Never ending JPA scholarship 'controversies'

The latest JPA scholarship results have been announced and not surprisingly, it has been met with howls of protests among the usual quarters, starting with the MCA.

Here are a few links to some newspaper reports that document these protests as well as the JPA's response to these protests. You can access them here, here and here.

Protests and appeals should not be surprising given the limited number of scholarships and the higher number of 'deserving' candidates. But the JPA is not helpless in trying to quell some of these protests.

What the JPA needs to do is the following:

(i) Clarify the objectives of the JPA scholarship

- Is it to give an opportunity for academically excellent Malaysian students to study abroad?
- Is it to create a pool of talented workers who would come back to serve the country in the civil service?
- Is it to reward students from academically disadvantaged backgrounds e.g. from rural areas, from lower class families, from Sabah and Sarawak etc... an opportunity to study abroad?
- Does awarding the local versus the foreign JPA scholarship fulfill different objectives e.g. are those who are academically more gifted awarded the foreign JPA scholarship?
- How important is the racial 'quota' in determining who ultimately gets this scholarship?

Right now, my impression is that the JPA is trying to be all things to all people and trying to fulfill too many fast changing objectives with the awarding of these scholarships.

(ii) Make the criterion for obtaining these scholarships transparent to the public

- Hopefully what this will do is to quell some of the protests. At least if the public knows what these criterion are e.g. to reward students from rural areas, they will understand even if they might not agree with these criteria.

I always feel that more information and transparency is better.

(iii) Have some sort of tracking mechanism to see if these objectives have been met

- For example, JPA could easily track the statistics of different scholarship recipients e.g. % of scholars obtaining places to study in the top universities in the UK or US, graduation rates of scholars with different academic abilities based on their SPM results, % of scholars who return to Malaysia after graduation, % of scholars who return to Malaysia and work for the civil service, etc...
- Using these statistics, the JPA as well as their political masters can decide on whether their objectives have been fulfilled and if not, how the criteria for selection needs to be changed to fulfill these objectives

Right now, most JPA scholars who go abroad either don't come back to Malaysia or if they do, end up working in the private sector which is what they would have done anyways, without the JPA scholarship. Hence, it is a waste of taxpayers money.

My sense is that for this year's JPA scholarship, many more students who did not achieve academically stellar SPM results and who were from rural areas were awarded a disproportionate share of the scholarships while many students who were more academically superior but who are from the urban areas were rejected.

We've blogged about the JPA scholarships many, many times in this blog. I will summarize some of the recommendations which have been put forth here:

(i) Award these scholarships only after these students have applied to and obtained places in foreign universities
(ii) Give priority to those students who have obtained places in some of the top schools in foreign universities based on a pre-approved list of universities
(iii) Bond these students so that they have to return to Malaysia to serve in the civil service

If I were advising the Malaysian government on this matter, I would recommend the following steps:

(i) Refer to the JPA foreign scholarships as the JPA scholarships. Call the local scholarships something else since most of the attention is paid to the places for foreign universities.
(ii) Restrict the number of JPA foreign scholarships so that you can be more selective about who you pick to received these scholarships.
(iii) Create an administrative layer within the civil service that is specifically in charge of 'taking in' these JPA scholars as civil servants so that their skills and expertise can be utilized for the public good
(iv) Allow other GLCs to recruit these JPA scholars but with the caveat that these GLCs have to pay back a certain value of the scholarships (but with a discount) so that the taxpayers' money is accounted for

I would make it absolutely clear that the JPA foreign scholarships will be awarded to the best and the brightest who are willing to come back to serve their country. This way, the JPA scholarships will have a focus instead of trying to be all things to all people.

And hopefully, end some of these always occurring 'controversies' about who is or is not deserving of a JPA foreign scholarship.