The government needs to realise that throwing more money at the current system and seeking band-aid fixes without fundamental reforms is unlikely to get any meaningful impact, says Wandering Malaysian.
What would it take for a Malaysian university to be among the top 100 universities in Asia?
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings compares university performance across their core missions – teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook – using 13 performance indicators.
There is no Malaysian university in the top 100 in Asia compared with two universities from Singapore and surprisingly two from Thailand.
What is preventing our universities from being globally competitive? Surely, it is not the shortage of resources: Malaysian public universities received almost 25 per cent of the total expenditure on education and training (about RM12bn in 2013).
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Yet surveys show that more than 25 per cent of university graduates in 2012 had not secured a job six months after graduation. At the same time, Malaysian employers are lamenting a shortage of talent as a major constraint in growing their business.
There is evidently a mismatch between what the local universities are producing and what the labour market needs, leading to underemployment and frustration amongst university graduates. Many of them turn to the public sector for employment which means that the public sector is not attracting the best and brightest talent.
Then there are the over 56,000 Malaysian students studying in foreign universities, many of whom are likely to be excellent students and a number of whom are also sponsored through government scholarships. There are no publicly available tracer studies on the career prospects of these students and their competitiveness in the labour market compared to the graduates of Malaysian universities. (One can however speculate that the former are likely to be more competitive.)
Access to university education for young Malaysians is unequal and largely influenced by household income: while 40 per cent of young adults from the top quintile of Malaysians (by household income) have a university degree, only 5 per cent from the bottom 60 per cent have a degree.
The challenge for Malaysia, therefore, is both to expand opportunities for all Malaysians to have a university education and to improve the quality and relevance of university education. There are obvious areas for improvement focusing on creating a more meritocratic and open culture in universities.
This requires a fundamental reform of the university system starting with the Ministry of Higher Education.
But that may be too ambitious an undertaking, and it may be more pragmatic to focus efforts on one university as a pilot. This would require revamping the university leadership, recruiting and rewarding the best academics and researchers irrespective of their origin or ethnicity, selecting the best qualified students and establishing a culture of excellence in research and teaching, learning from the best experiences in the world.
Above all, the government needs to realise that throwing more money at the current system and seeking band aid fixes without fundamental reforms is unlikely to get any lasting or meaningful impact.
Source: wanderingmalaysian.blogspot.my
AGENDA RAKYAT - Lima perkara utama
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
World class university My Foot better demolished all uni b cos u all malu d rakyat none in top ranking Cannot speak a sentence in inglish Waste of rakyats money S’pore so near go there