By Samantha Joseph
Malaysia’s large pool of private institutions have become a cause for concern, especially in terms of quality, student welfare, and employability. While these institutions are necessary and some provide top-notch education, what are the forces at work behind the rest of the horde remaining open to the public?
______________________________________________________________________
Malaysia is currently home to 484 private higher education institutions (PHEI), not including 20 public universities. This may seem like a case of the more the merrier, but it is in actual fact a case of quantity over quality. The argument that Malaysia needs more higher education institutions to achieve its goal of an education hub is doubtful.
The United Kingdom has, as of 2009-2010, 165 higher education institutions. Malaysia has a population of 28 million. The UK? 63 million.
But having posited itself as an education hub, wouldn’t Malaysia need a greater amount of infrastructure to support the greater number of students, especially those from overseas? The numbers, though, don’t seem to add up.
Even if we were to take the number of students alone, the UK has far more students, but far less universities. The 2011/2012 numbers put the number of non-UK domicile students at 435,235, and the total number of students at 2,496,645.
Malaysia is home to 935, 231 students according to the 2011 students statistics report, and the Education Malaysia Global Service maintains that the number of foreign students in Malaysia is an estimated 100,000.
If the UK is too unfair a comparison, our neighbour Thailand with its population of 66 million has only 169 institutions as reported by the Ministry of Education, Thailand website.
Malaysia is trying to play catch-up with countries like the US, the UK and Australia who are the top three destinations for international students to pursue a tertiary education, but is it focusing on the most productive aspects of the industry to lure students in? And who exactly benefits from the bloated number of PHEIs?
Twenty years ago, in 1992, there were only 156 private higher education institutions. What happened then?
A little bit of history
The current state of the industry is described by analysts as ‘highly competitive’ and by economists as ‘oversaturated’, and there seems little to inspire many of the smaller, unrecognised colleges beyond collecting student fees, but at one point in time, private higher learning institutions were few and far between.
The higher education industry in the 70s were monopolised by public HEIs. In his paper Privatization Of Higher Education In Malaysia, Professor G Sivalingam of Monash University notes that there was even considerable public resistance to the establishment of private universities.
Some institutions, like KDU, Sunway and Taylor’s have been around for decades, when the industry was first opening up and moving away from the perception that it mainly serviced ‘dropouts’ from secondary school up to a certification level.
In the 1980s and 1990s, these institutions that acted as tuition centres for overseas qualifications and offered twinning programmes fulfilled a need, and market considerations were different.
One of the main market considerations, according to an economist who has worked in both the private and public education fields, was the increase of middle-class non-bumiputras who could not find placement in the limited seats of the quota-straightened public universities.
“It began in the 1990s, when the government encouraged the growth to take off the political pressure from non-Malays who were unhappy that they were not getting places in public universities,” an industry insider with experience in both public and private institutions observed.
“These people couldn’t afford to go overseas. So the government found this was a means of reducing the political tension and allowed these colleges to grow.”
The image of the environment at the time is supported by those who were involved in starting up institutions.
Teh Geok Lian
“KDU was set up in the early 80s, when many young Malaysians were finding it difficult to get into public universities given the limited number of spaces available,” Teh Geok Lian, chief executive officer of Paramount Education Division, said in an email to KiniBiz.
“At the same time, some Malaysians studying overseas were finding it difficult to meet their fee obligations as exchange rates were spiralling; many of them came home to continue their studies through twinning programmes.”
In 1996, the government introduced the Private Higher Educational Institutions Act to liberalise the education industry in Malaysia.
As Professor Sivalingam noted, “The impetus for the privatisation of higher education came after the 1985-1986 economic crisis, which placed limits on the expansion of the public provision of higher education.
The privatisation of higher education was to facilitate educational reform to produce quality graduates that could transform Malaysia from an agrarian economy to an industrialised and knowledge based economy by 2020 for the primary purpose of enhancing the competitiveness of the Malaysian economy.”
Simply supply and demand
We can look to the public higher education system to see what the government’s stance on education is, and it is irrevocably that the role of education is for the public good.
“Higher education in Malaysia has since independence in 1957 been treated as a global public good because of the positive externalities associated with its provision,” Professor Sivalingam reported.
The entire system is based on what is (certainly questionably) best for the country. Malaysian students are assigned their programmes not based on their preferences, but instead based on a system that allocates the better students majors that enable them to provide a greater contribution to society eg engineering and medical studies. Even the much-reviled (official and unofficial) quota system that prioritise certain ethnic groups in hopes that giving them an education will help them succeed serve to underline the fact that education is seen as the stairway to social improvement.
Does the private sector work along those same lines?
In a paper Public and private provision of higher education in Malaysia: A comparative analysis published in 2005, Ishak Yussof and Roy Wilkinson posited a theoretical economic model for private higher education suppliers in comparison with the public sector. This theory essentially says that the most profitable will succeed; the supply-and-demand model. This is the theory guiding most businesses.
“The most profitable products will be those where scale economics are achieved at relatively low levels of output and low levels of capex, the incentive to achieve scale economies will lead to higher ratios of students to staff, and the attempts to economise on capital and labour inputs will result in lower quality products,” they predicted.
“These factors collectively are likely to result in there being substantial differences in the nature and quality of the private compared with the public provision of education.
Whether or not, this private provision is inferior or superior will depend the nature of demand. In the case of specialist, niche demands the quality is likely to be superior to that supplied by a non-specialist. In the case of general demand, the opposite is likely to be the case,” the paper stated.
This does not mean that every PHEI should be tarred with the same brush, nor should it mean that PHEIs are simply out to get profits without concern for their students. The issue here is the monetisation, or commoditisation, of the education industry that has some institutions jumping on the bandwagon, inspired solely by collecting fees either through students or through the National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN).
The further issue is the perception that Malaysian institutions, especially the smaller colleges that make up a large majority of the numbers, are lacking in quality but are still allowed to function due to lack of control from the Malaysian Quality Association or the Ministry of Education, and the influence of politically-connected individuals from among the ranks of PHEI shareholders.
Tomorrow: The business of private education.
You must be logged in to post a comment.