The recent discussions over Edward Wong’s rejection by Universiti Malaya reveal the distrust among non-Malays in the public university admission system, says former economy minister Rafizi Ramli.
Rafizi said the practise of accepting students from various qualifications into public universities is common in many countries, and that cancelling the admission of matriculation students into public universities here will not resolve the issue.
“When something like this happens, people only want an easy answer. They choose either to support or not support Wong. Malays are telling Wong that there are brighter students, while the Chinese and Indians are decrying discrimination.
“It is very important to have transparency in the system. If there are over 1,000 applicants who have perfect scores, what’s the criteria for selecting the 85 students?” Rafizi said in his podcast Yang Berhenti Menteri last night, referring to the number of students accepted into UM’s accountancy course that Wong had applied for.
He added that a bigger problem at play is the financial sustainability of the country’s public university system.
According to Rafizi, the government was unable to provide all the money needed to accept every qualified student, hence universities had to set up the SATU stream that charges higher tuition fees to fund itself.
The Pandan MP suggested that universities restructure their programmes according to the demands of the market by trimming down courses that are unpopular in the job market to increase available seats in those that are highly sought after.
He also noted there was a need to examine the merit “bell curve” among the applicants to further identify talents who stood out the most to ensure a fairer admission process.
Earlier this week, the higher education department said Wong, who achieved a perfect 4.0 CGPA and scored 99.9% for co-curricular activities, was ranked 1,129th among 2,291 eligible applicants for UM, while only 85 places for accountancy were available in his top choice university this year.
Wong’s case gained public attention after MCA president Wee Ka Siong raised it at a press conference where he called the centralised Unit Pusat Universiti (UPU) admission process “flawed” and “unfair”.
