The Prime Minister announced on Saturday (Aug 15) at the PKR National Congress in Ayer Keroh that the Universities and University Colleges Act 1971 (Act 30) will be abolished and that the matter will go to Cabinet next Wednesday. Malaysian university students have waited a long time for the government to acknowledge and accept that students are entitled to the same constitutional freedoms as every other citizen.
A repeal of AUKU has appeared in the Pakatan Harapan manifestos for both the 14th and 15th general elections and as recently as February this year. Meanwhile, the Higher Education Ministry maintained that the Act remained relevant and 40 students from more than 30 NGOs marched to Parliament on Feb 9 to demand reform.
As such, we can only measure the government’s true commitment to this announcement by the Bill that follows and its tabling.
We also know from experience that repealing a provision is not the same as fixing systemic issues of the higher education system. The Section 15(5)(a) provision under which we were charged was struck down by the Court of Appeal in 2011. Parliament then repealed it in June 2012, which is why the Federal Court struck out the government’s appeal five months later without ruling on the merits.
Since 1971, AUKU has been amended seven times, and as such, an act amended that often is clearly built on the wrong premise; the correct way forward is to legislate a new one rather than continuously tweak the old one.
What remains, and what is genuinely at stake in the replacement, is the machinery: how a public university is constituted, who appoints its board and vice-chancellor, how it raises revenue and on what terms it admits students.
Therefore, if the case for a replacement Act rests on administrative workability, that case has to be argued on its merits, and it must not carry over the old control provisions into the new Act.
The new Act must take proactive steps to commit public universities to the equitable admission of qualified Malaysians.
Ministry data through MyMoheS as at Dec 31, 2025 records 634,706 students at public universities, of whom 56,565 or 8.9% are international. At the five research universities, the proportion is far higher at 22%, or 41,097 of 186,824, and 12,962 of those are undergraduates admitted through the open channel.
The ministry has said in the past that the UPU quota is filled first and international entry sits over and above it. That is a claim that nobody outside the Ministry can verify because programme-level capacity and intake data are not published.
The same open channel or direct intake also admits Malaysians. A public university stated in its published fee schedule that open channel places carry no subsidy, that applicants pay full fees and that admission is assessed against minimum entry requirements without reference to merit marks.
A qualified Malaysian ranked on merit can be refused a subsidised place and then offered the same programme at the same university through the direct intake open channel that does not rank on merit, provided the family can pay. Whatever that is, it is not equal treatment, and it impacts the students least able to absorb it the hardest.
Universities have drifted towards commercial channels because the public grant has not kept pace. Budget 2026 gives the Higher Education Ministry RM18.60bil against RM18.09bil in 2025, an increase of only 2.76%. A public university told to expand while its operating grant barely moves will sell places. The remedy is to fund it properly and limit the scale of direct intake.
We therefore ask the government to commit to four things before the bill is tabled:
- Publish the data: Intake by programme, by channel, by fee level, by race and by nationality, for every public university, for the past ten years.
- Guarantee equitable admissions under the Act: Subsidised places for qualified Malaysians should be a statutory obligation with an established baseline, and any parallel commercial channel should be capped, disclosed and merit-ranked on the same basis as the mainstream.
- Fund public universities as public institutions: Through a multi-year operating grant tied to domestic undergraduate places rather than to revenue raised from full-fee intakes.
- Hold open consultations: Publish the draft Bill for comment and bring student groups, academic staff bodies, students’ representative councils and the opposition into the drafting.
Repealing AUKU answers a question from 1971. It does not answer the one facing a family in 2026 whose child has the grades and still has no place. If the new Act settles only the first, we will have won the argument we started 16 years ago and lost the one that matters now.
Muhammad Hilman Idham and Woon King Chai were two of the four Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia students charged under Section 15(5)(a) of AUKU in 2010 for their presence during the Hulu Selangor by-election.Their challenge produced the Court of Appeal ruling of Oct 31, 2011 declaring the provision unconstitutional. They write in their personal capacities.
