COMMENT | Local universities ranked well, but are they delivering excellence?
COMMENT | A well-structured and quality-driven higher education system is a critical public-private good and a key ingredient in Malaysia’s pursuit to develop an inclusive, highly skilled and talented human capital supply to drive its knowledge-based, high-tech, and innovative economy.
Moreover, an inclusive and diverse higher education system with a free flow of ideas can contribute to the country’s democratic, economic, social, and cultural progress.
It is crucial, therefore...
COMMENT | A well-structured and quality-driven higher education system is a critical public-private good and a key ingredient in Malaysia’s pursuit to develop an inclusive, highly skilled and talented human capital supply to drive its knowledge-based, high-tech, and innovative economy.
Moreover, an inclusive and diverse higher education system with a free flow of ideas can contribute to the country’s democratic, economic, social, and cultural progress.
It is crucial, therefore, for Malaysia to generate a high-quality higher education strategy to achieve its ambitious but thus far elusive Vision-2020 - to produce a “fully-developed”, high-income, democratically just and equitable nation.
Are Malaysia’s numerous public-private universities and tertiary institutions modelled to achieve such long-cherished national goals? More importantly, do they provide the critical mass of skilled and talented manpower demanded by the country’s fast-growing knowledge and technology-intensive industries?
Are they producing a workforce with intercultural competency to network in the global economic marketplace? The answer appears to be negative, as Malaysia has for a long time faced a supply and demand mismatch in the employability of its graduates.
Over the years, Malaysia’s mismatch of its graduates in the labour market has been highlighted by the Malaysian Employers’ Federation (MEF) and others.
MEF continues to point out “the inability of the country’s ill-prepared graduates to meet the rapid advances of the Industrial Revolution (IR) 4.0 challenges”. A decade ago, the BN government’s landmark “New Economic Model for Malaysia - Part 1” highlighted that the “human capital situation in Malaysia was not improving as the education system was not producing the skills demanded by firms.
Skills shortage, together with complaints about inadequate creativity and English proficiency, consistently rank high among the top obstacles faced by firms according to studies on Malaysia’s investment climate.”
An alarming corollary to this is the persistent mismatch between the employment aspirations of Malaysian graduates and the reality of their unemployability.
In all probability, most of the unemployable graduates are from disadvantaged backgrounds or are first-generation university goers with student loans to repay. Without well-paying jobs commensurate with their qualifications, they can be forced into a debt trap and become a precariat class for the rest of their lives.
The National Graduate Employability Blueprint, 2012-2017 highlighted that over 50 percent of graduates were below par in terms of competency in their subject knowledge, languages (English in particular), communication and writing skills, and work attitude.
In 2020, the Higher Education Ministry highlighted that one in five or 116,161 fresh graduates are struggling with unemployment and the reasons given are similar to the ones outlined by the National Graduate Employability Blueprint nearly a decade ago.
The reasons are mainly the lack of technical and soft skills, digital skills, demand for unrealistic salary and benefits and poor attitude to work.
The government over the past two decades, at high cost to the public purse, has instituted several reskilling programmes for fresh graduates to secure jobs.
This perennial problem seems to persist in spite of Malaysia’s expenditure on education, which, including higher education, has consistently been one of the highest in the region except for the oil-rich state of Brunei.
Despite the failure of Malaysia’s universities to consistently meet the critical high-quality human capital needs and employability of its graduates, there is still a huge sense of euphoria among the country’s political leadership, policymakers, the bureaucracy, the university administrations and the mass media, that the country’s public universities are progressively achieving higher ranking in the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World Ranking System.
Therefore, it was not surprising that the CEO of the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) in a letter to the New Straits Times of Nov 12, 2021 stated that ”The quality of our higher education is at an excellent level as all local research universities are in the top 40 in Asia.
The ranking by Quacquarelli Symonds: Asia 2022 are based on several criteria, including high-impact journal production, research, academic reputation and marketability of graduates.”
The CEO further reiterated that “When the quality of higher education is good at the global level, it will attract students to study here, in line with the Higher Education Ministry’s target to attract 250,000 international students.”
Just how accurate are rankings?
Though rankings have developed a life of their own across the global higher education system, the question to pause and consider is - do their several key measurement criteria foster in an equitable, objective and precise way, what they claim to reflect?
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), widely known as the Shanghai Ranking was established in 2003. In 2004, The Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) joined forces to establish the QS-THE Ranking, but in 2009 they parted ways to establish separate ranking systems.
Currently, the ARWU, THE and QS are widely accepted as the “Big Three” World University Ranking Systems. These “Big Three” (research biased) ranking systems are here to stay, though they are plagued with questionable methodology, arbitrary definitions, the homogenisation of education systems across the world, thus creating a nebulous global notion of “academic excellence”.
Considerable criticism has been levelled against the Asian QS World Ranking for placing too high a weightage (30 percent) of the overall score on an opinion survey referred to as the Academic Peer Review (a value judgement). Most importantly, ranking provides us an aggregate assessment of the whole institution and there are inherent flaws and biases in the data collected.
Apart from this, the emphasis is on research and publication and not on the quality and performance of the institution as a whole. Further, the usage of a concept of “one-size-fits-all” to indicate the ranking of all institutions, despite the differences in their mission, goals and environment, provides a rather distorted interpretation of rankings.
The belief in this imprecise concept of “academic excellence” has made a huge impact on the country’s political leadership, policymakers, university administrators and the population at large.
Much more importantly, ranking has come to play a significant role in the decision-making of students and their parents. Parents want to choose the best-ranked university for their children, despite the fact that ranking does not provide them with reliable information about their wellbeing, learning or future job opportunities or security, their earning potentials and employment satisfaction.
Countless politicians, policymakers and academic studies still continue to tell people and, in particular, parents that university degrees and credentials will enable their children to earn more than those without degrees, despite an erosion of well-paid jobs with security in the graduate labour market.
The blind faith in this repeated rhetoric continues to make parents want to send their children for a university degree education, whether they have the ability to benefit from it or not, largely because a degree from a ranked university can be a magic gateway to a “better” job.
Thus, many are willing to pay, in most instances through student loans, to have the opportunity to get degrees from one of these imprecisely ranked universities.
Nevertheless, it is without doubt that ranking does not determine excellence.
Malaysia’s priority should be on the development of an inclusive and quality higher education provision that is capable of driving a vibrant pool of talented human capital to meet the rising challenges of IR 4.0 and its need for knowledge-intensive industries. Such a strategy would also enhance Malaysia's role as a regional education hub.
The drive should not be to chase ratings but to produce the right mix of human talents combined with an inclusive national knowledge-intensive industrial policy in order for the country’s firms to move forward to be competitive in the global marketplace, create new high-paid jobs for the growing graduate population and achieve developed nation status.
In this regard, Malaysia still has a long way to go, and also has to overcome the challenges of the ongoing, unanticipated Covid-19 pandemic.
V SELVARATNAM is a former lecturer at Universiti Malaya and the National University of Singapore. He was also a higher education specialist at the World Bank.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.
