More postgraduate students - Quantity versus Quality

This seems like a busy week for education issues. The Zahid Higher Education Report was released to the public and I'm sure Tony and I will be blogging about it as more details are known. As usual, we're a step behind YB Lim Kit Siang who has already blogged about it here. But in this post, I'd like to discuss a report in the Star a few days ago quoting Higher Education Minister as saying that there will be a three fold increase in the enrolment of post graduate students in our local varsities, both private and public.

"Higher Education Minister Datuk Mustapa Mohamed said the current enrolment of 39,000 master’s and 7,000 PhD holders would increase to 116,000 and 21,000 respectively by 2010."

Let's analyze this statement further.

Where will the bulk of these postgraduate students receive their degrees? Mostly from public universities. According to Table 11-6 of the 9MP, out of the projected 21,680 PhD enrolment for 2010, 21,410 (98.9%) will be enrolled in public universities. Out of the projected 117,320 Masters student enrolment for 2010, 111,550 (95.1%) will be enrolled in public universities.

The first question that comes to mind is this - where are all these 'extra' postgraduate students going to come from? According to the same Table, to achieve this three fold increase in postgraduate student enrolment, we need to have an annual average growth rate of 26% for the next 5 years. That seems like a pretty tall task. Imagine a faculty with 40 Phd students and 40 Masters students. To achieve a three fold increase in enrolment, this faculty has to take in an average of 16 new students in both the Masters and PhD programs for the next five years (closer to 20 if you take into account graduating students).

I am quite sure that if one requires a department to increase its intake of students at such a rate, quality will surely be compromised. Most programs probably won't get sufficient applications to makeup the additional places required for growth. And if they do, it probably means that they are letting in students who might not have otherwised qualified.

One can only begin to imagine possible consequences. Since most departments would not be willing to fail or to hold back the underperfomers, what might happen is that we'd get a flood of underqualified Masters or PhD holders coming out from our public universities.

I had an earlier post here with some recommendations of how to increase the % of PhD holders among the academic staff in our public universities. I'd like to thank the many people who posted replies and enlightened me on some of the intricacies to applying to do a PhD within the public university system. I'm quite sure that some of the posts were from current lecturers within the system.

One of my suggestions was to force those lecturers who cannot get into foreign universities to complete their PhDs locally. Some lecturers with PhD's will struggle mightily to complete their degrees in an overseas environment that is foreign, competitive and difficult. At Duke, even with very well qualified applicants, the completion rate for PhDs stands somewhere between 60 to 70%. It makes more sense for these lecturers to try to complete their PhDs in a local environment.

But getting our non-PhD lecturers who are underperformers to obtain their PhDs locally is one thing, tripling the number of PhD students in 5 years is a whole new ball game. As if a mass of underemployed and underqualified undergraduates is not enough, should we exacerbate the situation with a mass of underemployed and underqualified postgraduate students as well?

Worse yet, what if some of these post graduate students who cannot get jobs in the private sector gets 'absorbed' back into the public university system as professors and lecturers? Then we're back to square one (if not worse).

We also have to look at the other side of the equation. Increasing the number of postgraduate students also means that we have to increase the number of qualified professors who can teach and supervise these postgraduate students. Given that we currently have less than 60% of our academic staff who have PhDs (and we will only reach this 60% target in 2010), is it realistic to assume that we have the capacity to train TRIPLE the number of postgraduate students at the Masters and PhD levels by 2010? The numbers just don't seem to add up!

My assessment of the situation goes something like this.

The numbers in the 9MP are just targets. The Higher Education Ministry and the administrators in the public universities are probably aware that a three fold increase in the number of postgrads is not viable. They will probably aim for a two fold increase (still problematic, for the same reasons outlined above). They probably won't get sufficient local applications. They will open up some places to foreigners, probably from other developing countries. They will also try to hire foreign lecturers and professors to fill up the 'gaps' in capacity and manpower. But the quality of the courses as well as the graduates will inevitably be affected, negatively.

I think that Tok Pa is caught betwen a rock and a hard place. To achieve developed country status and to upgrade the reputation of our local varsities requires more postgraduate students as one of the elements. But without a more substantive change in the structure and culture of local varsities (hiring and promotion decisions, the competitiveness of academic salaries, incentives to publish and do good research), quality will have to be sacrificed to achieve quantitative results.