DEC 16 — Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin is reported to have said that he wanted good policies under his ministry’s previous administration to continue to be implemented.
I am hoping those good policies include not to continue with doing well in the ranking games because, as Prof Wing Lam said, education is not a sport.
According to the provost and chief executive officer at University of Reading Malaysia, we should not compare universities with football teams competing in the higher education equivalent of the English Premier League. There are far more important things we need our universities to focus on.
We have been told, many times over, not to be obsessed with rankings.
A certain Ong Kian Ming, then Head of Penang Institute in Kuala Lumpur, issued a media statement in September 2017, that the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) should not be overly obsessed with Malaysia’s performance on the global university ranking system, but instead focus on improving the local measures of university quality developed by the MOHE and the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA).
According to Ong, if we focus on improving our universities according to more suitable locally developed indicators, the output of our universities in terms of the quality of research, the quality of teaching and the quality of graduates will also improve.
Two years later, the eminent Prof Dzulkifli Abdul Razak expressed how he was “increasingly unsure of the worth of the ranking game.” The issues he had had for the last decade or so were still unresolved: The whole exercise was “intellectually dishonest, perhaps bordering on unethical.”
He saw it fit that we “skip” the ranking game. We should move on.
When the obsession with ranking seems to continue unabated, Prof Dzulkifli wrote in July this year that there was a new ranking of “cities on their ‘affordability’ for students around the world.”
There is now another ranking to fuss about.
Kuala Lumpur was ranked by QS as “Asia’s most affordable study hub”, and placed 28th globally for 2023.
On that note, Prof Dzulkifli wondered whether there was a departure from regarding higher education as a public good, as advocated by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
Does the second-time Higher Education Minister share the same thoughts as Prof Dzulkifli? Or the same views of Ong?
We await with bated breath Khaled’s presentation of MOHE’s direction next month.
Will we continue the obsession with the ranking game, or will we skip it and move on?
*This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
