursework because this would discourage the teacher from looking too hard at his work -- she would see he had obviously worked hard on the report, and give him high marks.

The problem with coursework is that it is an arbitrary, artificial system of evaluation imposed by the central government with little thought as to what the schools and teachers can do, and little thought for what universities want to see. As Rajan notes, our university admissions process is extremely centralised -- everything is boiled down to a couple of numbers, which are then fed into the government's system. The government then tells you what university you will attend, and what degree you will pursue.

Likewise, with coursework, the government tells schools how to grade students' work, and it tells universities how these grades must translate into admissions decisions. There is no room for a teacher to assess students in his or her own way, to try something different. Neither is there room for a university to assess students in a different way, such as through tailored interviews or personal statements.

Obviously, there are pitfalls to granting educators more autonomy. But I don't think there is any question that at the moment we err far too heavily on the side of ridiculous centralisation. The government has attempted to standardise the education system to an extreme, and the result is something easily gamed by the pretence of ability, instead of actual demonstrable results. The government needs to grant universities more leeway in making their admissions decisions, and at the same time experiment with giving schools more freedom in coming up with alternative methods of assessment.

A New Education Minister: More of the Same?

So our Prime Minister has reshuffled his Cabinet, and our new Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin is now also our new Education Minister. Unfortunately, my sense of things is that this probably will not mark a significant change in direction for Malaysian education.

Datuk Hishammuddin Hussein didn't really turn things around, if you ask me; Kian Ming is impressed by his administrative competency and I would agree that he probably kept things from getting worse. But I think it is very hard to say that things improved under Hisham. The government took some very tentative steps towards tinkering with the school system, but nearly every complaint that held water five years ago is still valid today.

I am not optimistic about Muhyiddin because the Education Ministry seems to have become a political football; you often become Education Minister because you're expected to eventually become Prime Minister, and this certainly seems to be true in this case. There is still little sign that the government recognises what's wrong with our school system, let alone how to fix these problems.

The number one issue which Muhyiddin must address is that of teachers: they are overworked, underpaid, poorly trained, and mostly powerless. There is no incentive for bright people to enter the teaching profession, and even those who are selfless enough to serve barely earn enough to cope, especially in urban areas. Teachers are often expected to not only teach, but handle paperwork and take on administrative duties. Yet, they barely get much training, and they are so shackled by the system that they are assigned to posts that make no sense; it is unusually common for a science teacher to wind up teaching history, for example. Fortunately, this is beside the point, because teachers have no power to determine the curriculum; what they teach has already been decided by a handful of bureaucrats and Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka textbook authors, and they are just responsible for vomiting up whatever these people want them to say, so their pupils can dutifully do the same on their exams.

There are a lot of other wrong things with our education system, but all my experiences in the school system point to teaching as the main problem: we aren't treating our teachers right. And when we don't properly treat these mature adults who we actually pay to be in school, is it really surprising that we often treat our students and youth even worse? We have good teachers, but we don't trust them to teach. We have good students, but we don't trust them to learn. Is it then surprising that so few people in our schools want to teach or learn?

When you empower the good teachers, you also empower the good students. I just finished watching this fantastic lecture on molecular biology which illustrates this perfectly; the speaker is a Princeton University biologist who not only loves her field, but lectures clearly and explains obscure concepts in a simple way. And if you watch the whole way through, she gives credit to all the students who work in her lab, because everything she presented was first discovered by one of them: "when you learn things like about how the natural world works ... it was done by a child. Science is done by that demographic."

It is hard to imagine a Malaysian academic saying something like that, and that says a lot about the way we think about education. We have trouble with giving academics freedom, and we have trouble with giving students freedom. This is unquestionably true in primary and secondary school, where the curriculum is completely dictated by the state and federal governments, but almost as true in our universities, where faculty and students are less free to speak their minds than any ordinary member of the public.

When you get to the heart of it, the problem with Malaysian education is that we are afraid of setting our people free, to explore our world. The attitude of our modern education system and our modern education policymakers is that minds are something to be controlled, not freed. And for all the talk of reform on the part of our new Prime Minister — and even his two predecessors, both of whom promised scores of reforms in their own times — none have dared address this problem which cuts to the core of the rotten apple that is our education system. Certainly, the new Education Minister is no exception to this rule. Until someone in government recognises this, I will have a very tough time believing there will be any kind of meaningful change in our school system.

