An article in The Star entitled “Ties with China enter new level” on the 23rd of January seems to have brought quite some hope for Malaysia’s economy considering the strong ties with China.  However, a portion of the article got most of my attention:

Ong also hopes to create another unprecedented move – to get a top Chinese university to set up a branch campus in Johor.

The Australians and British have set up branch campuses in Malaysia but a top Chinese branch campus in Malaysia would be the first in the world.

“We are also working with the Hong Kong Polytechnic University which has offered scholarships and internships to Malaysians so they can have exposure to China,” he adds.

This few paragraphs indeed got me thinking about the quality of education and universities in Malaysia.  First of all, Malaysia started bringing in Universities from United Kingdom and Australia some decade or so back.  At that point in time, it does makes sense since British universities such as Nottingham have a long history and been established among the top in the world.  Afterall, many of our leaders graduated from the United Kingdom (Malaysia was once a British colony, that explains why).  In addition to that, universities like Monash and Curtin also made their way into Malaysia; both have a history of 51 years and 23 years respectively as of today (both much “younger” than UM, USM, UKM.  They were then brought in to further enhance Malaysia’s image as an education hub due to their strong research, branding and ranking.

Many years down the road - today, we have not seen how these foreign universities contribute to Malaysia being an education hub.  Yes, I agree that it became a low cost destination for British or Australian degrees (our private colleges could do that anyway).  However, Nottingham has also opened a branch campus in Ningbo, China.

Being an education hub, our government targets to increase the number of foreign students in Malaysia.  Let’s not dream of having a whole load of students from UK, US, Australia or even neighbouring Singapore.  It is a fact that anybody can see by walking in our private colleges that most of our foreign students are either from China, or other third world country.  Now if that’s the case, does it make sense to bring in a university from China?  Who are the target students?  Wouldn’t students from China prefer to study in their homeland if it was going to be the same university?  Would any students from UM want to study in University Malaya, Indonesia Campus for example?

I guess what the government should focus on is to build strategic tie-ups or professor exchange programmes between the local universities and the foreign universities.  It’s only with these initiatives that our lecturers can get better exposure and the “Made in Malaysia Universities” can begin to grow.  I’m sure Malaysia wouldn’t want to be an education hub for non-Malaysia universities, does it?  Think about GDP vs. GNP and it explains why merely being a hub for non-Malaysian universities doesn’t make sense.  If it does, Malaysia would rather be a hub to make all foreign cars rather than developing Proton.  Isn’t that the same logic?

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Tags: Campus, China, education, foreign, Universities

This entry was posted by Clayton J.C Tan on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Economy, Malaysian Education, Malaysian Politics, Youth Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.