Race based merit

If you need to consult a specialist, how would you choose one? If you hadn't consulted one before, you might ask family and friends for recommendations. You might even wider your enquiries to social media and forums. 

Next, you might look for reviews online but those are rare in Malaysia. Maybe go for the one with most experience but that information is also not easily available. If all else fails, maybe you look at their credentials i.e. professional and academic qualifications and where they came from.

In Malaysia, until 2002, admission to public universities were done by race first and then merit second. The bulk of the quota was reserved for Bumiputera, of which the majority of them were Malays. The "quota system remains in the matriculation colleges with a 90% quota for Bumiputeras, while certain foundation courses are exclusively for Bumiputeras." This partly resulted in Bumiputera students constituting 81.9% of students in public universities as at Dec 2023.

It wasn't unheard of non-Malay pre-university students, before 2002, with excellent results in the national exam being denied placement in preferred course, only to discover later that Malay students got in the said course with significantly poorer results.

"  While large numbers of Bumiputera graduates have been produced by local universities, the quality of local graduates has come under scrutiny by employers.

“Matriculation colleges and foundation programmes provided access (to many), but their shortened and simplified syllabuses have under-equipped students for university-level studies,” Lee said.

There are also grouses that the quota system denies qualified non-Bumiputera students a spot in matriculation colleges and this in turn contributes to a “brain drain”. "

(source: FMT's article "Explained: Malaysia’s quota system in higher education")

So, going back to my earlier supposition on how you would go about choosing a specialist, you might then avoid doctors who graduated from local public universities. If you have to choose one from such university, you might then choose a non-Malay. Yes, unfortunately, due to the severe distortion caused by the racial quota, this is the only way to indirectly choose a specialist based on merit.


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