JANUARY 14 — “Undergraduates should not be clueless. Waiting to be spoonfed in the classroom, paid to live outside it and payless after graduation is the real canker afflicting the nation.
Students have to become responsible now, not later!”
In a time of economical upheaval it is the easiest thing to be said. Universities when run without a sense of profit are cost centres draining the nation of its finances, is the easiest way to argue and remove state funding for tertiary education.
Yet there is never a rebuttal to the observation that all the top nations incidentally have the top universities. A vibrant learning environment with university campuses the crown jewel.
Universities: They cost money, they bring money and in between they witness a young student admitted for a ruptured intestine due allegedly to hunger. What is the real story about tertiary education in Malaysia, in the aftermath of claims of higher education literally killing youth?
The camps are well lined up. On the left, a minister adamant undergraduates have low tuition fees, options to work and food programmes. Youth minister chips in, says with all the welfare programmes out there, not the least by his wing, how can people go hungry? And what are self-aggrandising lines without a celebrity adding a line, as Daphne Iking quipped she had to do cabaret — how tender youth is — , ciggie-selling — they won’t just light up on their own, you know — and tutoring — syabas! — as a student.
On the right, with less readable fonts, the national undergraduates organisation, Kesatuan Mahasiswa Malaysia, predictably asking for lower tuition fees and higher loans. And with them presumably the hundreds of thousands of students who would surprise, surprise want cheaper tuition and more digits in their bank accounts. If it were possible, along with that a career which can pay back a loan.
Informed choices
Personally for me, a week before my own campus registration day, I had no money. So no guesses on whose side I tend to be with. I have waited tables, stalked homes to find survey respondents, entered plantations to figure their yield rate differentials, tutored students whose parents were keen on grades not education and taught debating. There were other things we did back in the day, not quite cabaret and definitely not flattering but they were done because they needed to be done — and sometimes for a laugh.
All those days, fortune played handsomely to my palms and I am that graduate. Chance does not spread herself enough to cover all students and while I want students to be responsible, it is a little shoddy to point to students as the makers of their own discomforts.
Fair for ministers to purr when enrolments surge along with gold medallists, then to disown the campus segment struggling to stay on?
There are college drop-outs in any climate, but to pass the buck wholly to the students without asking if the demands are fair is more than a tad cruel.
Ask too if students are encouraged to discover the burdens of higher education, not just its perks? After all there is student life and then early working life repaying the student loan before dreaming of better things and the condo in Sri Iskandar. By telling the thousands in schools today that their job is to study as far as they can without telling them that the wrong course will turn their lives into a nightmare or the right course but with intrinsically low real-life applicability — forest management for instance — may force them into penury, is irresponsible.
I’ve seen balding middle-aged senior directors explain to their nieces what skills are valuable to hiring managers. I’ve got nephews whose key concerns are to avoid recruitment into the gangs before they are 14. So I want to stop in their tracks those who handily want to suggest young people should explore their options on their own and not wait for the state to handhold them to the future. We all have different uncles.
Information is asymmetrical and hindsight makes us forget that things were incredibly relative
The state in blindly encouraging parents and their children to pursue higher education whether they have the aptitude, attitude or the money is a major drawback presently.
Government is complicit by being gungho about tertiary education for brownie points, and separate but related unwilling to assist young people to have a reasonable view of what university education entails, especially for the average student — and most students are far more average than parents and the system want to admit.
So paying to go on
The student organisation was correct to point out that the number of on-campus jobs and those needing it are wildly disparate. Campuses do not have active policies from administration to prioritise job creation for students. Jobs off-campus would require public transport connectivity and course registration flexibility, both also absent in our universities by large. Some universities bar women from entry to their own dorms past a certain hour — being a waitress would mean late hours. Most public universities would expel students drinking alcohol, how would they work in a club or bar without risking being associated with alcohol consumption?
University students offer themselves as partially or unskilled workers, but the country aggressively hires foreign workers to cut cost and force long hours. How can students fit into that regimen?
Working students are not uncommon, but to expect students to cope with the structure where there are low on-campus openings, difficulties in meeting work hours off-campus, wage depression brought on by foreign workers, high hours expectations thanks to the abuse of foreign workers and moral prohibitions ruling out obvious possibilities, is ludicrous.
Intestinal degradations
While this is a discussion about resource, who pays what and how one should benefit, it may be valuable to remember that education has a higher goal and every attempt to monetise the process has to be reasonable.
I understand if educational institutions can collect so that they can educate more people since resources are never infinite. But collecting is not the core purpose of institutions purporting to alter human potential. The money is a restriction not the guiding light for education.
The girl arrived at Bangi to get an education. She is now in a hospital. None of us is exempt from fault. To state why things are already fair is missing the point, it probably downgrades the education of those saying it. Because they do not seem to get it.
Let’s learn from the experience, as we do from all experiences. Let’s send the children home with degrees not excuses.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
