The Malaysian National Education Plan 2026-2035, launched last month at great expense using money that might better be used on priorities like academic salaries and student welfare, proved to be a “monumental meh!”
As predicted, it was a shoulder-shrug plan as far as higher education is concerned, with no prioritisation of the needs of students or academics but plenty of ideas of how overpaid owners, leaders and senior managers can make even more money at the expense of everyone else.
It failed to impress for three reasons.
First, in a world where artificial intelligence will transform and disrupt higher education in the next 10 months, it tries in vain to predict what will happen in the next 10-years. Even Stalin and Mao had the humility to restrict their ambitions to five-year plans.
Second, the ministry of higher education (MOHE) repeatedly highlighted that they were saving money by excluding foreign consultants in favour of local stakeholders.
This produced the normal copy-cat plan of “seven strategic thrusts and 49 high-impact packages” as the foreign consultants.
The local suppliers are cheaper, but it remains little more than the usual patronage cascade with no obvious relevance to real priorities.
Third, the last Higher Education Blueprint 2015-2025 delivered a baseline of an increasing reliance on foreign students with 260,000 forecast to be enrolled within the next four years.
Around 137,000 students from Mainland China are expected to enrol in Malaysian universities, many owned by Chinese commercial education providers.
To remain relevant to foreign students millions of ringgit have been and will continue to be spent on foreign commercial marketing credentials, ratings and rankings.
This diverts attention and resources from real quality indicators, student welfare and academic salaries. Meanwhile Malaysian universities excel in rankings for academic fraud and research paper retractions.
In terms of student outcomes, the foreign quality benchmarks claiming 100% employability fail to acknowledge the reality of 1.6 million graduates, or 32.2% of employed graduates and 66.0% of young graduates aged 24 and under, working in semi-skilled or low-skilled jobs in 2024.
Nor do they address median graduate starting salaries of RM2,000 which will be below the minimum wage due to be uplifted this year.
The new masterplan did not acknowledge these low baselines let alone provide a response to address them. So what should it have done?
First, it should be based on the reality that the higher education landscape is shifting so fast that planning makes no sense.
Instead, creating less bureaucratic, agile, innovative and competitive systems with greater university autonomy and academic freedom provides a better response to a rapidly changing environment.
Second, it should acknowledge that the standard model of higher education is functionally dead.
Physical universities with fixed semester courses and lecturers struggling to keep up with the latest developments have been superseded by free, high quality, up to date, online content from world-class universities available to study wherever and whenever you want delivered by content developers using AI.
Third, higher education policy must reflect a change in the nature of learning from functional, vocational, “industry ready” courses lacking in actualisation opportunities to the new demand for enrichment, empowerment and self-fulfilment from flexible learning and credentials.
Admittedly this is rather vague and lacks specific ideas but that is the point. Imagining how higher education will evolve over the next 10 years has no specifics.
Ideas include a new model for academics working as independent professionals in an open market or an accreditation only model where universities provide credentials for learning from multiple providers.
Even transnational education will play a major role but not apparently in Malaysia’s vision for the future of higher education.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.