PRIVATE EDUCATION IN MALAYSIA: ARE WE RISING TO OUR IDEALS?

1. Introduction

Academics who have worked and seen the growth of universities in Malaysia will readily subscribe to the view that our higher education has rapidly become subject to the marketplace in the last decade. Professors and other academics on the campuses of public universities often harbour different views to this relatively new trend. Some deplore it saying with distaste that their teaching services are now arranged in return for payment; a mere process whereby students come to obtain credentials for employment purposes. The academic researchers lament that their research funding now are predominantly made available only in view of immediate serviceable outcome or tangible product; rather than driven by intellectual curiosity regardless of where it leads. On the other hand, the private higher education providers and the marketplace however applaud this trend. Private colleges and universities see themselves contributing not only in the training of more qualified and skilled human resource for the country but also in the quest of new knowledge. It is this later aspiration that often comes under close scrutiny. Is it true that private institutions of higher learning (IHL) in Malaysia today are helping to meet our future demand for human capital that is so required to propel the nation to achieve its fully developed status by 2020? Are they meaningfully helping the government in forging a new future?

2. The Rationale and Process

It is a truism that provision of higher education has been predominantly a public sector responsibility. But the rapidly changing economic environment, technological advancement and social demands have thrown the providers of higher education into a state of introspection. The public universities, their roles to the society, governance, accountability, finance and indeed the education they provide itself, have been under increasing scrutiny.

Among the pressure points acutely felt by public universities in Malaysia in the last decade or so are calls for them to be more diverse, creative, innovative and more efficient. They were challenged to respond, manage and adapt to changes and realities of the 21^st century effectively for survival and growth. One way to bring about that change is to remove the barriers to the establishment of private universities. In Malaysia, reforms of the policies that aim at removing these barriers have been proceeding to allow active participation of the private sector in the provision of higher education. Privatization of IHL in Malaysia was seen as the panacea to the ever-increasing demand for higher education, the high costs of its provision and the dearth of quality graduates with knowledge and skills that can propel Malaysia into international economic competitiveness.

Privatization in reference to higher education is a new phenomenon not only in the Malaysian context but also the world economy. Operationally, privatization connotes a greater orientation to the student as a consumer and the concept of college education, encompassing its courses, research outputs and consultancy services, as products of the university. Taking foot as the norms in the running of private enterprises, these universities will give increasing attention to image building, competitor institutions and market niches, pricing and enhancement of net earned revenue. Essentially privatization is a process or tendency of institutions of higher learning to assume the characteristics of private enterprises; only with respect to operational norms but not functional. Hence a private university or college is still required to fulfill the established roles and obligations expected of any public institution of higher learning.

3. The Ideals and Trends

Inevitably the process of university privatization will follow a distinct pattern that can be characterized by three production scenarios; (i) massification of education, (ii) marketization of education and learning and (iii) managerialization of knowledge.

3.1 Massification of education

The production of goods or services in large quantities is called massification. Often the use and practices of specialization and standardization become essential components of such production. Thus massification of education is the employment of the instruments of mass production for the development and distribution of knowledge and learning. With the rapid advancement in the communication and information technologies today, distance education and online learning are exploited to make university education more affordable and the process of teaching and learning more efficient.

3.2 Marketization of education and learning

Marketization is the treatment of education and learning as a commodity, to be packaged, displayed and selected for consumption by a paying public. Clearly in the private enterprises, the market is the most efficient way to distribute a resource. Thus marketization or commoditization of education is seen as an effort to improve education.

3.3.Managerialization of knowledge

Managerialization is the process whereby the production and distribution of knowledge is taken over by a team of non-academic managers. Essentially the professors and academic personnel who have the expertise to develop the products of education relinquish some control over the production and distribution of knowledge to purely managers who know little if at all about the subject in question or learning materials for educational delivery.

4. Reality Check and Outcome

In recent years, much rethinking and reengineering have been put in place to make tertiary education in Malaysia more committed and able to rise to the challenges og globalization. How has privatization of higher education fared in terms of governance, pedagogical inputs, student output, research productivity, efficiency and equity considerations? Let us critically consider some of the obstacles and outcomes that have emerged since the process was put into motion slightly more than ten years ago.

4.1. Affordability and Democratization

Critics of massification of education are quick to see this as a disaster. They point to the segmentation of the learning process into neatly standardized classes, each of which teaches a certain subject, through which the students progress year by year, tier by tier, as though on an assembly line. In practice, they further argue, teaching will cease to be the toil and craftsmanship of an individual. A professor will no longer be challenged with the opportunity to provide and custom fit lectures to fit a small group of students assembled before him.

While university professors assert that the only form of teaching must be via face-to-face mode of delivery or in-person lecture, the proponents of massification of education highlight the continual frustration to society as a whole in the challenge of providing a university-level education to the majority of the population. Obviously teaching and learning must evolve to reach everyone and not only the favoured few with the time and money to spend attending university lectures.

