Foreign versus Local Grads: Take XXX

The 'X'es refer to the many times we posted or discussed this issue on our blog. I wanted to revisit this issue after reading the following comments from Dr. Azmi Sharom at one of the panels in the recently concluded The Star-ACMS conference:

Among the points he brought up was the perception that foreign graduates were better than local graduates.

“Both go through the same schooling system, and there are an equally bad number of lecturers overseas as there are locally,” he said, rebutting some commonly given reasons.

I'll be blogging more on my thoughts on the conference when their full report in the education pullout appears this weekend. But for the time being, let's reflect over the remarks of Dr. Sharom.

Firstly, I agree with the spirit of his comments which is that we shouldn't unfairly judge against a local graduate versus a foreign graduate especially when it comes to important decisions like hirings and promotions. We have to look at people on a case by case basis. I'm sure that Tony has had his fair share of poor quality applicants from both foreign and local universities.

That being said, from a purely statistical point, I would not think that I would be wrong if I said that the OVERALL quality of foreign graduates is better than local graduates. Before you start castigating me, please hear me out first.

There are, by some latest estimates, approximately 300,000 students in our local public universities (I'm excluding those in the local private universities) versus 30,000 students in foreign universities (I'm limiting these to universities in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ and excluding universities in Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. For those of you interested in taking a short detour, go this this MOHE link to find estimates of our students currently studying overseas. You might want to ask why more than 5,000 of our students are currently studying in Egpyt!)

So, even if the quality distribution (however you want to measure it) is exactly the same for local and foreign graduates, the sheer number of local graduates makes it so much more likely that we'll encounter more of them who are of poor quality (poor written and spoken English, poor SPM and university results, poor computer skills etc...). Most of us don't work by proportions in terms of our impressions.

For example, if we were interviewing candidates for a job and we find that 16 out of 20 local grads and 4 out of 5 foreign grads are of poor quality, the sheer number of poor quality local grads will likely overwhelm our impressions.

But I'd probably go a step further. I don't think the distribution of quality is the same between foreign and local grads. I think it is definitely biased in favor of foreign grads. I would say that at least a third of foreign grads are government sponsored in one way or another (JPA, Petronas, Tenaga, Telekom, etc...). The fact that these students were selected for scholarships probably means that they were above average performers during secondary school.

I would also say that perhaps another third of foreign grads are high performers who would have gotten government scholarships but didn't because of various reasons (didn't do that well in BM, studied in Singapore, missed the JPA by a few As, didn't want to be bonded by the government etc...). Many of these high performers are from middle class families who have scrounged and saved so as to enable their kids to go to an overseas university. And many of these parents wouldn't have made these kinds of sacrifices if they thought that their kids were going to 'waste' their money on an overseas education. Furthermore, the middle class and mostly urban bias means that many of these kids who do end up overseas are already sufficiently proficient in English. This, of course, gives them a leg up when they do return home and apply for jobs and go out into the working world. It also further cements the perception that foreign grads are somehow better than local grads.

There's probably another third or so who end up overseas because their parents are rich and not solely for their academic prowess. I'm sure we've seen our fair share of spoilt, rich brats who start their first job driving a BMW or Mercedez to work. I know I have. For these kids, there are always other options such as working for daddy's company instead of slaving away at that 9to5 job. Thus they are not likely to skew the public perception of what the average foreign grad is like compared to an average local grad.

These factors, combined with the fact that the selection mechanism for local universities are much more lax (except for the high demand courses like Medicine, Law and Economics), is it that surprising that the overall perception of foreign grads being better than local grads holds true?

There are of course exceptions to these rules. There are a bunch of great local grads out there, some of whom work for Tony, I'm sure. When I was working at BCG, one of the top performers there was a graduate from USM and another two great associates were from UM and UITM respectively. There are also hopeless foreign grads who goof off at work and regularly go for that 3 o'clock beer and siesta. But perceptions are built on OVERALL impressions and for this, the stats cannot lie.

The curve is definitely skewed in favor of foreign grads. The numbers work in their favor too. There are fewer of them and the selection and signalling mechanisms operate in such a way as to ensure that the overall quality of foreign grads is higher than that of local grads. It is not so much the fact that there are crap lecturers in both foreign and local universities (which is definitely true) but the fact that you have better and a smaller number of quality students going overseas versus the masses who attend the local public universities that goes on to shape public perception.

I don't think this gap perception is likely to decrease especially given the push to increase the intake of local public universities without a commensurate increase in teaching and related resources.

There's also the issue of further differentiation within foreign and local universities but that is for another post.