Educational support and assistance in Malaysia, whether for secondary or tertiary education, is more than enough.
Indeed, scholarships are plenty and the cost of public university upkeep is almost all provided by the government.
In fact, the education sector is among the sectors with a large annual budgetary appropriations, in terms of financial outlay and manpower.
The support became more significant with the establishment of the Perbadanan Tabung Pendidikan Tinggi Negara (PTPTN) in 1997, giving financial support to students gaining admission to colleges and universities.
PTPTN allowed many young Malaysians to access tertiary education, especially among the B40 groups, done through assistance for teaching fees and out-of-pocket expenses while at the colleges or universities.
Students of various ethnic groups and social status have benefited from the assistance.
The demand for such assistance continues rising at the time when the ability of the government and the PTPTN, in particular, to sustain support to such schemes in the future is very challenging.
About 150,000 to 180,000 students receive assistance from PTPTN annually involving RM3 billion per year. RM66 billion has been disbursed to date.
The financing of this scheme largely comes from government loans to PTPTN and from market loans, guaranteed by the government. It may one day exhaust the government guarantee facility, given the pressures on public sector debt ceiling and servicing.
PTPTN loans also benefit students from private universities. The loan is also available to children from T20 group, though the number is not large.
There have been reports that some loans have not been repaid, arising from factors such as high levels of youth unemployment, low salaries and plain refusal to repay despite reminders.
When the policy for repayments was seriously enforced through measures such as stopping borrowers from travelling abroad, the repayments collected rose significantly.
However, the moment it was relaxed, the collection declined markedly.
The previous Pakatan Harapan government decided that borrowers earning below RM4,000 a month were exempted from repaying the loans. The amount is way above minimum wage and the poverty line income.
Whatever the excuse for not repaying PTPTN loans, it is the duty of every borrower to try to repay, however miniscule the repayments are.
A good recollection rate will help it sustain its activities to help other would-be borrowers in the future.
For this purpose, PTPTN needs to be more stringent in collecting the repayments to make the scheme sustainable in the years to come.
The government's intention to help low-income borrowers access higher education is good.
However, given the government's financial position, it would be better to design a financial assistance that involves the banking system, as is done in other countries.
The banking system has the resources that can be made available for educational financing.
In this regard, the experiences of other countries can be easily examined and adopted to let educational financing grow as a new class of asset to be managed.
The government is not the only one that gives financial assistance for higher education. Government-linked companies such as Telekom Malaysia, Tenaga Nasional, Petronas, Permodalan Nasional Bhd and Bank Negara too give assistance to students pursuing tertiary education.
In addition, state governments give financial assistance to students who are state nationals. Perhaps, the orientation of the schemes may differ from the ones carried out by PTPTN. Some of them focus on Islamic education.
It would be interesting to examine all these related financial activities and see the possibility of them becoming a set of economic activities that can evolve into market-based educational financing system within an ecosystem that supports the tertiary education service industry.
The writer is Chairman of Malaysian Institute of Economic Research (MIER) and Academic Fellow of USM
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times