Our Varsities: Good, Bad & Ugly

I'm not going to copy and paste the entire article here. But I thought its worth highlighting that one of our resident commentator on this blog, Shawn Tan has put together a group of young Malaysians at Cambridge University to discuss burning issues, the first being the state of our universities published in Malaysiakini.

It's unapologetic, it's critical but it's not new. The fact that the points raised aren't new isn't a criticism of the article but that of our Ministry and Government for they have not addressed these issues with the necessary determination and political will despite these problems having been raised many times over the last decade or more.

Vice-Chancellor Selection Committee

Hi guys, yes, I've been posting only sporadically on this blog in recent weeks but I've certainly not forgotten about it. Thanks to Kian Ming for keeping the blog going. I've been posting several education related articles, but due to some of the political nature, I've placed them on my personal blog. The latest being the controversy of the ADUN of Subang Jaya, Hannah Yeoh being banned from attend her own alumni's prefects reunion(!).

I've also paid special attention to education issues in parliament, hoping to eke out answers from the Ministers on the various issues which has been raised by the bloggers and readers here. Unfortunately I still have to fight for attention in the Dewan to get a chance to question the Ministers, I did managed to do so on a handful of occasions.

Of interest is the on-off-on-off vague issue of a vice-chancellor selection committee which has been the subject of discussion on this blog for the past 2 years already.

Over the past 2 sessions, the Minister of Higher Education, Datuk Khaled Nordin has stated that there will be a vice-chancellor selection committee being set up without providing any details. I pursued the matter, as recorded in the Hansard on the 9th July:

Tuan Pua Kiam Wee [Petaling Jaya Utara]: Terima kasih Tuan Yang di-Pertua. Tadi
menteri telah membangkitkan satu Jawatankuasa Pemilihan bagi naib canselor. Saya hendak minta penjelasan sedikit, adakah shortlist yang dibuat oleh jawatankuasa ini akan diberikan daripada kementerian ataupun shortlist akan dicari ataupun disediakan oleh jawatankuasa ini dan apakah kuasa yang diberi kepada jawatankuasa ini?

Adakah ia akan diberikan kuasa supaya dapat membuat advertisement di suratkhabar-
suratkhabar seluruh dunia untuk mencari calon-calon yang terbaik untuk menjadi naib canselor universiti kita? Terima kasih.

Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin: Ia boleh dilakukan melalui kedua-dua cara.
Satu daripada top down daripada kementerian dan satu lagi daripada Select Committee dan dari segi tatacara dan sebagainya, kita belum lagi memikirkan secara mendalam sama ada ingin membuat pengiklanan seluruh dunia dan sebagainya ataupun tidak, kerana semua itu akan mula dilakukan setelah kita buat pindaan kepada Akta Universiti dan Kolej Universiti yang mempunyai ataupun yang akan menyentuh mengenai perkara tersebut.

In short, that means that there's still no authoritative details on how this committee will work, whether there will be strong interference from the Ministry, on the process of recruitment and just about everything else about the selection committee. Its a little unfortunately that despite this committee being talked about since the previous 2 higher education ministers, we still have to wait for the next parliamentary session before we hear new developments.

At the speed the Ministry is moving, its not surprising that our institutions of higher education isn't going to get any better any time soon.

From SPM to Public Uni?

Read this report in the Star a few days ago. About 30,000 SPM and equivalent holders were accepted into the public university system. My question is this - How can we really be sure that a majority of these students are ready to enter university without any pre university foundation (such as STPM or matriculation)?

The 30,000 figure represents about 10% of the total student population in our public universities. Since there have been previous students who have been admitted with just an SPM certificate, the total number of such students might be as high as 20% of the public university system.

While the Higher Education Minister, Khaled Nordin, had emphasized that these students were chosen purely on merit, I have to take his statement with a bit of salt given Malaysia's poor record in choosing students purely based on 'merit', however it is defined.

Is there any reason why these students would be better qualified to go straight from SPM to a public university compared to those who choose to do their STPM or the matriculation program? 30,000 is not a small number. Surely not all of them can be regarded as top scorers i.e. scoring 9As and above. Surely many of the top scorers end up doing STPM and matriculation instead of choosing to apply to go straight into a public university.

