IDEAS CEO Wan Saiful Wan Jan said the universities would know best how to determine the fees to ensure the viability of their courses without interference from the government, which was guided by non-market forces.
“If they increase tuition fees up to a certain level, there will be no more students,” Wan Saiful said on the sidelines of the IDEAS: National Higher Education Conference 2017 here.
The conference is being held as a collaboration between IDEAS, a privately-funded think tank, and Yayasan Sime Darby.
Wan Saiful said universities would survive if their tuition fees were set at a reasonable level.
He said it was really important for public universities to have financial autonomy as people in the government did not know all of the activities that the universities wanted to carry out or the necessity to manage their funds independently to realise their strategic objectives.
European University Association (EUA) defines financial autonomy of a university as its ability to decide freely on its internal and financial affairs.
“In order for universities to be able to do the things they want, they need to generate their own revenue.
“Public universities don’t need to generate 100% of their own income.
“The government can continue to subsidise, but at least let universities decide how much tuition fees they should charge,” said Wan Saiful.
However, yesterday, UM Association of New Youth (Umany) president Kon Hua En criticised the move by the University of Malaya Centre for Continuing Education (UMCCed) to create a direct intake for the university’s programmes.
He feared that those who have the financial muscle will bypass the normal application process for public universities and said this was unfair.
He claimed this was unfair to those from lower-income families who will not have the opportunity if they fail in the centralised university unit (UPU) selection process for public universities.
Kon said this direct intake system enabled students to take up engineering courses by paying the actual unsubsidised tuition fees. The tuition fees for these programmes, through this process, could be as high as RM90,000, he added.
Kon asked if the system had come about because the government’s move to slash the budget for public universities had forced them to generate income through tuition fees.
Higher Education Minister Idris Jusoh today clarified there had been no hike in tuition fees for courses at public universities since the last increase three years ago.
He said what had happened was that some universities had established private entities that offered unsubsidised courses.
Idris said a student accepted into a programme to study medicine at a public university only needed to pay RM3,000, one of the lowest fees in the world.
“The same goes for an engineering course as you need to only pay about 5% of the total cost of more than RM30,000 at public universities.”