4.2. Choices and Relevance

Indeed the number of private IHL in Malaysia today has increased by many-folds in the last eight years reaching a staggering 669 colleges and universities in total. Our attempt at democratizing higher education accompanied with the challenges of shifting the role of university from educating an elite to educating the greater population seems to have clearly taken a fast-tract mode and probably emerge triumphantly as another one of many Malaysia’s success stories. But are these private colleges and universities helping to meet our future demand for human capital that is so required to propel Malaysia to achieve its fully developed status by 2020? The euphoria may be short-lived when we consider the direction of growth of these private IHL with respect to the nature of study programmes and fields of specialization they are offering to the greater population.

Unlike the Industrial Master Plan (IMP) which was aimed at enhancing the growth of the manufacturing sector, Malaysia’s second IMP or IMP2 covering the period of 1996 to 2005 has set its focus on increasing competitiveness through strengthening industrial linkages, enhancing value-added activities and increasing productivity. The emphasis here is the inevitable shift from the labour-intensive to a knowledge intensive hi-tech industries. To support a sustainable industrialization programme, it was duely recognized that the quantity and quality of science and technology is of utmost importance. High technology and knowledge-based industrial activities demand an adequate pool of highly-skilled research scientists and engineers with post-graduate education. We need people who are able to understand, assimilate, adapt, innovate and develop new technologies. With the rapid growth of information and communication technologies in every aspect of industrial activities today, the need for high levels of science and technology personnel has become greater than ever before. Yet Malaysia faces an ever-increasing shortages of skills that its industry needs for technology deepening. Compared to our neighbour Singapore that has 4000 scientists per million population, we have a mere 350. The underlying reasons for this are numerous which sadly include the lack of coherence in our education system that fails to take into cognizance both the societal relevance and industrial needs. There is a need to reinforce the importance and relevance of both the scientific and technological values in our education policies.

But how far have our mushrooming private IHL taken this requisite as their imperatives in running their daily business? Advanced courses in science-based courses such as information technology, engineering and medicine are often made available through twinning with universities overseas. This possibly is the logical path taken to avoid huge capital investment by the local partners in having to provide expensive research facilities and laboratories required for education and training of research scientists and engineers. Unfortunately, such arrangement will still put a high price tag on the course fees and thus not widely sought after by poorer students. Regardless, in their desperate bid to equip themselves with the ultimate paper qualifications, students often opted for cheaper non-technical courses such as business studies, economics, management and hospitality programmes. If left unimpeded, such a trend can only achieve in widening instead of bridging the gap between the pool of science-based and non-science based human capital for future Malaysia.

4.3. Economy and Governance

Crisis of resources, encompassing issues on resource optimization, financing and accountability, often preoccupies Malaysia’s universities in the past decade. To effectively deal with questions of resource optimization and financing, privatization of university education may help alleviate certain specific problems. An important factor that makes this issue so pressing is the dramatic increase in enrollment numbers at our public universities rendering them less able to cope with a demographic bulge due to scarce resources.

Privatization also suggests the adoption of economic management practices associated with private business, such as aggressive marketing, contracting out and outsourcing of non-academic services, productive labor relations and minimization of payroll expenditures. Decisive decision-making and “top down’ management will inevitably set in. Each academic program, department or school will also serve as a business unit that can contribute to profitability. Widespread use of audits and accountability measures will help justify the expenditure often deemed unnecessarily excessive in furthering the cause of higher education. More often than not, defenders of public universities find themselves on the same side with advocates of university privatization when considering potential benefits to be derived from top-down management, lessening public bureaucracy, financial transparency and accountability, increased flexibility for faculty entrepreneurship and wealth creation.

Proponents of managerialization of knowledge resulting from privatizing education further claim that teams of people working in unison will be able to manage educational attainment far beyond that of any individual professor. No professor has the expertise nor the time to professionally provide all aspects of educational delivery. Unless professors work as part of top-flight educational teams, their achievements will be eclipsed over time by teams of skilled professionals producing top-flight educational materials.

4.4. A corporate sell-out through marketization?

Debated far and wide has been the trend toward the commoditization of education or universities. By allowing and accepting a market system to generate, disseminate and apply knowledge, are academics finally succumbing to a corporate sellout? Since time immemorial, the world of academia has always revered knowledge as a public trust. To defenders of public universities, knowledge is destined and to be exploited for the benefit and improvement of all humanity, freely shared and freely used. Privatization of universities or education thus is perceived as in contradiction to the concept of public ownership and free distribution of intellectual capital strongly held in principle by true-blooded academics.

