faulker059

One area affected by the mini-budget or stimulus package that was announced yesterday is postgraduate education in Malaysia. All the details are not out yet but here are some of my preliminary thoughts based on the following Star report . This is what the DPM who is also the Finance Minister and will soon by our PM said: Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said it would finance tuition fees and research grants up to RM20,000 for every student pursuing a PhD locally and RM10,000 for students pursuing a Master’s programme. “A total of 500 places at PhD level and 10,000 at Masters level in public universities as well as at Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Multimedia University and Universiti Teknologi Petronas will be offered,” he said. The Higher Education Minister had this to add: Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin was happy that the stimulus package took into the consideration the needs and problems faced by fresh graduates during the current economic sl...

I was chatting with a student from an Islamic country this morning. He seems like a really bright guy and he was interested in doing a PhD on Islamic Finance in a Malaysian university. This got me thinking. Malaysia should use its comparative advantage as a Muslim majority country where English is widely spoken and used at the higher education level to attract bright and young aspiring scholars from other Muslim majority countries to do research in Malaysia. This is an untapped market. Many bright young potential scholars from countries like Pakistan and Nigeria may not have the necessary background and resources to apply to universities in the developed world to do their PhDs. Some of them also may not want to apply to some of these countries because of the visa restrictions post 9-11. Malaysia is actually a good place for some of these scholars to do their PhDs. There is more cultural affinity because Malaysia is a Muslim majority country which means easy access to mosques and halal ...

One of the first initiatives announced by new UM VC, Prof Ghauth Jasmon, is the decision to increase the number of post graduate students at the UM and reducing the number of undergrads. This is not really something new. We've blogged about it here and here . Many of my previously expressed concerns are still valid today. What I fear more is that this may be a smokescreen that the new VC will be forced to use to increase the number of foreigners at the postgrad level in an attempt to artificially boost UM's position in the THES rankings. This is a sample of what I previously blogged about: The first question that comes to mind is this - where are all these 'extra' postgraduate students going to come from? According to the same Table, to achieve this three fold increase in postgraduate student enrolment, we need to have an annual average growth rate of 26% for the next 5 years. That seems like a pretty tall task. Imagine a faculty with 40 Phd students and 40 Masters stu...