On the JPA scholarships

For those not already in the know, the Malaysian government has recently announced that it would cancel all overseas JPA scholarships, with a few caveats.

The caveats being the MARA scholarships (which are limited to Bumiputeras), and the exceptional cases where students are accepted into OxBridge/the Ivies. Some of these changes have yet to be finalized, and so the details of the former (that of the MARA scholarships) may yet change. And I hope they will.

What I am particularly mad about, however, is the government's explanation of such changes. I don't usually talk politics in this blog, but this has upset me to point where I'm willing to disregard that rule for just this one occasion. Let's take a look at each of the given reasons, presented to us by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz:

1) The Government has no money
The Malaysian government is currently building an unnecessary Parliament House in Putrajaya for RM800 million, and the cost of the Jalan Duta palace project has doubled to RM800 million. These are extremes, of course - but you must ask where exactly that the government's priorities lie. Scholarships are one of the few remaining channels through which Government money goes directly back to the people (this is slightly paradoxical, considering that the money is ours to begin with).

In what universe is a RM800 million palace more beneficial to Malaysians than 1500 scholarships? The opportunity cost is that we lose 15,000 scholars in 10 years, and 30,000 in 20 years. That's a big loss for the country.

Now compare this to our tiny neighbour Singapore. The PSD scholars over there are part of a system that feeds directly into the public service. You get the PSD scholarship, you go to Oxford, Cambridge, or any one of the Ivies, and you come back and you enter the Government. In a couple of years, one or two of these people (per batch) become ministers. And the differences between our two governments are vast - the Malaysian government rarely makes sense (more on this later); Singapore's technocratic government makes too much sense, if you will, to the point where the opposition parties can't say much about the island-state's policies.

My point: when Nazri comes out and says that "We have to tell the truth. We just cannot afford it. Just like how a parent cannot afford to send their children abroad to further their studies, the government cannot afford it. We do not have the financial capacity that permits us to send every good student abroad." I think: bullshit.

Nazri continues (boy, is this guy good): "It’s impossible to increase the number of scholarships because we don’t have enough money for that when we also need money to focus on other areas."

Yes. Like RM800 million palaces.

2) Our students are too 'academically excellent'

"... Secondly, it is this: however we do it, whether we reclassify the As that the students get to A+, A and A-, the fact remains that in this year alone, the number of students who obtained 9A+ were over 1,200. This means that the boys and girls are getting more and more clever and we cannot reduce the number of scholarships we give out by re-grading the As any further,”

He also says:

"There are just too many outstanding students. Even with the new grading system, where grades are divided into three classifications, for example, A-, A and A+, there are still many students who are able to get with outstanding results.”

This is new. I have never in my entire life heard a minister from any government of any country - not even the Scandivanian nations, who presumably have the best public education in the world - complain that their students 'are getting more and more clever'. Nor have I ever heard an education minister say that 'there are just too many outstanding students'.

Nazri must think us Malaysians exceptionally stupid.

Make no mistake: this problem is real. But what it means is that either something's going wonderfully right with our education system, or the metric for academic excellence in Malaysia is meaningless and dumb. You'd think they'd raise the standards for SPM, instead of canceling overseas scholarships forever, but they don't.

3) Foreign scholarships are a contributing factor to the Nation's brain drain
Bullshit. Dumb governmental policies and institutional racism contribute to the brain drain. Being fed up with the government contributes to the brain drain. Sending people overseas, on bond, for a proper education so they may return and serve the country does not a brain drain make.

4) Keeping students in Malaysia will result in first class universities
Here's where things get interesting:

“Ultimately, the purpose is also to retain our good students here in our local universities. We want our good students to study locally and this is our long-term goal. We want our universities to be first-class. We want to retain the money here, so we finance those in local universities — we want the talent here."

I want to tackle this properly, because certain people think this point to be true. In particular, an overseas JPA scholar believes that:

Now, for Malaysia, I’m not gloating or anything, but I think Malaysia will greatly benefit from this act. (Don’t hate me for saying this). By doing this, more students will be restricted and thus will not be able to study abroad. This is result in the flooding of brains into local universities. FINALLY, SOME SMART PEOPLE WILL BE IN LOCAL UNIVERSITIES!!! Hence, the rankings of our local uni’s will get higher and higher. Quality of local education will increase, whilst not spending a great amount of taxpayers’ money on scholarships. XD

So let's take this apart, shall we?

Assumption 1: smart undergraduates mean higher university rankings.
Rubbish. University ranking is strongly correlated to quality of research. Universities are not high schools, where prestige and rank come directly from how many straight-A students you pump out. They're primarily graded according to the quality of the work they create (exaggerated example: MIT invented the Internet, Cavendish discovered DNA).

You may be right if you're talking about postgraduate students, but to be honest the only way to increase the university standards is through gaining better teachers. Case in point: NUS grabs academics from around the world by offering them generous grants for their research, with the caveat that they teach students during their stay in Singapore. Hong Kong is presumably doing the same.

So Joel's rant (FINALLY, SOME SMART PEOPLE WILL BE IN LOCAL UNIVERSITIES) is a correct prescription. Unfortunately, you don't do that by routing smart high school students to our local universities. You do that by routing brilliant academicians from other universities to come teach/research in your respective institutions. I'd make the case that if the government were truly serious about improving local universities, they'd do this instead of blatantly canceling overseas scholarships, and pretending that it does some good for our public Us while they're doing so.

Assumption 2: more local students in local universities mean better universities
I'm not sure where our government gets that idea from. A counter-example: Stanford's student-teacher ratio, in specific classes, are 1:15. If you're lucky, that's one Nobel prize winner to 15 students (Stanford has 16 laureates - and, yes, I got that 'Nobel ratio' line from the Stanford admissions website). I'm not sure how 'more students in our local universities' translates to 'better learning experience'. I'm also not sure how Joel thinks this is good for his juniors.

Not to quaffle: but if he truly believes this to be a good thing, then why not drop the overseas scholarship and sign up for a local public Uni?

I'm rather sick of this, and I'm worried for my country. I'm sure all of us know of families who would benefit greatly from such scholarships. Canceling the overseas PSD and forcing students to attend local Universities - particularly without a better education roadmap - is a disservice to our country and our people. And making such announcements with blatant illogic is a disservice to our intelligence. So I don't know. I want to believe that there's yet hope for Malaysia, but it's getting harder and harder every time the government makes such announcements. And hope I think, is the most important resource we need.