It is very revealing to learn that only 18 percent of Malaysians have university education. This low percentage seems bewildering given the various superlative claims that Malaysia is an advanced developing country, wishing to leapfrog into a developed nation status by 2020.

The year 2020 is only 16 years away. This duration is similar to that of the period between the nuclear annihilation of Japan at the end of World War Two to the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Can we witness a similar dramatic change in social processes within that period of time in Malaysia?

In the effort to create a knowledge society to drive the economy, a more educated populace is a necessity. The agencies that deal with education will need to design strategies on a long-term basis to try and achieve this objective. All stakeholders, both the public and private sectors, ruling and opposition politicians, and all relevant bureaucrats and technocrats should contribute ideas to this endeavour. This all inclusive process is a dire necessity to design an educational system that will be current, dynamic and responsive to the demand of modern times.

In the desire to produce more university-educated Malaysians, the first purported strategy mentioned was to build more universities. This infrastructure-first approach will definitely require enormous funds. Perhaps it is easier and speedier to look at the human resource allocation and also the processes of education in our school and university systems that may require modifications.

It is not known whether the present public universities have reached their full capacity. The more popular undergraduate professional courses may have been saturated in all public universities and perhaps also in most private colleges. However, the more generic/general undergraduate courses in the sciences and arts are perhaps not so, since the lecture-to-student ratio is not that high in order to ensure effective teaching.

If the above assumption is reasonable, then our current public universities can still absorb more students into the generic courses of the sciences and arts. Although it is less profitable to the private colleges, there should be some schemes that can be worked out so that the available lecturers in such colleges also teach generic courses in the sciences and arts.

If the broader aim is to have university-educated masses, one should not equate undergraduate education to merely immediate job prospect. Undergraduate education in general should be adaptable enough to create educated masses with generic skills but also with adequate intellectual capability to learn further at a formal or informal level.

A formal postgraduate education will mandate that students enroll in various graduate programmes ranging from masters to doctorates. In aiming to achieve a critical mass of university-educated populace, the percentage of graduate students should also increase to reflect the true quality of university education achieved.

In an effort to create and possess knowledge as a source of power and prowess in all spheres of national life, the level of creativity of the educated masses should be high. This can be reflected in the greater percentage of students proceeding towards formal graduate education of some sorts.

The more graduate students enrolled into universities, the more researches can be carried out. Only then will the researchers and researches match the perennially untapped research grants waiting to be utilised.

At school level, the present exclusivist approach in our teaching and assessment systems even at primary school level will prematurely preclude significant number of late bloomers from taking up sciences later in their life. It appears that the current dominant preoccupation of primary and junior secondary education is to score As in the national examinations.

This obsession by parents, teachers and also the headmasters to score points on the students examination achievements has resulted in a system which is syllabus-centred rather than student-centred. Rote-learning and examination-tailored tuition classes have become necessary complements in the current education system. Even the government has implicitly acknowledged, and perhaps also condoned, this state of affair by its recent introduction of tuition coupons to rural poor students.

If we anticipate to have more people enrolling in the universities in the future, there must be a system in the early formative years of education that are inclusive enough to accommodate as many, if not all, students that have any level of learning capability. The teaching process should be more student-centred and generic learning skills should be the aim of education rather than the memory of facts. The assessment process should not be punitive to slow performers but instead should be usable enough to improve their learning processes.

Teaching and learning in the sciences should be inquiry-based or problem-based to induce the relevance and fun among the students. Although this methodology has gained acceptance in only some field of the sciences at the university level, many proponents believe that this should also be a better method of teaching sciences even to the younger students.

Perhaps we should focus our energy first on the processes and human resource management before embarking on further expensive infrastructure development to effect any change, especially on the all important education system.