PUTRAJAYA (Feb 12, 2008): Improving the standards of medical and healthcare programmes by ensuring qualified educators and quality students. This will be the catalyst to enhance the ranking of Malaysian universities, which has been sliding in the past few years.

Higher Education Minister Datuk Mustapa Mohamed said yesterday this is a key component in the government’s efforts to enhance the level of excellence of public universities, including instilling a high-performance culture, increasing transparency, and ensuring autonomy of university management.

To begin with, Mustapa said, Public Services director-general Tan Sri Ismail Adam will call for a meeting between Mustapa’s ministry and the Health Ministry soon to discuss outstanding matters.

These matters include the placement of medical students in government hospitals, the limited number of places in universities for medical programmes, and the involvement of academicians in tertiary lectures, hospital administration and clinical work.

"We want to find solutions that will meet and benefit the national agenda, not only those that serve the respective ministries’ objectives,"

Mustapa told a press conference after a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak at Najib’s office.

"We are happy that many issues have been resolved but there is a need to strengthen this relationship so that everything is seen from the context of national and global competitiveness."

The meeting was also attended by representatives from the PSD, Treasury, Economic Planning Unit, and the management of 20 public universities. Mustapa said the meeting, the first to look into issues on higher education and researches, also discussed last year’s Times Higher Education Supplement-Quacquarelli- Symonds (THES-QS) World University Rankings, which did not include any Malaysian university in the list of top 200 universities.

He said the government has laid out strategic plans to boost the universities’ rankings, including giving more allocations to universities for research purposes.

The meeting also discussed giving more financial autonomy to vice-chancellors, provided it is taken "with accountability and responsibility".

The VCs would have a freehand in running the universities financially and turning them into high-performance institutions.

However, for this to be realised, it will need the cabinet’s approval and amendments to the existing laws.

Mustapa said they also discussed the Financial Procedure Act in relation to the establishment of subsidiaries.

"If we want to form a subsidiary, we have to go to the Finance Ministry. This is a legal requirement.

Some procedures definitely need to be speeded up and bureaucracy minimised so that the plans can be executed smoothly," he said.