THE CICAK.com

Insufficient alarm over the fall of UM’s ranking

By WAN MOHD AIMRAN

University Malaya dropped from 89th to 169th place in the Times Higher Education Supplement this year, an embarassing blow to the Malaysian education industry.

This incident recently appeared in the news.

Although not surprising, one wonders how an institution, once regarded as a top university in Asia, if not the world, could have slipped so low in a year.

The fact that UM is the country’s premier university makes this drop in ranking even worse. If such a renowned institution ranked so badly, what hopes are there for other less prestigious universities and colleges in Malaysia? Would it even be ludicrous to compare local varsities to international instutions?

What does it say about the quality of the graduates that these institutions produce? What kind of signals are we sending to parents, who send their children to local universities, about the quality of the education in the country?

Are they going to be well-equipped to face challenges in this increasingly borderless world?

Most importantly, how does this reflect on local graduates who are supposed to be the country’s future leaders, thinkers, movers and shakers?

Does Malaysia have a future?

What puzzles me is the lack of substantial responses from the government leaders.

The Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi said he was “very sad” over the news and later responded in a typical Malaysian manner: “Sometimes, the criteria used in the rankings may differ from what we have set for our own institutions of higher learning.” And that our institutions are “mainly focused on human resource development.”

How could the prime minister only feel “very sad” upon hearing this news. It seems, this time, Malaysians were not fiery over the political, social and economic positions of Malays. It was very mellow.

Why wasn’t there a sense of urgency, equivalent to the NEP revival during the previous UMNO General Assembly? Why isn’t UMNO Youth shouting their usual line of rhetorics, asking the government to stop the decay of our educational institutions?

An education minister said that there was “obviously some inconsistency in the ranking criteria.” He added that the drop in UM’s ranking was “inconceivable.”

Why are we so quick to dismiss the rankings as irrelevant?

I don’t think the ranking system was so myopic, and that it only based universities on technological prowess.

A university is only as good as its students and faculty. They are the driving force that will take the university to greater heights.

The issue of whether the criteria used was suitable, for Malaysian universities, should not have come up in the first place. The ranking system must already be quite credible.

We cannot afford to produce graduates that only fit our Malaysian political, economic and social structure. Doing so will put us at a disadvantage, as other countries become more prepared to tackle globalisation.

Malaysia will not be competitive if its citizens continue cling on to the “jaguh kampung” or the “big fish in a large pond” mentality.

It is self-defeating. And we risk being left behind.

—
WAN MOHD AIMRAN BIN WAN MOHD KAMIL is a staff writer for theCICAK.

He is currently a Physics and Theoretical Physics undergraduate at Imperial College London. Often accused by friends for being too politically correct, he continually seeks a fine balance between indulging himself in philosophical thoughts and leading a normal life as a Malaysian youth. Visit his site.