faulker059

Read this story on the Star about how the new Deputy Higher Education Minister, Saifuddin Abdullah, is using facebook to reach out to his 'constituents'. The Star reported that: "University students who wish to bring up grievances regarding their tertiary institutions can do so by directly contacting Deputy Higher Education Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah through Facebook. Datuk Saifuddin said that he will be live on the social networking website on the first and third Wednesdays of each month, from 10 to 11 pm." I applaud the new Deputy Minister for Higher Education for using the internet and social networking sites such as facebook to reach out to students at the tertiary level. I'm a little bit more skeptical as to how effective going 'live' on facebook will be since the chat function on FB isn't really very good. I think the new Deputy Minister deserves close attention. I've been aware of him ever since M Bakri Musa wrote a review about a b...

OK, one final note from the UMNO GA and we can move on. Since Khaled Nordin, the current Minister for Higher Education, failed to win one of the 3 VP positions and since there will be a cabinet reshuffle coming up soon, I'm going to publicly state my support for Tok Pa or Mustapha Mohamed, to be given back the cabinet position of Minister for Higher Education. I've always had more praise than criticism for Tok Pa during his time as Minister for Higher Education and I hope that his skills and intellect will once again be used to improve the state of our public and private universities and colleges in Malaysia.

A couple of weeks back, I blogged about how the mini-budget / stimulus package provides for an additional 10,000 places for Masters level courses and 500 places for aspiring PhD candidates in public universities as well as at Uniten, Multimedia University and UTP. A week after this announcement, on March 17th, Bernama reported that only 16 people had applied for places in the PhD programs. On March 22nd, the Deputy Minister for Higher Education announced that less than 100 applications had been received. In a typical university in the US, the ratio of applications to places is about 30 to 1 for most programs. This means that if there are 10 spots open, there should be 300 applications for this program. Some PhD programs like Economics will have more. Some, like Romance Studies, will have fewer. With so few applicants, our public universities should be worried if they can actually find good enough candidates to fill these places. If they can't, typically what will happen is that ...