PUTRAJAYA: The following are excerpts from the New Straits Times exclusive interview with Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh.
Q: You are at the helm of the Higher Education Ministry, which is one of the most important ministries and the future of the nation depends on people like you. What are your thoughts on this?
A: Knowing how important education is, my first promise is to deliver the best education Malaysians can get locally, which means that we have to keep increasing the quality of our higher education.
How do we do it? You can see the quality of (higher) education has been soaring. The rankings of our universities have been going up (and) our student debaters are winning competitions globally. Recently, our Malaysian debaters won championship titles at the Australasian Intervarsity Debating Championship in Perth, the first two wins after 41 years.
Our rankings are also improving, so we aim to have two top 100 universities by 2025, which can include higher rankings in subject, university position or even country. As far as the universities are concerned, we are going upwards; that’s why we use the tag line “soaring upwards”.
We are not there yet, but I promise you, we are going to be there eventually. It won’t take long; at the rate we are improving nowadays, we are already keeping abreast with the top universities. It may look like we are aiming too high, but the way we are soaring upwards, I believe that in 20 to 30 years, we will be able to stand alongside the likes of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard.
Q: So are we already identifying the universities and the steps to take in search of a university equivalent to Oxford University and the like?
A: We have already identified our top five research universities (RUs). They are Universiti Malaya (UM), Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. At the top of the ranking is UM, which is clearly ahead of the other four universities. Nevertheless, in the last few years, the other RUs have shown improvements in subject rankings. At the same time, academicians from these universities have also been receiving international recognition.
Q: The focus on TVET (Technical Vocational Education and Training) and community colleges has shown an increase in employability. How do we balance this with the unemployment of university graduates?
A: At the university level, the way we implement the programmes has changed. Before this, we didn’t have the CEO Faculty Programme. Now, we bring CEOs (chief executive officers) from the industry to give a talk, network with lecturers, view the curriculum and allocate 20 to 30 hours a year for them to sit down with lecturers to change the curriculum and the way they teach, and also ensure that employability is available.
Besides that, we also have the 2u2i Programme, where students spend two years at university and another two years in the industry. This has been implemented at Universiti Malaysia Kelantan and will soon be implemented at UPM and Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin. We cannot say that they (the students) don’t have any work experience after they graduate with industry experience of two years. For example, in animal science, the students will have experience dealing with livestock. In the plantation industry, for instance, under UPM’s plantation management, they will have to undergo two years in the plantation industry. If students are into entrepreneurship, they should be able to observe how businesses are handled to start their own company. So, there will be no such thing as employability issues. We are also upgrading entrepreneurship programmes in all campuses.
Our evaluation system has also changed, where we are using the integrated cumulative grade point average (iCGPA), which is the first in the world. We believe students should not only be evaluated based on their academic performance, but also on these skills — interaction, communication, entrepreneurial, practical — and ethics, to ensure they become holistic students, as stated in our (National Higher Education) Blueprint.
Students’ proficiency in the English language has also improved tremendously, with the percentage of those achieving Band 3 (in the Malaysian University English Test) increasing to about 27.8 per cent. So, based on these initiatives, I believe that our graduate employability will be better.
I am not saying that what we implement today, we will get results tomorrow. It will take four years for this group of students to graduate from universities.
Q: Recently, you had an Away -Day with public university vice-chancellors to discuss on the future of Malaysia’s higher education. Can you share with us on the discussion that took place?
A: Basically, we discussed on how to improve the quality of higher education based on the (National Higher Education) Blueprint. We also discussed on our branding and the need to “shout” on our niche.
For instance, many do not know that based on a study by QS Top Universities ranking, University Rankings, Kuala Lumpur is ranked as the most affordable city for students in 2016.
A survey by the British Council on “The Shape of Global Higher Education: National Policies Framework for International Engagement” has singled out Malaysia and Germany as the best performers in national policies on openness to international higher education. These are some of the plus factors besides the quality of education that we have.
We also need to adopt technology. Previously, education is all about going to the university (and), to complete the years required before graduating. Education is getting more flexible today with online learning. We are hoping for more online courses to be offered. Flexibility in education will also allow gap year for students. We can introduce credit hours for volunteerism too. These were some of the things discussed earlier during the session with the vice-chancellors.
In Part Two of the interview tomorrow, Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh speaks on university autonomy and rankings, income generations through endowment and waqf and attracting foreign students to Malaysia.