A few days ago, I read a piece: “Free your child from burden of study loans”, which essentially highlighted the importance of saving early for our children’s tertiary education. Yesterday, I read another piece: “How to tackle study loan defaults”, which talked about the poor marketability of graduates and hence their inability to pay off study loans.
As a nation, I think we have been discussing and debating issues and problems pertaining to tertiary education for a long time. However, more often than not, we merely scratch the surface due to concerns for political correctness and other sensitivities.
Tertiary education in Malaysia used to be “almost free”. However, as we become more developed and richer, somehow this privilege too has been taken away. We now argue that a university education must be based on “market price” and those who cannot afford it should take study loans.
We have liberalised our university education, making it available to everybody, including those who may not have the aptitude for it. Those who could be good technicians or successful artisans, we have inadvertently “converted” into unemployable degree holders now waiting for that elusive “graduate job”.
But the reality is many graduates today are in fact doing clerical and non-graduate jobs with many hardly having any opportunity to secure graduate employment in the foreseeable future. Why then are we producing so many graduates and in the process, committing so many to debt?
We may argue that a university education is a universal entitlement. But surely we can’t be that foolish to use our hard earned savings or worse still, get into debt to get something “useless” in return.
The mushrooming of universities and the availability of PTPTN loans have made many pursue a university education without thinking. For many, it is like attending secondary school after completing their primary education without realising a university education is not free.
Sometimes I ask what is the objective of our university education – is it to move up the value chain or to provide profit or employment to many of our half-baked universities and their lecturers.
Sometimes I wonder whether PTPTN loans are made readily available to help students pursue their dreams or help universities maintain their enrolment.
If we think a university education is not an elitist pursuit but a universal entitlement, then we shouldn’t be lamenting about unemployed graduates, students saddled with loans, insufficient allocations from the government, poor quality degrees and a graduate’s lack of marketability.
At one time, many of our secondary school students were taught by non-graduate teachers, but did our education standards suffer? At one time we did not produce that many graduates, but did the country’s development suffer?
Sure, times have changed and so has the structure of our economy. However, if we have persistent unemployed or unemployable graduates, it means our economy does not need them.
TK Chua is an FMT reader.
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