People forget.....

The "liberalisation" of education started in the late 80s....

The NEP policies and quota system was in full force....depriving many qualified nons of education.....as a blow valve, private higher education, then tightly controlled and poorly viewed, was liberalised, and the private sector encouraged to set up colleges....later granted rights to award degrees (university college status) and higher degrees (full uni status)....

To help finance this, ptptn system was set up.....instead of public funding, the then gov pushed the responsibility to the student....

In other words ipts was allowed to exist so ipta can be "controlled" to comply with NEP policies....

Along the way, things started to go wrong....ptptn is easily scammed to extract money from public (it's tax payer funds) leaving the debt with students....

Controls of quality by MoE is poor....the new mqe wasn't effective....

Two human activities should not be privatised.... education and health.....once you leave it to market forces, skews starts to develop.....

And here we are....lol

The ptptn was set up as a corporate body, and have no power to enforce quality....

The powers rests with MoE (student and university quality) and MQE (course quality)....both failing in their jobs....

MoE lost moral ability to enforce quality when ipta is allowed to sacrifice quality for ketuanan policy....mqe is toothless in enforcement....

A minority of students have stpm now....the bulk of bumis have matrik, or the preferred asasi....

Those nons with money avoid stpm and go do international pre-u like a levels ausmat etc....or some "foundation".....

The problem isn't the colleges per se, but the demand, expectation of everybody that they CAN and DESERVE a degree....

Only the top 25-30% of the population have the intellect to successfully pursue a full standard academic degree....the next 40% is able to undergo a skill based technical training....and the rest do the routine works like clerical, sales, assembly line etc ....

In recognition of such population distribution, countries like Germany provide training accordingly to the appropriate sections of the population....more people in technical post-secondary education than in academic.....

Msia is grossly distorted because of the unique policies in place....

Ketuanan policies pushed many under qualified students into academic studies....

The buy-with-money private system allows anyone with money to buy any qualification irrespective of qualification or ability...(and because of this demand without any controls, effy ipts flourished).....

The end result is many people who shouldn't even be in academic studies, graduate with a piece of paper....

But they really don't have the intellectual ability to perform the job that the piece of paper claims....hence we have the current situation..... unemployable graduates, grads not working in fields they are trained in...etc....

That that happens when you commoditify education....