Recent Development

How did graduate education develop in the last twenty years in Malaysia? Graduate schools grow because there are graduate students knocking at their doors. Besides the universities, the government research institutions, such as the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI), the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia (RRIM), the Palm Oil Research Institute of Malaysia (PORIM) etc. were also demanding places to be made available for their young research staff. Major providers of this kind of training were the Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), and the University of Malaya (UM), where strength in the sciences was clearly evident beginning in the Eighties. As a result, more and more Malaysian research scientists were being trained locally, using local problems as their focus of graduate research. Soon these universities were establishing "graduate schools" - separate entities within the universities which handle all matters related to graduate education, such as processing applications, handling immigration matters, appointment of supervisory committees, external examiners, etc.

The University of Malaya has a total of 4559 graduate students as at end of November 1999. Of these, only 8.9% are international students. Slightly less than 12% of UM's graduate students are pursuing their doctoral degrees (Table 1).

In the early Eighties, the UPM had less than 500 graduate students, and very few international students. Today, there are 558 international students, who make up about ten percent of the Graduate School enrolment⁵. They come from 44 countries, ranging from Algeria to Yemen, from Afghanistan to Taiwan, from Burundi to Somalia. However, Sudan and Indonesia hold a tie for first place with 102 students each for the 1999/2000 academic year. Bangladesh, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and Thailand also have sufficient numbers (ranging from 24 to 58) to enable their students to set up "country clubs" for mutual moral support. Majority of the international students are pursuing higher degrees (48% for Ph.D.'s) in the sciences, which is to be expected since this university has particular strength in agriculture and allied sciences. The UPM has been quite aggressive in recruiting foreign students. One method used by this university (and also UUM) is to go on road shows overseas-Africa, Indonesia, Cambodia and China.

The USM had 2,978 graduate students as at December 1999, including 179 post-graduate diploma students (Table 3). Graduate school enrollment at this university comprises about 20% of the student population. There is also some degree of internationalization here, in that nearly ten percent (283 students) of graduate students are foreign students, coming from 37 countries. Areas of strength in USM include the pure sciences (e.g. biological, physical, chemical, marine etc.), the applied sciences (pharmaceutical, computer, etc.), technological and engineering, pure arts (humanities and social sciences) and applied arts (educational technology etc).

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