More foreign undergrads at UM?

Have been so busy with work that I failed to notice this Star report which appeared earlier this week entitled "UM out to woo foreign students". I only took notice of it as I was reading a post from fellow blogger, Whatalulu.

Just a couple of quick notes on this.

Firstly, I've said in earlier posts that I have no problems with the government trying to recruit more foreigners at the postgraduate level but I do have a problem with the recruitment of more foreign students at the undergraduate level, especially if these students are subsidized at the same rate as Malaysian students. Undergraduate spaces are already precious and cannot fulfill the demand of tax paying Malaysians. To bring in foreigners just for the purposes of increasing one's ranking (instead of taking other more substantive measures such as improving the quality of teaching and research) is pretty ludicrous. (Now, if it was for the purposes of increasing revenue for local universities so that they can improve the pay of lecturers and the universities' infrastructure, that would be another story)

Secondly, recruiting just 300 foreign students isn't exactly going to catapult UM into the category of LSE or UCal Berkeley or Melbourne in terms of the percentage of foreign students. You need a couple of thousand to make a decent dent in percentage terms. And if this is indeed the long term policy of UM and the MOHE, then see the first point above.