I've finally found the time and motivation to finish up my intended three part discussion on education, that began here and continued here.

Tertiary education should naturally be the most specialized educational institution out there. It is the final step before the 'real' world so it should seem natural that it provide the most detailed information about specific careers. The head knowledge and information I've been calling to be held off in both primary and secondary education should rightly take its place in institutions of higher learning. To critics who think that there is too much knowledge to be crammed into a 3 or 4 year institution, I say, after 10 years of learning processes of learning, rote learning in 4 years will not turn out too difficult. Plus, how much information cramming will we really need to do in college.? Probably not a lot. The reason why we have books and computers is so that we need not store all the unnecessary information in our brains.

Anyway, relating the above paragraph back to our Malaysian context, I think in general sense that our institutions of higher learning set out to accomplish these goals. I emphasize 'general sense' here because it is a known fact that out public universities love chasing pointless medals at university fairs in East Europe (*ahem* UiTM and USM *ahem*). But yea, in general, the purpose of our Malaysian universities is pretty much on the spot. Execution however, that is a whole new topic of its own.

The only way to save our public universities is to plough tons of money into it. I'm not saying their current shortcomings are a result of lack of funds, but with a handsome budget, I can think of a million and one things to do to improve our public universities. My suggestion for the source of that money: PSD scholarships. We spend so much sending thousands of PSD scholars abroad when really (no offence to PSD scholars, you guys are geniuses to be able to get a PSD scholarship in the first place) we should be investing our money at home. We should be using those millions of dollars to pull in great professors to teach in our local universities, starting with well qualified Malaysian professors who are teaching abroad. By sending one student abroad, we are making a difference in one life. By bringing one well-qualified professor into Malaysia, hundreds if not thousands will be changed. Instead of continuing to export our talent out for training, we should be working harder at improving our public universities at home.

I've been hearing stories of PSD scholars having their bonds waived because the government has no place for them in the PSD. Sounds dumb to me to give out scholarships when you don't need the manpower but what is worse is that these talents ultimately don't return. Once you take away the bond of a student who is very comfortably living in the US, Germany or the UK, what are the chances that they are gonna come home. Kinda close to ZERO, I think.

If we had excellent universities locally, then when these people graduated, we'd be able to keep the talent. Hopefully they'd find jobs locally and go on to bigger things in Malaysia and for Malaysia.

Invest at home. That's my call for tertiary education. Start with Malaysian professors teaching abroad, but ultimately hired anyone and everyone who is well qualified to teach in our public universities. If we bring in excellence, it will breed excellence.