Thursday 27 June 2019

Higher Education – Access and Equity


Building capacity alone will not address equity and access issues that confront a significant part of our population.

Institutions and regulatory agents must be more proactive in their roles to bring people with limited access and reach to higher education into educational institutions. Malaysian regulatory services, and indeed the public are still steeped in outdated, elitist notions of entitlement and eligibility to higher education. These notions are inherent in our social structures that are intensely hierarchical, almost like caste systems. Even now, in this so-called enlightened age, people are heard to say that not everyone needs to be educated, or in debates on language, that not everyone needs to learn English. These notions are also partly inherited from our colonial past. The British education system was until recent times very elitist. But even the colonialists have changed. The Dearing Report of the United Kingdom, published only 20 years ago in 1997, recognized that universities cannot hide any longer behind axioms like ‘education for its own sake’ and must take action to make higher education serve the interests of the individual and the nation.

Higher education policies in Malaysia do not give sufficient attention to this issue. Quality and standards and the reputation of universities are their main arguments to keep learners out. This must not continue. Regulators must look at new strategies to include a broader range of learners into post-secondary and higher education. And, if their skills are not adequate for higher education, to introduce measures that will bring those skills to par. Keeping people out is not a strategy to widen access nor to improve quality in education. The real measure of success of higher education institutions must be based on how they created strategies to improve access. Poverty, differentials in earning and the casting of status based on education, all social ills will be removed by broadening access. How to do this? The following policy changes will help;

Preparatory programs to bridge learners into higher education. The bridging course that played an important role in preparing those without formal entry qualification into higher education was outlawed by the Ministry of Education policies. Yet, such courses have been recognized the world over as a means to mitigate access issues;

To add to secondary education syllabus, a non-examinable preparatory course to tune students to think about education beyond the school;

Language, soft skills and Learning to Learn Courses to be run parallelly with substantive programs in colleges and universities;

Reexamination of the duration and content of part-time programs in all fields to encourage adult working employees into part-time higher education;

Permit secondary schools to conduct preparatory courses from private higher educational institutions or part of such courses in the school to mitigate the cost of travel, accommodation, etc.

Rethinking strategies for distance education that will allow universities and colleges to conduct part of their programs in the distance education mode, including in secondary schools with support of schoolteachers.

The irony is that this country is no stranger to improving access to education. It has already implemented successful strategies to improve access and equity in higher education. The special secondary schools, the Matriculation programs, the MARA colleges, and UiTM are all the products of a successful strategy to mitigate access issues. These steps are, however, not inclusive and for that reason remain ostracized from our perceptions of fairness and equity. 

None of these institutions or their underlying policies have to be sacrificed to introduce strategies of inclusiveness within the general educational institutions in the country. Both public and private sector institutions can be conscripted through encouragements and incentives to make space and create pathways to those left out of higher education. Recent strategies by public universities to recruit high fee students into normal programs and through part-time courses show that they have the capacity. What is sadly absent is a commitment from them to their most profound obligation – to improve access to those who are excluded. This must change.

5 comments:

  1. Equity and access- two words made “sensitive” by the politics of race and religion and which directly fueled the phenomenal growth of Malaysian private education catering largely to non-Malay locked out of public universities and colleges.

    Ironically, it was exactly equity and access that motivated the likes of Arshad Ayub (now a Tan Sri) in the Sixties when he pioneered preparatory programs in the old Maktab Mara and later ITM for Malay youth. He undertook his mission with an evangelical zeal since he believed that alone was the key to the social engineering and justice he often talked about.

    More than sixty years later, these same two words continue to trouble Malaysians and their “leaders” who still have not learnt their lessons.

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  2. The challenge really is for the excluded sectors of society to organize themselves so that collective and sustained pressure can be brought to bear on decision makers to effect the policy changes proposed in this article. It is therefore important for those of us who can to support the efforts of organisations, political or otherwise, that have the empowerment of the marginalized as their objective.

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  3. Inclusive Education: Examining Equity on Five Continents.
    Alfredo J Artiles, Elizabeth B Kozleski, Federico R Waitoller
    Harvard Education Press, 2011

    https://scholar.google.com.my/scholar?q=education+systems+research+harvard&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DPIvkYskTFRQJ

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  5. Very interesting and informative post on one of the problems in the higher education sector in Malaysia. As the Malaysian population progresses, the issues of access and equity to higher educational institutions will become more & more important, especially for those who are unable to continue their higher education due to reasons like poverty, insufficient academic credits from primary/secondary schooling, etc..

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