SERI ISKANDAR, Dec 6 — Sultan Nazrin Muizzuddin Shah said Malaysia’s higher education needed to adopt an enterprising approach to flourish in a fast-changing world.

The Perak Sultan said this entailed incorporating aspects of entrepreneurship, such as an appetite for risk and being visionary, when reforming parts of the education system that were developed in the previous century.

He said this today during his royal address titled 'Building a Dynamic and Inclusive Education Ecosystem’ at Universiti Teknologi Petronas in conjunction with the university’s 20th anniversary.

“Higher education is currently in a state of considerable flux, as the accelerating pace of technological change has major implications for the sector,” he said today.

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“To prepare students to flourish in the unpredictable environments of the future,an education system must be highly agile and flexible, capable of anticipating and responding to the coming changes.”

This included encouraging more participation from businesses in education, particularly in the areas of technology, he explained.

“We are now crafting a more comprehensive policy to address these pressing issues, in the form of MyHE4.0” he said

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“Such efforts may encounter resistance from traditional institutions. But such systemic change has clearly become absolutely necessary if our higher education sector is to be able to keep up with the new developments as they unfold.”

“It is urgently required if we are to provide our students with an education that equips them effectively for the ever more complex challenges we face.

Students must also be assessed more holistically, said the Perak ruler when highlighting the use of an integrated cumulative grade point average or I-CGPA that included “softer” skills that were important to the creative roles envisaged in the future economy.