98 Mukherjee, Singh, Fernandez-Chung and Marimuthu
per student than Malaysia (UIS 2014, Table B5, p. 158). Also at stake is the
quality of graduates and their ability to be employed at levels and salaries
commensurate with their qualifications. Moreover, the productive capacity
of the country to employ graduates needs to be assured if public funds
are not to be utilized in supporting a brain drain.
Quality of Secondary Schooling
Countries seek international testimony for their primary and secondary
school systems as the quality of secondary graduates seeking university
admission is of considerable significance. In recent years, Malaysia has
seen a groundswell of private locally and internationally financed schools
which contribute to the country’s goal of becoming a regional education
hub; are increasingly perceived as profitable business investments; and
have provided alternatives to Malaysian parents voting with their feet,
registering their concerns about the performance of the public school
system.
Parents point to recent international performance ratings, Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA)^2 and Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)^3 which show declining academic
achievement compared to ASEAN neighbours such as lower income
Vietnam, and much below Korea in the key areas of Mathematics, Science
and Reading. In the 2012 PISA data, Malaysia ranked 52nd for Mathematics,
59th for Reading, and 53rd for Science with an overall ranking of 52nd;
Vietnam 17th, 20th and 8th with an overall ranking of 17th; and Korea
5th, 5th and 7th with 5th as overall placing. The story is similar for TIMSS
ratings. For both Mathematics and Science, scores of Malaysian students
declined significantly between 2007 and 2011, from 474 in 2007 to 440 in
2011 in Mathematics and from 471 in 2007 to 426 in 2011 in Science. In 2007
Malaysian students performed better than Thai students in Mathematics
but in 2011 Thai students outperformed Malaysian students.
More than achievement scores perhaps, the greater indictment comes
from a school-to-work longitudinal study which found that schooling had
“in large measure been responsible for a memory-based learning designed
for the average student” (Nagaraj et al. 2009). A lawmaker has expressed
concern regarding entry into an “extremely competitive job market with
insufficient skills.... SPM holders with A or B grades in English remained
unable to hold conversations in English, leading to low employability” (The