Has Our Higher Education System “Gone to the Dogs”?

Malaysia’s tertiary education was the envy of many countries in the 60s and 70s. With Mahathir as Education Minister and then Prime Minister, quality has been turned into quantity. That policy also stems from affirmative action. Mediocrity overrules meritocracy.

It was with pride that a son or daughter was able to make it to University Malaya (in the 60s and 70s). Those who couldn’t had to go to the U.K., U.S., Singapore, Taiwan or India. Today it is the other way around. An overseas degree is more valuable than the local one.

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Ranjit Singh Malhi, an educationist wrote a good article on the state of our higher education. The quality of lecturers, professors and students are low. An investment of RM14.5 billion (higher education budget for 2022) is simply chasing “good money after bad education”. Graduates are produced in the container loads, PhDs graduating from one university in one year is in three digits and articles published reflect the low quality of teaching. We lag behind Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore by 2-4 times in the number of articles published in the arts and humanities area. A handful of scholars in the sciences are in cutting-edge research. That’s the view of an academic, namely Sharifah Munirah Alatas.

Many of the articles and thesis are bordering on comedy as far as expression is concerned. And it is this “tidak apa” attitude that encourages it. How will these degrees (or graduates) be recognised overseas?

There was a time when we wanted to be an education hub. There was great fanfare and many students from African states turned up under Mahathir’s South-South initiatives. Today they have gone, because they too have realised that this (the degree) is just “form over substance”.

Many university students don’t have the critical thinking or writing skills in English or Malay. So, we get civil servants who utter nonsense about tigers will breed more with deforestation! Sloppy thinking, sloppy writing end up with sloppy policies.

Are the private universities in Malaysia any better? No! They suffer from commercialism. Students will tell lecturers their salaries are paid by them and they need the pass mark or a distinction because it is their fees that sustain the university. Many lecturers are pressured by their Deans or Heads of School to compromise. And these students come to the marketplace expecting similar handouts or “spoon-feeding” to move up the corporate ladder. In one seminar I did, the participants wanted only the “model” answers to the problems they faced at work. Why? Because that was how they passed SPM, STPM and the degree programme!

God help Malaysia!

Reference:

Has our higher education been mutilated? Ranjit Singh Malhi, Malaysiakini.com, 27 Jan 2022