Malaysia’s blueprint for the ideal university

 

From Wan Chang Da

The higher education blueprint is an accidental document.

Several months after the launch of the school blueprint on Sept 12, 2012, the higher education ministry was merged with the education ministry.

Drafted to mirror the school blueprint, the higher education blueprint has a similar set of systems and student aspirations, but with 10 instead of 11 shifts.

The first objective is to prepare Malaysian youth to thrive in the ever-changing future by placing the needs and interests of learners at the heart of the system through a commitment to equitable access and high quality education of international standards.

The second objective is to promote institutional excellence through various experimentations in funding, governance models, RDCI (research, development, commercialisation, and innovation) ecosystems, online learning, and institutional performance management and delivery.

Objectives more structured, but unclear

On one hand, the national survey of the higher education ministry seems to be more structured, as compared to the one by the education ministry. However, the national survey is rather disjointed and misaligned with the existing higher education blueprint.

Almost half of the survey is dedicated to questions about technical and vocational education and training (TVET). There is no deliberate attempt to differentiate between the nuances of tertiary education, especially for higher education, technical education, vocational education, and skills development, as well as lifelong and life-wide learning.

Yet these subtle nuances have vast importance, as the guiding principles for a higher education blueprint are expectedly different from TVET and other parts of tertiary education which will have implications for implementation across universities and colleges.

What the public needs to know

Asking respondents whether they have read the higher education blueprint and how well they know the document, published a decade ago, is a good gauge of how well-informed the person making the suggestion is.

But the public has not been systematically informed of the measures and progress of the blueprint, and may not be able to make informed assessments of the overall progress or specific developments of individual shifts in the current blueprint.

The public also needs to know the impact of the higher education blueprint since its implementation in 2015. Unlike the education ministry’s annual report published by the Education Performance and Delivery Unit, there has been no public reference to the implementation or performance of the higher education blueprint.

To the public, regular updates about higher education are none other than the announcements of university rankings.

Are university rankings the measure of quality in the higher education blueprint? Although the blueprint has fewer tangible outcomes than the National Higher Education Strategic Plan 2007-2020, it still has several measurable targets.

For instance, under the shift to gain global prominence, Malaysian higher education institutions are expected to enrol 200,000 and 250,000 international students by 2020 and 2025 respectively.

When the higher education blueprint was crafted in 2014, there were 107,838 international students. However, according to the ministry’s statistics, the number of international students increased to its peak in 2017 with 131,514 students and dropped to 93,569 in 2019.

By 2020, there were 95,954 students enrolled. The most recent update was 114,765 in 2023. Clearly, we are not on track to achieving the 200,000 international student target for 2020, let alone the 2025 target of 250,000 students.

What about the intangible outcomes? To what extent have universities produced graduates who are holistic, entrepreneurial and balanced?

Presumably, this outcome extends beyond the simplistic data captured by the annual Graduate Tracer Study, where student whereabouts were tracked and reported six months after their graduation.

Do we know who graduated from our system within the last decade, how they are doing in their career journey, and the dual impact on the student’s life as well as the nation’s progress?

An introspective view and clear goal

The two suggestions made in the first article are equally applicable to the current attempt of the higher education ministry at crowdsourcing ideas for the next blueprint.

First, a comprehensive update on the progress and performance of the higher education system is important to provide the context for the public and stakeholders to provide feedback and suggestions.

There have been at least two reviews undertaken specifically on the higher education blueprint, and at least two committees tasked with reviewing the state of education and higher education policy in the last decade. Is it a good time to make public the findings and recommendations of these reviews?

Second, the Falsafah Pendidikan Kebangsaan is a grand vision of education that must be extended to higher education in developing the potential of Malaysians holistically and in an integrated manner.

Employability, job preparation and skills and competencies development are, at best, mere by-products of higher education. Instead, the purpose of higher education should be grounded in humanity, citizenry, and the inculcation of the capability to learn.

The following recommendations also merit further consideration.

One, the nature of higher education institutions, particularly universities, is essentially different from that of schools or vocational/technical institutions. A university is far more than a learning centre, research institute, job-training workshop, or transition platform between school and the world of work.

Fundamentally, a university is the embodiment of 

knowledge

 in our society, therefore a higher education blueprint must be drafted in cognisance of the very nature and purpose of universities.

Two, in architectural terms, we can expect that the blueprint for a house will be different from one for a prison. Yet in the current blueprint, the higher education ministry acknowledged that it assumed the role of a tight controller and rightfully envisioned that it would be transformed into a regulator and custodian of public accountability.

Hand-in-hand with the ideal role of the ministry, each university should understand its unique purpose and role in the system with the autonomy to self-govern, select the talents required, and put in place strategic processes based on the resources available.

Have we achieved this ideal state? If we have not, should we restore genuine institutional autonomy by letting universities and higher education institutions chart their own paths, or produce yet another top-down, ministry-controlled, and decade-long blueprint that may go obsolete? - FMT

Wan Chang Da is a former National Higher Education Research Institute director.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.