Chinese Malaysian university students discover a world of opportunities venturing abroad

On The Ground

Chinese Malaysian university students discover a world of opportunities venturing abroad, transcending affirmative action quotas at home by Robert C. Thornett

Charting a New Path to Ireland: Set Jin Lee This June, eighty kilometers north of Dublin, Set Jin Lee was the only Malaysian student to graduate from Ireland’s Dundalk Institute of Technology (DKIT)—closing the chapter on a four-year adventure that also took her to Finland and the US for work and five other European countries on excursions. Four years earlier, at a fall college fair in Kuala Lumpur, Lee had bumped into a representative from DKIT, and by spring she was admitted with a generous deal including free accommodation and tuition averaging about 9000 Euros per year—roughly a third of the average for international students in the US or UK. Lee finished her studies at DKIT with zero debt, covering her living expenses with part-time jobs after classes. She was the first Malaysian ever to receive a degree from DKIT in Social Care, a broad field focusing on the social welfare of people who are

immigration and refugee services. Lee chose a college on the other side of the world from home, in a country where no one from her high school had ever studied, and a major no Asian student had ever chosen there. “There are hardly any Asian faces in social care in Ireland,” says Lee. “Maybe it’s because Asian parents often tell their kids to go into medicine, law, or IT, and that social work doesn’t bring in money. Or maybe it’s because social care systems are not as developed in Asia, so people don’t know about social work jobs. To convince my parents that Social Care was a good major, I had to explain what social work was, because they did not understand the job.” Set Jin Lee’s less-traveled road to a college degree is one example of how Chinese Malaysians have long bypassed Malaysia’s race-based public university admissions system, often called “educational apartheid,” by studying abroad. Malaysia has a

Lee chose a college on the other side of the world from home, in a country where no one from her high school had ever studied, and a major no Asian student had ever chosen there. marginalized, disadvantaged, or have special needs. Her classes explored everything from addiction, disability, residential care, and homelessness to 66 | Solutions | Fall 2019 | www.thesolutionsjournal.com

unique demographic mix of Malays (69%), who control the government, along with Chinese (23%) and Indians (7%). In 1971, Malaysia launched its

highly controversial New Economic Policy (NEP), the first of a series of social engineering and affirmative action policies in jobs and public college admissions. Long criticized by the United Nations, what made this affirmative action unusual was that it was designed to favor not minorities but the ruling Islamic Malay majority. For decades, 90% of the seats at Malaysia’s public universities have been legally reserved for Malays under a quota system, leaving Chinese and Indian Malaysians to compete for a tiny number of seats or go elsewhere. The silver lining, however, is that many Chinese Malaysians have gotten a better education overseas than they would have at public universities at home. With some 56,000 college and university students studying abroad each year, Malaysia today ranks eighth in the world—just behind the US, which has over ten times its population—and Chinese Malaysians are at the forefront of this study abroad exodus. Long experience has made Chinese Malaysians especially knowledgeable and adept at study abroad—and they come well-prepared by the network of Chinese Independent High Schools in Malaysia, funded almost entirely by donations from the Chinese community. And Chinese Malaysian students are especially suited to life overseas: they are typically trilingual if not quadrilingual—speaking Mandarin and/or Cantonese Chinese in addition to English and Malay—and they are accustomed to being in the minority,