Malaysia’s goal is to transform itself by 2020 from the middle-income trap it is currently in, into a technologically savvy, export-driven and high income developed nation. The key drivers for this intended growth trajectory are high quality human capital, in addition to vibrant foreign and domestic investment. To boost the country’s critical stock of talented, entrepreneurial and “balanced” human capital, Prime Minister Najib Razak launched the “Soaring Upwards” higher education initiative. Its aim was to accelerate the production of a “first-rate educated workforce” to upscale productivity and hasten economic growth, high-wage employment and economic prosperity.

Developed and developing nations, including Malaysia, have believed over time that their talented human capital needs can be actualised through sustained and effective investments in a broad-based high quality education provision for their young citizens.

This was to be achieved through a well-formulated, efficiently coordinated and well-funded, inclusive national education system from pre-school to tertiary level. Students have to be equipped with bilingual and numerical competency, critical thinking, communication skills and core ideas, as well as be nurtured to be creative, innovative, technology savvy and entrepreneurial in preparation for work. In order to achieve developed nation status with its limited domestic market, Malaysia has no alternative than to be a robust exporter of high value-added goods and services to a highly competitive global marketplace. To hold and enhance its competitive edge in its export value chain with other aggressive market players, the country’s higher education institutions have to continuously acclimatise its graduates on an upward scaled knowledge, language and skills path. Additionally, the country must be able to leverage its graduates in the ever-changing occupational structures in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Otherwise, the country will not be able to generate and accumulate the capital to achieve high-income and developed status. Does Malaysia’s education system – from pre-school to the tertiary level – inculcate in its students the critical and complex bundle of ingredients to meet the human capital challenges the country’s advancing economy aspires to?

MALAYSIA’S HIGHER EDUCATION MODEL

Malaysia’s higher education provision is underpinned and driven by a politically determined, structurally divergent and racially polarised public-private higher education system. The public provision is centrally controlled, highly subsidised and driven by a politically resolute, race-based affirmative action strategy and an insular national language policy. In the last four decades, public education has been characterised by a low level of English competency. This has drastically inhibited the system from preparing students to keep pace with the accelerating growth in new knowledge as well as the changing needs of the labour market. The parallel, highly structured and overwhelmingly profit motivated private system is also anticipated to meet the high-quality graduates needs of the economy. Can these parallel yet divergent systems, inbuilt with overpowering political and economic constraints, generate the right mix of high-quality skilled graduates to drive a technologically savvy economy and achieve high income and developed nation status? Small countries like Malaysia have no choice but to be intertwined with the increasingly competitive global marketplace to market their products and services.

To maintain and enhance their competitive-edge over other competitors in the global marketplace, Malaysia has to develop the requisite cognitive, analytical, problem solving, decision making, communicating abilities and interpersonal and management skills underpinned by a good command of English. The packaging of these complex skillsets will enable graduates to command their own value in the advancing knowledge economy.

WEAKENING ENGLISH PROFICIENCY, DECLINING QUALITY OF EDUCATION

Bahasa Malaysia, the national language, was made the sole medium of instruction from 1983. Although English was made a compulsory second language, nationalist and patriotic sentiments, conjoined with political exigency, progressively gave greater emphasis to the usage of Bahasa Malaysia, while the use of English was allowed to deteriorate substantially. This has contributed to a drastic decline in English proficiency in the national schools in the last forty years, as well as among tertiary students and the academic community. The policy was pursued despite the pre-eminence of English as the dominant world language and the lingua franca in international communication, knowledge, trade and diplomacy. An overwhelming majority of academic books, research documents and high-impact research journals, particularly in the critical STEM subjects, are in English. English has emerged as the indispensible language of the international scientific community, and for accessing rapidly advancing scientific knowledge. Malaysia’s drive towards a modern scientific and technological savvy and export-driven nation hinges on a high-level of competency in the English language and its access to the latest discoveries and development in tandem with the rest of the world. English is a key requirement to secure high-wage employment in the areas of commerce, finance, trade, technology, science, both nationally and globally, and social mobility.

SUPPLY-DEMAND MISMATCH AND GROWING UNEMPLOYMENT

The outcry from both the public and private sector is that the universities are not nurturing graduates with sufficient English language skills, the mental building blocks to think constructively, and of a quality workforce that Malaysian industrial and service sector employers are in dire need. As the private sector’s demand for better skilled workers increases, many top firms are almost exclusively recruiting returning Malaysian graduates from selective overseas English medium universities.

A government law maker pointed out recently that thousands of local public university graduates were unemployable by the private sector because of their poor command of the English language. These graduates are recruited into the highly bloated public service. The concern over the failure of thousands of local university graduates to secure employment due to their poor command of the English language and their “inability to string a sentence together in English” was reiterated by Adenan Satem, the former Chief Minister of the East Malaysian state of Sarawak. To alleviate this serious and growing problem of “graduates without a future”, the Chief Minister decided to adopt English, the “language of the world”, as the second official language for Sarawak.

The National Graduate Employability Blueprint 2012-2017 highlights the prevailing serious mismatch between the supply and demand of graduates in the labour market and the country’s general employability rates for graduates “remain poor and unimproved”.

The Malaysian Employers Federation pointed out in 2016 that there were 200,000 unemployed graduates in the country. In JobStreet.com’s survey of 2013, employers stated that there was a gap between their expectations of graduates and the quality of graduates produced by the country’s universities.

Nearly 70% of employers think that the quality of the country’s fresh graduates is average. They lacked sufficiently developed cognitive skills and the ability to write correctly as well as communicate orally in English. Poor command of the English language was singled out as the primary reason for their growing unemployability.

To boost the employment rate of public university graduates, the government instituted the 1Malaysia Training Scheme and the Graduate Employability Management Scheme. It is perplexing how public university graduates need to be retrained, at the taxpayer’s expense, when deficiencies within the higher education system are not addressed. The question also is whether short programmes are likely to be sufficient in enhancing candidates’ glaring deficiencies in the English language, and other work related deficiencies, to the required level for the workplace.