SEPTEMBER 10 — Every year, almost like clockwork, social media will be abuzz after the release of the UPU (Unit Pengambilan Universiti). This year alone, 105,424 students applied for undergraduate programmes, hoping to be placed in one of the many courses offered in public higher education institutions across the country. This year, like every other year, also had a wave of allegations of unfairness and racial bias thrown at the admissions systems.

Edward Wong’s case, where he was offered only his fifth choice (a placement in Management at USM) and denied placements in Accounting in four other universities despite scoring a 4.0 CGPA and a 99.9 per cent merit score, seems to be this year’s highlight. 

Uniquely, the Department of Higher Education responded in a press release by releasing granular acceptance rates of each of the courses he was rejected by. These rates are shocking by any metric. UM’s Accounting course had a 3.71 per cent acceptance rate, UPM’s 2.41 per cent, UUM’s 13.49 per cent, and UTM’s 2.4 per cent. If we treat each course as distinct admission units, as students apply for them independently rather than to the university as a whole, these courses are more competitive than Ivy League universities. To provide a comparison, Harvard University’s latest overall acceptance rate was 3.63 per cent. 

Like many who have guided many students in applying for undergraduate studies in the US, we typically advise students to hedge their applications and not only apply for the most selective institutions. To avoid disappointment (or worse, zero acceptances), students typically apply for a range of “reach”, “match” and “safety” schools depending on their academic and co-curricular profile, based on the data released by US universities. 

The UPU system, however, does not do justice to both expectation setting and navigating applications. Students applying almost exclusively to incredibly selective courses without knowing that in reality, they’re taking an incredibly unlikely gamble, will be left unsatisfied. For those who don’t have access to mentors to give tips on how to strategically play the application game, this greatly disadvantages underprivileged students. Overall, many students are left dumbfounded as to why they didn’t get accepted despite objectively doing incredibly well on paper.

In such a state of ambiguity, it is easy to attribute and allege racial bias. For non-Bumiputeras in Malaysia that experience racial quotas in other parts of the education system, such as in the Matriculation pre-university programme, mistrust is perhaps a reasonable reaction. As UPU does not release statistics for review, there is no way to disprove (or prove) systemic racial bias.

In our recent report that made reform recommendations to the UPU system, one of the easiest reforms the Department can do today is to publish detailed admissions data and success rate by course. Additionally, mechanisms to inform students about their likelihood of admissions based on their profile will both quell complaints and help them assess their own choices better.

Of course, data transparency is not the only answer. Currently, a 4.0 in Matriculation is weighted equally as a 4.0 in STPM. While I cannot say if STPM is truly more difficult than Matriculation, STPM students seem to be facing a systemic disadvantage for competitive courses. Data released in a Parliamentary response last year showed that for competitive courses, namely medicine, pharmacy and dentistry, less than 3 per cent of each cohort in public universities consisted of STPM graduates in 2024.

Transparency won’t solve every problem in UPU, but it is the first step to restoring trust in a system that decides the futures of more than 100,000 students every year.

*Jason Wee is the Executive Director of Architects of Diversity, a non-profit organisation working towards building a more equitable and inclusive Malaysia. He is also a graduate of Princeton University.

**This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.