Responding to Dr Azly Rahman’s very honest article on UiTM and the plight of Malay students, I would like to add in support of his views that such students can only survive under a small shell in their homogeneity.
They can only work for the government with such mentality and with their lack of competence. Institutes such as UiTM are producing Malay students with an-inward looking mentality and lack of exposure to competition.
How many of such students can the government support in terms of jobs? Malaysia has one of the largest civil servants as a ratio to the entire population. Their salary is paid for by the taxes which are disproportionately borne by the non-Malays.
Our tax system cannot support all the bumiputeras to be in the public sector and some will have to find work in the private sector. Unfortunately, in the private sector they are faced with stereotypical discrimination.
Good Malay students entering the job market find it difficult to prove themselves in the private sector dominated by the non-Malays due to stereotypes of them being lazy, not competitive and inadequate in the skills required to perform in their jobs while other Malay students get absorbed into the private sector job market mainly through the quota system.
By doing so, an engineering firm which I used to work for was paying salary to incompetent graduate Malay engineers who didn’t even know what the conversion is between a ton and the kilogram. There were one or two better ones but they were not entrusted with bigger responsibilities because they have been discredited by their own peers.
I am afraid the truth is if the students at UiTM do not open up to multi-culturalism and compete and learn from other students before they go into the job market, this is what they will face.
The government cannot afford to absorb all graduate Malays into the civil service but neither are they doing much in order to help the Malays to be more competitive in the private sector job market.
Although the Malays have been given many privileges in terms of education and business contracts, it is those privileges which have rendered them unprogressive. Over 50 years, they have been brainwashed by expectations of special privileges either in education or the job market.
Ironically, the reality is that the real special privileges are given to Malays who are already privileged. A rich Malay classmate of mine who only managed very mediocre results for A levels was awarded a full Mara scholarship to study in the UK. How fair can that be to other poorer Malays students who fared better?
Those Malay students who have been ‘privileged’ to accept local sub-standard education realise they cannot compete with the other races when they get accepted in the private sector but they can still keep their jobs without given much to do.
I actually sympathise with the Malays in our country. They are going backwards together with the government. Non-Malays have accepted that they have to fight to get want they want in their lives, so they have better capacity to survive in Malaysia or another country. Malays have little chance to survive out of their environment and have to depend on the government to spoonfeed them.
Our private sector is suffering from a lack of good human capital. The non-Malays who studied abroad are staying away from our job market with better opportunities abroad. So the private sector has little choice but to depend on the local Malay graduates which are pre-dominantly from tertiary institutions like UiTM but are also skeptical of hiring them.
Malays constitute more than 60% of the population in Malaysia and their contribution should be significant in terms of its size in making Malaysia a developed country. If students at UiTM and other similar universities do not change their attitude, we will be reversed to Third World country status very soon.
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