Explaining Bumi policy, UiTMC V-C says 60pc students in bottom income group because M40 now poorer
The increase of the B40 household students was not attributed to new entries, but from existing students, who were previously in the M40 household income group, but lost their source of income during the Covid-19 pandemic.
(MMO) – Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) vice-chancellor Datuk Shahrin Sahib @ Sahibuddin said that about 60 per cent or 114,000 out of the 190,000 students in the university are from the B40 group.
Shahrin said the number of the B40 group has increased up to 20 per cent since the Covid-19 pandemic which gave a new challenge to the university in playing its role as a provider of higher education to Malays and Bumiputeras, Utusan Malaysia reported.
He pointed out that the university is currently facing paradoxical challenges where there is no accurate solution to ensuring graduates can improve their economic situation.
“Today’s era is a paradox, no matter what you do, it’s not necessarily right. UiTM student profile in our current system shows B40 is about 59.9 per cent. The majority of our students are from the B40 group. Their family household income is below RM5,000.
“What is also a phenomenon is that there are 28 per cent of T20 students. This shows that there are Malays who have come out of the economic crisis, they are growing up (having children studying at university), so where is the issue? The issue is M40.
“In our data, M40 is only 12 per cent. In a brief analysis, during Covid-19, when the private sector made reductions in workers, many of the Malays involved were from the M40 group, who were affected.
“So they (family) are the senior managers, assistant general managers, senior engineers who lose their jobs and what do they end up doing? They work as an e-hailing driver to get back into the workforce. But despite that, the data from our student system shows that the groups are still struggling.
“So this is why the group, which originally M40, fell into the B40 category, thus the 40 per cent increase to 60 per cent,” he was quoted as saying.