If out of a cohort of about 300,000 students who take SPM and about 10% of that cohort goes straight to a public university, wouldn't that strike someone as worrying?

It would be interesting to track these SPM entries to see over a period of time whether they perform better or worse than those who enter with an STPM or matriculation certificate.

My sense is that this number is way too high and that many of these students could have done well with at least one year of a foundation or pre-university course.

I can't help but feel that this is another factor in contributing to the massive decline in the standards of our public universities.

Vice-Chancellor Selection

Finally I had my question on the status of the Universiti Malaya vice-chancellor and the Ministry's selection process answered today in writing by the Ministry of Higher Education.

My question to the Minister was

...bagaimana kedudukan kontrak Naib Canselor Universiti Malaya. Adakah seorang Naib Canselor baru akan dilantik, dan apakah cara pemilihan yang akan digunakan untuk mengenal pasti seorang akademik yang bertaraf "world class" untuk memulihkan mutu pengajian tinggi di Malaysia.

We have already received news blogged here earlier via the media that the UM vice-chancellor's contract has been extended by 6 months to 7th November 2008. Hence, the focus was on the Ministry's reply towards and its ability to shed light on its selection mechanism.

Cara pemilihan Naib Canselor yang dilaksanakan oleh Kementerian ialah membentuk satu Jawatankuasa Semakan/Carian bagi menilai prestasi Naib Canselor berdasarkan petunjuk prestasi utama (KPI) yang ditetapkan.

Sekiranya Jawatankuasa berpuas hati dengan prestasi Naib Canselor sedia ada, maka Jawatankuasa akan mengesyorkan kepada YB Menteri supaya perkhidmatan Naib Canselor sedia ada disambung.

Sekiranya Jawatankuasa tidak berpuas hati, maka proses carian calon-calon yang berkelayakan akan dibuat. Calon-calon tersebut kemudiannya akan ditemuduga dan dinilai berdasarkan kriteria-kriteria tertentu separti nilai dan sikap yang positif, pencapaian akademik, kepimpinan dan pengurusan, pengiktirafan di peringkat tempatan dan antarabangsa, artikulasi visi dan misi, kemahiran komunikasi dan jauga keperibadian yang unggul. Calon-calon yang berjaya akan disyorkan kepada YB Menteri untuk pertimbangan dan persetujuan.

I don't know about you, but I thought it was an answer that was as good as a "no answer".

In other words, the Minister was saying, if the evaluation committee is happy with the vice-chancellor's performance, his or her contract will be renewed, and if not, then a new candidate will be sought according to certain (but unspecified) criteria.

What type of answer is that? Are we more "enlightened" thanks to the highly informative answer given by the Minister?

What criteria is used to evaluate the vice-chancellor? How will the search/evaluation committee be set up? What are the criteria for VC selection? How are the candidates nominated and shortlisted? Will there be worldwide invitation for application? And I could go on and on, especially on how all of the answers to the above questions will priortise on the need for a 'world class' vice-chancellor as the first step towards stopping the continued deterioration of our higher education system.

The reply given by the Minister clearly showed two things.

1. Firstly, he is not serious about the Parliamentary question and answer session for not having given an answer which shed any light on the issues raised.
   
   
2. Secondly and more importantly, the new Minister of Higher Education, Datuk Khaled Nordin is not serious at all about reforms to our higher education system to narrow the quality gap of between our universities with that of those overseas, and clearly do not have the political will to achieve the goal of a world class university.

Having been following these issues relating to the quality of higher education in Malaysia closely for the past 3 years over 3 different Higher Education Ministers, I'd like to express my complete disappointment with the total lack of progress made by the Ministry in reversing the decline of our local universities.

UM VC to be replaced after 6 months?

The writing is on the wall, I think. Although it was reported that the contract of the current UM VC, Rafiah Salim, will be extended by 6 months, it appears likely that she will be replaced after that as the new Minister for Higher Education, Khalid Nordin, has indicated that a search committee will be set up soon to look for a new VC.

