Affirmative Action Malay Style

Affirmative action Malay style http://www.dispatch.co.za/2000/09/28/features/MALAY.HTM

Not only South Africa is grappling with affirmative action. Pauline Jasudason explains.
WHEN straight-A student Suchitra Nadarajah applied for university, she thought her grades and 18 months of constant study for the entrance exams would land her a spot in one of Malaysia's top medical schools.

Then the ethnic Indian ran into Malaysia's affirmative action programme, which sets aside the biggest number of college slots for Malays, the country's majority ethnic group.
Her grades and entrance scores notwithstanding, Suchitra was offered an unwanted place in an information technology course instead of medicine.

"I just sat there speechless, eyes all watery," the 19-year-old says. "It was totally unexpected."
Suchitra is one in a long line of minority high-achievers who bear the brunt of a three-decade-old affirmative action policy that reserves privileges for ethnic Malays in education, jobs, housing, banking and business.

Malays are entitled to substantial discounts when buying a house. They are awarded government study loans and scholarships more easily. They get preference over other ethnic groups, such as Indians and Chinese, in hiring for public sector jobs.

Some voices, including an occasional Malay, are increasingly saying that the policy -- whose goal is improving the lot of once-marginalised Malays -- has served its purpose and should be ended to help Malaysia's economy become more competitive.

But most Malays vow to fight for their privileges. They have a powerful backer in Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who has championed the betterment of Malays during his 19-year tenure and depends on their votes to stay in power.

The quota system for education results in some odd social engineering, with students being allocated places at schools in which they may have no interest.

In Suchitra's case, her parents opted out of the public university system and enrolled her in a private school to keep her dream of becoming a doctor alive. They are fortunate they can afford to pay 25 times more to put her there.

About 150000 students attend Malaysia's 10 state universities, while around 100000 are at nearly 600 private colleges, whose programmes cost from three to 25 times more than state schools -- far out of reach of many poor Malaysians.

Race has been the bedrock of Malaysian politics since independence from Britain in 1957.
In colonial times, large numbers of Chinese emigrated here, many establishing themselves in business, and like elsewhere in Southeast Asia, their acumen and work ethic led them to gradually dominate economic life. A significant number of ethnic Indians also arrived, mainly to work as labourers on plantations.

The native Malays -- locally known as Bumiputeras, or "sons of the soil" -- were largely rural people who had little in terms of education or monetary earnings.
But in 1969, after bloody racial riots stoked in part by perceived injustice at Chinese dominance of the economy, the governing United Malays National Organisation -- now led by Mahathir -- set out to change society.

In 1971, a new National Economic Policy reserved the bulk of university slots, government jobs and business contracts for Bumiputeras. Almost 30 years later, it has spawned a rich elite of Malays, some of whom outpace the Chinese at home and compete with global players overseas.
But the system started fraying in 1997, when Asia's economic crisis erupted and led to dissatisfaction among both Malays and non-Malays over what critics called a corrupt system riddled with cronyism.

In elections last year, the United Malays National Organisation lost significant support from ethnic Malays, including some professionals, to an Islamic fundamentalist party. For the first time, Mahathir's party needed support from Chinese and Indian allies in Parliament to keep a two-thirds government majority.

David Chua, an ethnic Chinese who is vice-chairman of the National Economic Consultative Council, stirred social waters this year by calling affirmative action outdated.
"We're in the new millennium. We cannot use methods that were being used 20 or 30 years ago," Chua was quoted as saying by the newspaper Utusan Malaysia. He said that while the policy was necessary for racial harmony 30 years ago, now is the time to build the country's competitiveness by focusing on ability.

Sensitive to repairing his support among Malays, Mahathir quickly responded that special privileges enjoyed by Malays are not open to debate.
"The government will not back down, not even by one step, in defending the Malays, as we are aware they are still weak," Mahathir said.
Mahathir has since further inflamed communal passions by likening a Chinese association pushing these ideas to "extremists" on the same level with an Islamic cult accused of stealing arms to overthrow the government.
Nowhere is the system's pain felt more keenly than in minority students who toil to get high marks but see their efforts come to little.

On paper, the quota system stipulates that 45 percent of college spots should go to non-Malay minorities like the Chinese, who account for 30 percent of the population, and Indians, who make up 10 percent. The rest are reserved for the dominant Malay ethnic group, who amount to 60 percent of the country's 22 million people.

But in reality, a medical school's student body would generally be less than nine percent ethnic Indian and a little over 16 percent Chinese. Seventy-five percent would be Malay, partly because of overzealous Malay administrators.

As a result, while minority students wage a fierce battle with each other, aiming for excellent results to guarantee a place of study in a university, ethnic Malays with lesser marks get in.
Ungku Aziz, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur and the man who designed the quota system in the state-run universities after the 1969 riots, strongly defends it.

"If we have a free system, then one group will dominate," Ungku said in an interview.
Before quotas, only two percent of engineering graduates were Malays while 92 percent were Chinese, he said.

"If you don't have some kind of balance, then you will have social unrest," Ungku said.
Salmi Shukor, 24, an ethnic Malay medical student, is thankful for the privilege.

"I'm not saying someone else did not deserve the place I got -- just that because of it, I got in to study here," she said, adding it lightened her single mother's burden of educating both her and her sister.

T Marimuthu of the Malaysian Indian Congress, a government ally, argues that the system benefits the children of many poor Indians, most of whom work in tough conditions at rubber or oil palm plantations. He says those Indians would never be able to compete with the Chinese without quotas.

Henry Lim, 22, a Chinese student at the University of Malaya, rejects that argument
"What about the poor Chinese?" said Lim, who also wanted, like Suchitra, to be a doctor but landed in engineering instead.
LINK:
Academic research on Malaysian higher education
http://mahdzan.com/papers/