Incentives for varsities
BY HARIATI AZIZANThe Ministry of Higher Education is looking at an incentive package for foreign universities to woo them to set up branch campuses in Malaysia.
Higher Education Minister Datuk Dr Shafie Mohd Salleh, who visited the Study in Australia 2004 exhibition in Kuala Lumpur recently said that the Cabinet had directed him to study the incentive package offered by the country's tourism industry and design a similar package to help boost Malaysia as the regional centre for education excellence.
“They have directed me to use the tourism incentive package as a model for education. This is to encourage more foreign universities to come here. The incentives will include tax exemption for equipment, low premium for land required for the foreign university's campus, and electricity and water tariffs,” he said.
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Wooing Malaysian students at the launch of the education fair are (from left) Australian High Commission education counsellor Matthew Evans, trade commissioner Michelle Wade and High Commissioner James Wise. |
Dr Shafie earlier announced that his ministry was looking at amending the Private Higher Education Act 1996 to allow foreign universities with branch campuses here to offer courses without having to get approval from the Private Education Department and National Accreditation Board (LAN).
However, he said, the universities had to be reputable ones and the courses must already be accredited by a quality assurance agency or accreditation body that was equivalent to LAN, or if the Public Services Department recognised the course.
The ministry is also looking at higher education policies from other countries to revamp the local tertiary education sector.
On another note, he said that his ministry is exploring possibilities of two other Australian universities setting up branch campuses here. Australia is the top destination for Malaysian students with about 27,000 of them currently enrolled Australian universities. Of these, close to 12,000 are “offshore” students, that is, studying in twinning programmes in Malaysia.
An area that the ministry is keen to collaborate with Australian universities is the health sciences. “We have 40,000 vacancies for allied health science professionals but students still go for conventional medical courses like medicine, pharmacy and dentistry.
“The allied health science programmes in Australia are very established so I hope to draw on their expertise.”
(Allied health science is made up of a large, diverse group of health field occupations which meet many necessary functions in the health care system. Examples of allied health sciences are Biomedicine, Optometry, Food Science, etc)
Dr Shafie added that although these courses are offered at a few local public universities, much still needs to be done to raise awareness of school students in this field.
“Students do not know about these allied science courses, so local universities that offer them should collaborate with school counsellors to raise their awareness in them. Currently, there are 48,000 unemployed graduates in the country, and if we had lured them into the health sciences, the problem could have been alleviated.”
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