I agree with Tony's earlier post on this issue. While Rafiah has been a better VC than her predecessor (Hashim "Billboard" Yaacob), she also has stumbled many times. Tony has listed some of her shortcomings. I have also been very critical of the appointment of Jeffrey Sachs as the first Professor of the Ungku Aziz Chair of Poverty Studies because I saw this as a high profile appointment which was wasteful and produced little returns from a reputational or research standpoint.

Of course, there are others who would disagree with us and I think that some of them have some good points including tempinis, a regular commentator on this blog.

Hopefully, the new search committee will take heed of Tony's advice on this matter which he has written extensively on in the past.

In case anyone is interested, please compare the academic CV of the first Harvard woman president, Drew Gilpin Faust, and that of Rafiah Salim. I know it's an unfair comparison but it's worthwhile to point out that Rafiah served as Dean and Deputy Dean of the law faculty at UM, one of the most prominent faculties in the university with just a Masters degree and that her own UM VC website does not give her CV.

Overseas Graduates Paid More?

The following is a press statement from Jobstreet.com with regards to a study conducted which showed that graduates of overseas universities fair better than local grads in salary scale. I must say, the results didn't come as too much of a surprise, although I'd be keen to obtain the methodology and sample data for further analysis.

But before you read on, please bear in mind that these studies provide the "generalised" results i.e., there are always exceptions. You will find plenty of local graduates who are extremely competent and who may be making a lot of money in wages in contrast to some of the overseas graduates. However, as a whole, that may not be the case.

(Just to also point out that while was I an employer, more than 80% of my employees were hired as fresh graduates, of whom, the overwhelming majority of them were local graduates. While it was tough picking out quality graduates, they were certainly there if you look hard enough.)

Kian Ming has also written his views on the often heated subject of "local vs foreign graduates" here.

Here's the press release from Jobstreet:

In a 2008 study of more than 100,000 JobStreet.com members in Malaysia who hold a Bachelors degree and are currently working in the country, JobStreet.com has observed that graduates from overseas universities on average earn about 12 percent more than local graduates.

The salary gap is most apparent among those with up to five years of work experience.

Overseas graduates are earning a significant 20 percent more than their local counterparts. Even after 10 years or more of work experience, the gap is still more than 10 percent.

In terms of job specialization, the biggest salary gap between overseas and local graduates is in business-related fields such as management, economics, finance and marketing where overseas graduates earn about 15 percent more than local graduates.

In the engineering and IT/Computer fields, salaries are about 11 percent higher for overseas graduates.

In a similar study among 20,000 JobStreet.com members in Singapore, it was observed that there is no significant difference between the salaries of graduates from local Singaporean universities and overseas universities even after 5 or 10 years of work experience.

In conclusion, a Malaysian who graduates from a local Malaysian university earns on average a lower salary than those who graduate from an overseas university. There were no significant difference in salaries that exists among graduates in Singapore.

The final conclusion is equally unsurprising, but its a new angle to look at for it certainly demonstrates the disparity between our local versus Singapore's universities.

World Class Vice-Chancellor Needed for UM

Datuk Rafiah Salim was appointed as the vice-chancellor of Malaysia's premier university, Universiti Malaya for 2 years ago to replace the disgraced Kapten Datuk Professor Dr Hashim Yaacob, to reverse the rapidly failing standards and her contract ends this month.

While not many persons will dispute the fact that she was likely to have been a better vice-chancellor than her predecessor, her performance to date has been at best mediocre.

Under Datuk Rafiah's tenure:

• Universiti Malaya continued to decline in terms of global rankings by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) dropping from 169th in 2005 before she took over, to 192nd in 2006 and 245th in 2007. The university remains unranked in the other respected Top 500 global universities ranking table compiled by Shanghai Jiaotung University.
  
  
• Instead of taking the necessary steps to rectify the declining quality, Datuk Rafiah chose to comfort Malaysians with the fact that UM was ranked 13th among nations belonging to the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC).
  
  
• She also hauled up a university academic after he wrote an article that criticised the nature in which the university student elections was held which appeared in a local daily last year. He was ‘advised’ by the vice-chancellor not to write on matters related to the university, clearly perpetuating the limited room for critical thought and constructive dissent within our academic institutions. Despite that, Datuk Rafiah had the temerity of suggesting that "public university students had the freedom to express their thoughts and ideas" at a student forum held in August last year.

