KUALA LUMPUR: Second Education Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh is fooling himself with his claim that Malaysia’s higher education system is on par with that of developed nations such as the UK, Australia and Germany, a DAP lawmaker said yesterday.

Dr Ong Kian Ming said the proof Idris gave to back his claim — that foreign students made up 10% of students at national higher educational institutions here — was laughable.

“To think that our education system is world class and on par with countries like the UK and Australia just because we have a large number of foreign students is dangerous, especially coming from the Education Minister.

“By this reasoning, this means that if we have a larger percentage of foreign students in our universities, our education standard has exceeded that of the UK and Australia,” Ong said in a statement yesterday.

He said decisions made by foreign students in studying abroad were governed by a number of factors including the cost of a programme, the cost of living, the entry requirements, the availability of programmes, the medium of instruction, the ease of getting student visas, the availability of scholarships, the prestige of a university, the number of places available to foreign students and the quality of teaching.

He added that according to the 2014 QS World University Rankings, Malaysia was trailing far behind universities in the UK and Australia.

Universiti Malaya is the only Malaysian university ranked in the Top 200 at 151, compared with 19 UK universities, eight Australian universities and three German universities placed within the top 100, said Ong.

“Unless the minister has access to the 2015 QS rankings and knows in advance that it shows a significantly different ranking for Malaysian universities, it seems silly to conclude that our higher education standards are on par with the UK, Germany and Australia, based on the rankings which the minister had refered to in the Bernama report,” he said.

The Serdang MP said that if Idris truly believed that the nation’s  education system was on par with those countries, he should produce a list of foreign students who were accepted to Cambridge or Oxford University, Imperial College, the University College of London, or Australia National University but had given up their places to study in Malaysia.

“I am in no way trying to put down our local universities. For some programmes, such as medicine and law, it is probably more difficult to gain entry into these programmes in our public universities compared to foreign universities.

“But even our local universities would have to admit that they had much progress to make in terms of teaching quality, infrastructure and funding for research before they reached the standards of universities in the UK and Australia.”

Ong said the second education minister was doing a great disservice to local universities by “unfairly” comparing them to other universities in developed countries as they had a longer history, higher per student funding and more established research infrastructures.

“Those are standards which our universities should aspire to but have not yet reached,” he said. — The Malaysian Insider

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on February 23, 2015.