The New economic Policy has largely been successful in removing the identification of race with economic occupation, but a newer division appears likely soon to overtake other considerations of social imbalance.

The New economic Policy has largely been successful in removing the identification of race with economic occupation, but a newer division appears likely soon to overtake other considerations of social imbalance. Since the late 1990s women have been outstripping men in universities and other such establishments: Larger percentages of women are admitted to these institutions, larger numbers remain enrolled and, consequently, more women graduate with a first degree. According to higher education Ministry statistics for 2007, women made up 59.3 per cent of new enrolments at public universities and 63 per cent of all graduates. (Combined with data from private institutions, the numbers fall slightly to 55.3 per cent and 57.2 respectively.) The same statistics indicate that men find more educational opportunities at polytechnics and other non-degree awarding bodies, and questions have been raised in the Senate about whether it was necessary to legislate quotas guaranteeing male entrance to universities. No, Deputy higher education Minister Datuk Idris haron told the Upper house last week when winding up his Ministry’s part of the debate on the midterm review of the Ninth Malaysia Plan. Public universities will continue to admit undergraduates on the basis of merit. “Parents today,” he said, “encourage their children, regardless of gender, to obtain an education, and it appears that women are more diligent than men: Merit is the result of this individual industriousness, and the Ministry has no plans to introduce a special quota for men.” The government has defended gender-neutrality admirably well in this area for some time, but the growing sense of concern is not without basis. The country’s fascination with paper qualifications has led to a corresponding over emphasis on professions defined by the equivalence of tertiary education with social status. Coupled with insufficient labour organisation in Malaysia, this trend has led to the demotion of journeyman trades to the level of unskilled labour and social subservience. Developed countries deal with the problem by addressing the imbalance directly in terms of remuneration: Guilds and unions impose high, even exorbitant, fees on services – leading to celebrated cases of, say, Oxford graduates ditching promising careers in investment banking to become plumbers. Quite apart from the economic problems the imbalance will eventual precipitate, the dominance of women in fields unjustly considered socially superior has already led to a heightened insecurity in men – and this may express itself in future social conflict. The student population in public universities is predominantly Malay, and the inequity resulting from the continuing educational advacement of Malay women will likely match a corresponding ‘lack’ in men in the form of a demographic shift towards later marriage, if at all, and fewer children – these are developments we have been able to observe in Singapore generally. eventually, affirmative action will provide a tempting political solution – but any such policy will yield an even greater inequity by promoting men at the expense of women to educational positions that should be determined solely by merit. Policy-makers will instead need to avoid the zero-sum game entirely by focusing not on spurious arguments such as “why are men less capable than women”, but on what it is men are doing instead of going to university. Greater acceptance of skilled trades can be created by encouraging wages to match economic demand–a solution achieved by valuing output on its own terms rather than as a subset of social class. Th e s e mechanisms might seem undoubtedly Marxist, or even borderline Communist, but they feature prominently in all advanced industrial economies in the West today. Therein l ies a more immediate problem: The increased cost of services in these countries is offset by the higher value consumers place on work. In Malaysia, however, as long as the comparative advantage of cheap labour remains entrenched, economic growth can be assured only by the number of people we keep in poverty. education was intended to decouple our economy from this Third World logic, but our project will have failed if we allow the objectives of tertiary education to be derailed by divisive ideas such as race and gender. We have a limited amount of time to fix this before it goes out of control, and we should perhaps give it more attention than the issues of private morality that have been making the headlines recently.
● U-En Ng graduated in mediaeval languages and is a journalist. He is a parliamentary sketchwriter for Malay Mail.

Source: Malay Mail – July 28, 2008