Therefore, I call upon the new Minister of Higher Education, Datuk Khaled Nordin to take the all important step that no other ministers had the courage to do - open the search for a new vice-chancellor for Universiti Malaya, not only to all Malaysians, regardless of race or religion, but also for all qualified top academics around the world in order to revive the fortunes of our premier university.

The Higher Education Ministry needs to:

1. Establish the independence of the search and evaluation committee to ensure that the only criteria used for selection is the candidates' ability to improve the quality and standard of education at the relevant university, and not instead, the candidates' political links or connections.
   
   
2. The quality of the committee members should be improved over time with greater emphasis on prominent and high-achieving academics. There's no reason why foreign “world class” academics could not be appointed to identify quality academics with sufficient intellectual prowess and administrative experience to lead our local universities.
   
   
3. The shortlist of candidates should not be provided by the Ministry of Higher Education. We should not limit the candidates to civil servants who rose up the ranks or the deputy vice-chancellors who are part of the current malaise. The shortlist should instead be derived from the applications which are sourced from advertisements made globally in search for the best available candidate.

Only when a world-class academic cum administrator is selected to lead and given the free hand to reform and transform our universities, who won't be shackled by denial syndromes and political interference, then we can reverse the fortunes of the declining standards at our local institutions of higher learning.

And only when the standards of our institutions are raised, will we be able to provide the best quality education to our future generation, without which they will not be able to achieve their full potential. Correspondingly, Malaysia's ability to compete and progress in the competitive global environment would otherwise be impaired.

The end of Datuk Rafiah Salim's tenure provides the new Higher Education Minister the golden opportunity to execute what's best for Malaysia's future.

Saudi University Appoints Singaporean President

This blogger has been preaching that Malaysian universities, to achieve any form of "greatness" has to first start by recognising that we need world-class leaders (as opposed to jaguh kampungs labelled as "world-class").

I've called not only for local vice-chancellor position to be "opened" up to competition from non-bumiputeras, but also to widen our search for talent globally. Only then, can our academia take their blinkers off, increase competitiveness and see the chasm separating our local institutions from top-notch colleges.

Well, Saudi Arabia's brand new university has already taken such a step. The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust) has appointed its first President, and gasps, Mr Shih Choon Fong, who is currently the President of National University of Singapore. As reported by The Chronicle (news on Higher Education):

Mr. Shih, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and is a former professor of engineering at Brown University, has also led a research group for the General Electric Company and has served as a consultant for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He is the author of almost 150 scholarly publications, making him among the world’s most highly cited engineering researchers, according to the Institute for Scientific Information, and he has received numerous awards.

As far as I'm aware, Mr Shih is certainly not an Arab, neither is he a Muslim and he probably doesn't speak much Arabic, if at all. However, Saudi Arabia, a country which Malaysia often seeks to emulate in many ways, has boldly taken the step that for the university to have a chance of reaching greatness, besides spending billions in funds, you need world-class leadership.

And Mr Shih certainly started on the right note, emphasizing strictly on "outstanding ability.

“This community will be international, encompassing people from all faiths, from all over the world,” he said. “This openness to talented individuals of outstanding ability will be the hallmark of this new university and the best guarantee it offers for achieving its remarkable goals.”

And certainly the Saudi authorities accepts, unlike our local Malaysian counterparts, that we have much to learn the world's top universities, some of which are just right across the border.

Kaust hopes that Mr. Shih can replicate in Saudi Arabia his experience in Singapore, where he was able to transform the National University into one of the world’s top 50 universities by building global networks for the university and links between academe and industry. His support for commercially lucrative research and his work with the Singaporean government on economic development will be helpful in accomplishing one of the new university’s stated goals of helping to diversify the Saudi economy away from dependence on oil revenue, as well as creating new jobs for the 30 percent of Saudi young people who are currently unemployed.

Hence the million dollar question is whether the Ministry of Higher Education in Malaysia can summon the necessary political courage to do the same for the local higher education system or will it choose to ignore international academic leadership which can bring real positive changes in place of a parochial race and nationality pride.

Or will it choose to establish another new university with much fanfare, a la Malaysia University of Science & Technology (MUST), and burn away another RM100 million?

Thanks to Ron for the heads up ;-)