In the university culture, the monopoly and control over the distribution of knowledge have always been reserved for the professors, their peers and the select few who attend university classes. Instead with the privatization of education, the market is now deemed as a more efficient guarantor of quality than the elite guild of academics or university professors.

The market is also seen as an effective means of distribution. Markets work on the principle that the exercise of choice is more efficient that the exercise of control. Marketization gives students the option to decide for themselves what they want pursue their education in than to have it decided for them. The quality of education then is best indicated when the products of education, namely its programs, research, ideas and opinions, are useful for the society at large and that people desire them as goods.

Unfortunately marketplaces are known to fail. Markets work only if there is sufficient supply of a commodity. Choice is only efficient where choice may be effectively offered and practiced. When commodities are in short supply, choices are no longer the prerogative of the marketplace but forced. In such scenario, the marketplace collapses in on itself, spiraling out of control, rewarding the rich and powerful and leaving the mass without.

4.5. Efficient versus Effective Quality Control

Arguments put forth in support of privatization of universities often express three magnanimous intentions; namely to improve the quality of university education, to make university education more affordable and to enhance the effectiveness of teaching and learning processes. The improvement of quality and standards is a central goal of all higher education institutions and every effort is made to translate this into operational performance at the institutional level. Critics and opponents of university privatization however pointed out that placing higher education under corporate lock and key will not automatically translate into improvement in the quality of higher education. “Market” is not necessarily an efficient guarantor of quality. Their market-driven and profit-oriented nature can allure private universities and colleges to compromise academic standards to commercial interests.

In order to maintain the quality and standards of academic programmes offered by private colleges and universities in Malaysia, the National Accreditation Board (Lembaga Akreditasi Negara or LAN) has been formed. LAN will serve as the single most useful mechanism to monitor standards and ascertain their comparability with other public and internationally established universities. The same body is also responsible for evaluating strengths and weaknesses of course content and quality of course offerings by private IHL in the country. However with the huge increase in the number of private colleges offering explicitly diverse academic programmes within disciplines and departments, doubt has been cast on the ability and effectiveness of a single national authority to cope with the tasks of maintaining quality and standards of the diverse areas of specialization within a specific academic area. Will LAN be sufficiently competent in the long-term to monitor and provide inputs to guide the curriculum structure and course content in order to make them relevant to the nation’s economy? Should another advisory body made up of practitioners, industrialists and public-sector representatives from respective fields be formed to ensure that courses and programmes offered by private IHL match the needs of the clients and the nation?

The academia expressed concern about who should carry out the evaluation to ensure the objectivity and credibility of higher education provided in this country. Evaluation of academic quality can determine whether a university has achieved its academic goals and reached the standards it has set for instruction, research, and student achievement. They advocate that effective quality assurance can only be undertaken through evaluation of academic performance carried out by academics or peer groups only. When maintaining quality and standards of higher education falls under the auspices of a national council or board comprised of non-academics, the process of evaluation is often characterized by conflicting rationales and expectations. Inevitably there will be confusion over terminology and methodology, and mistrust about the purposes of evaluation results. In the absence of expertise and academics from specialized backgrounds to evaluate the diverse programmes offered by private IHL, the accreditation board tends to use quality yardsticks that are non-academic. Hence becoming absorbed with tasks of ensuring the private IHLs have adhered and complied fully to the rules and conditions of their establishment. The Board often gets bogged down with regulatory functions such as application guidelines and deadlines, licensing and approval procedures, safety issues of premises, number of contact hours for teaching and learning, student-staff ratio and other matters remotely related to the quality of teaching and learning. While emphasis on such quality assurance procedures may appear efficient, they may not be effective.

5. Conclusion

Far from being used to subvert the nature and purpose of privatizing university education, all the above characteristics lend credibility to claims from proponents of university privatization that a timely decision towards empowering the private sector to come forward and participate actively in providing higher education in Malaysia can only lead to these institutions becoming more responsive to the needs of the students and employers alike. It is thus within the realm of possibility to expect that these colleges and universities are capable of preserving and promoting every aspect of the academic norms while at the same time putting into place effective management practices of private enterprises.

Given time to reflect and do some stock-taking, maybe it is timely for our private IHL to act and avoid being seen as too mercenary in nature but acculturate themselves to lending a hand in support of the government’s effort to increase the nation’s pool of research scientists and engineers. On the part of the government, there are ample opportunities to tap on the enthusiasm and commitment of the private IHL by creating enabling environment for the education and training of our future research scientists and engineers. They can organize and coordinate joint R&D with a pool of private industries and manufacturing firms. Public funding for research has been generously extended to private IHL to enable procurement of capital equipment for specific long-term R&D projects. The high cost of establishing appropriate world-class R&D laboratories by private IHL in Malaysia should no longer pose as a deterrent to these colleges and universities in offering both undergraduate and graduate studies in areas much needed to realize our own unique ‘industrial revolution’