Retaining our Best Talents

There have been calls to bring in more foreign scientists as Malaysia is trying to develop better expertise in R&D.

In the distant past, Malaysians were quite well known world-wide for our researchers in places like RRI, IMR and the plantation companies. Nowadays it seems all our best brains tend to move overseas to the developed countries.

Nothing very new about that as we will definitely lose a few bright ones and no amount of carrots are going to lure them back.

We should be more concerned about the thousands of bright Malaysians who somehow do not get a place in local universities.
With local graduates, we could get 5 to 10 years of service before they opt for greener pastures by doing post-graduate work etc.

We suffer from a lack of information on how the Malaysian authorities grant scholarships and as the AP scandal shows, a lot of unique problems are created when taxpayers' monies are paid out without proper and full disclosure.

I suggest we should request the authorities of provide the following data on ALL scholarship recipients given by the Malaysian government, including state scholarships.

There will be only three factors to be included:

1. Student's financial background
2. Student's academic standing
3. Course requested wrt country needs

Let me explain a little.

1. Students will do a means test. The following categories will be used
1.Very rich 2.Well off 3. Average 4. Poor 5. Very poor

2. School records will be graded as follows.
1.Very poor 2.Poor 3.Average 4. Good 5. Excellent

3. Course requested based on country's needs.
1.Poor demand 2.Little demand 3.Average 4. Good demand 5. Great demand

All students who apply for scholarships will be graded according to this selection criteria. Those with the highest scores will be considered for the scholarships.

To encourage all to excel in education, we can allocate perhaps 10 to 20% of the scholarships based solely on academic achievements.

All students who do not enter universities should be provided vocational and other skills training.




photo: on distant shores near 12(?) apostles, Australia