Inter-Varsity Grads... Errr, So?

In a piece of news which made the frontpage of the Star on Sunday, it was announced by the Minister of Higher Education, Datuk Dr Shafie Salleh that there may come a day when undergraduates can hop "between universities accruing credits instead of being stuck with just the courses offered by their own university."

The Minister has also proudly proclaimed this as a vision for the Ministry, "to be the first country in the Asean region to offer this flexible credit collection system."

As part of this scheme, the Ministry has taken two years to deliver a "Malaysian Qualifications Framework" (MQF)to streamline qualifications offered by institutions of higher learning which can be used as a reference point for entry into programmes as well as for credit transfers. Universities and colleges, private and public may also be rated in accordance to the framework.

Dr Shafie said that once the MQF had been finalised, undergraduates could collect credits from different universities but still graduate from the universities they had enrolled in... He described the inter-university credit collection system as "liberalising".

Forgive me for being just a tad dense, after more than one day of thinking about the credit transfer system... I've yet to figure out what's so "liberalising" about it? Mind you, there's nothing wrong with setting up a credit transfer system. I'm just scratching my head as to how this is regarded as "big news" justifying it's frontpage lead, and how is it that this has become such an important "vision" for the Malaysian higher education system?

As far as I can see, the above is purely an administrative framework which will not make any significant impact on the qualitative aspect of our higher education system. It is not a big deal as, universities overseas do "permit" credit transfers, but through recognition of the quality of courses conducted by the source university, as well as an academic evaluation of the specific candidate. The "administrative" system may instead jeopardise the quality of the better institutions, as it'll dictate the universities to "accept" students from weaker universities, removing elements of autonomy at individual universities.

What I'd like to see hit the frontpage news from the Ministry of Higher Education is how it's dealing with issues such as transparency in promotion exercises of university academics, improvements in the quality of overall student growth and maturity both academically and socially, as well as the age old issues of meritocracy in the enrolment of students into local universities. Measures such as the MQF are fair enough, but they don't and will not bring about the much needed improvement in the quality of our local public universities.