The damaged brain system
By James Chin (The Malaysian Insider)
The most famous “Malaysian” IT invention — the pen drive — was invented in Taiwan by a Malaysian Chinese who could not even enter a public university here. He had to go to Taiwan, get a degree there (which is not recognised here!) and invented the pen drive there. So today, the world thinks it’s a Taiwan invention! Malaysia Boleh!
JULY 23 — One of the wonderful things about living in Malaysia is that we devote so much of our resources into building brain power. We love smart people in Malaysia. Parents spend an obscene amount on tuition classes.
Let’s look at some of the major initiatives by our wonderful government to increase our brain power:
1) Malaysia will produce more than 100,000 PhDs by 2012
2) Creating “knowledge” workers and “world-class” IT industry via the MSC
3) Almost all grants by MOSTI is geared towards science and technology
4) Building new universities left and right. In the 1980s we had fewer than a dozen universities — now we have more than 20 public universities and an equal number of private universities
5) “Apex” and “research” universities allocated extra millions of ringgit with the aim of getting into the top 200 university rankings
6) All sorts of academic prizes from all sorts of dubious exhibitions
7) Smart schools
8) All sorts of scholarships — JPA alone gives more than 2,000 overseas scholarships. If you include Mara and GLCs and private companies, the number is probably somewhere about 6,000-7,000 overseas scholarships plus thousands of local scholarships
9) “Brain gain” programme where we try to entice successful Malaysian scientists to come back to help our R&D
10) All sorts of government-backed programmes like the invention awards, best ICT Company, PM’s innovation awards, smart partnership, etc.
Yet, somehow we seem to be going the opposite direction. Mind you it’s been there for more than a decade already and, correct me if I am wrong; the MSC has been a dismal failure since the “knowledge” industry has not taken off and no major Malaysian IT inventions since the inception of the MSC. Cyberjaya is still years behind Singapore.
In fact, the most famous “Malaysian” IT invention — the pen drive — was invented in Taiwan by a Malaysian Chinese who could not even enter a public university here. He had to go to Taiwan, get a degree there (which is not recognised here!) and invented the pen drive there. So today, the world thinks it’s a Taiwan invention! Malaysia Boleh!
The brain gain programme is so successful that almost all the scientists who came back to work here have resigned from the public universities or government research centres, and the bulk of them have left for overseas again. Needless to say, their major complaints were racism (almost all were non-Bumiputeras) and red tape. But no one wants to admit to this since it’s not a very smart thing to admit failure.
Meanwhile we are rushing to produce 100,000 PhDs. Since most of these 100,000 PhDs will be awarded by local public universities you really have to wonder about the quality.
Read more at: The damaged brain system
