Let’s raise the game

Attracting talent: Allowing foreign graduates to work in the country after graduation would increase the available talent pool. – 123rf.com

MALAYSIA has, for at least the past 20 years, positioned itself as a regional, if not global, hub for higher education.

Arguably, a key strength is the diversity of the higher education sector, which encompasses 20 public universities and over 430 private higher education institutions, including 11 foreign branch campuses.

Local institutions have also made headway in global league tables, with Universiti Malaya (UM) ranked 70th in the 2023 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings.

The Malaysia Education Blueprint 2015-2025 (Higher Education) set a target of 250,000 international students by 2025.

The Higher Education Ministry’s most recently available 2021 statistics indicated an international student population of 131,255, highlighting that there is still a long way to go.

Even after taking into account the Covid-19 pandemic, the target of 250,000 may prove to be overly ambitious, given the increasing competition for international students not just from de facto destinations such as the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, but also emerging players such as United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Academic City, Qatar’s Education City, South Korea’s Global Education City and Mauritius’ Uniciti Education Hub.

A key missing piece from Malaysia’s higher education hub strategy is the opportunity for talented foreign graduates to remain in the country, join the workforce and contribute to economic development.

International students are not only seeking a high-quality education, but also opportunities to develop their careers after graduation.

As a case in point, in 2019, the UK government reintroduced the two-year graduate visa, allowing international students an opportunity to stay and work in the UK for two years.

This was in response to mounting competition from study destinations such as Australia and Canada, both of which provide routes for post-study employment and longer-term residence.

Today, the UK has already hit its international student target of 600,000 by 2030 – nearly ten years earlier than planned, despite the global pandemic and Brexit.Taking things a step further, the UK government in 2022 also introduced the High Potential Individual (HPI) route, enabling any graduate from the world’s Top 50 universities to stay in the UK for up to three years.

Similarly, the UAE announced “golden visas” providing 10-year renewable residency for graduates from both global Top 100 and local UAE universities.

Needless to say, competition for international students is hotting up, and Malaysia needs to raise its game if it wishes to be a major player in the changing landscape of international education.

Education, employment and talent are all inextricably linked. Allowing foreign graduates the opportunity to work in the country after graduation would also be in Malaysia’s own interest, increasing the available talent pool, helping to address acute talent shortages in areas such as information technology and finance, and counterbalancing talent attrition due to brain drain, which Human Resources Minister V. Sivakumar recently reported was at 5.6% of the total population compared with a global average of 3.6%.

One must also ask if there is any logic to providing international students with high-quality education only to see them leave the country after their studies, taking potentially valuable skills along with them.

Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin recently said: “We cannot just be an international student hub. The Global Malaysia Outreach agenda will be revived so that we can be a talent and knowledge hub, and centre of universal knowledge.”

Put simply, Malaysia needs to reenvision its strategy as a higher education hub into one that both draws and retains talent from across the globe.

Prof Wing Lam is the provost and chief executive officer at University of Reading Malaysia, an international branch campus of University of Reading, United Kingdom. He has held a variety of academic positions in Malaysia, Singapore and the UK. Prof Wing completed his PhD in computer science at King’s College London in 1994. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles and journals. His current areas of research interest include technology and innovation. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.