I would like to continue from what Abu Maryam al-Bertami of Penang had to say about the small proportion of varsity educated Malaysians ('Too few Malaysians are varsity educated'). I too am concerned with this "build more universities and they will come" approach. It is like putting the cart before the horse.

The Education Ministry has to cope with whiny private university demands that the minimum entry requirements to their schools be reduced. This does not speak well for the quality of students that we are supposed to build more universities for.

Apart from that however, I would like to depart from Abu Maryam's comments. Instead, I would like to ask the following questions: what is the aim of having a university educated mass? Is tertiary education a means to an end or an end itself for Malaysians?

I really do believe that Malaysia can leapfrog into developed nation status by 2020. But I am not confident that a mass tertiary-educated populace will have a significant effect on this endeavour. I suspect that we have a minuscule portion of the population, say 18 percent or less, that is propelling us forward. Abu Maryam might say that we can achieve more if more of us had university education. But there is only a weak correlation between more graduates and more research. Hence I posit that a university education may be more of an end in itself that we can use to make our parents proud of us. That's it.

As dismal as it is to hear about the consortium of private universities lobbying for low standards, this may be a reflection of where we stand. We may just have to accept that no Malaysian will win a Nobel Prize one day. This is because there are not enough Malaysians willing to make the huge amount of sacrifice necessary to be the best.

I can say this based on my own experience. While what I've seen is purely anecdotal and in no way empirical, it makes for an interesting comparative story. I am on a PhD scholarship in an Ivy League school. The university is open 24 hours a day. I have my own key card to get into one of the private offices that the university gives to its doctoral students. I have access to the largest open-stacked library in the US.

Journals from around the world and papers dating back to 1909 are available on my fingertips. In return for all this, I have to carry out my research every day regardless of snowstorms and blizzards. There is no rest. My peers and I fight to near death because we believe in the survival of the fittest in pushing the knowledge frontier.

We have completely supportive professors who give forthright and sometimes cruel assessments of our progress or lack thereof. In comparison, when I carried out some of my research in one of the best universities in Malaysia (and of course it is public as opposed to a private house of cards), I was told explicitly of the limited access to resources.

In essence, I was warned not to ask for more. The students around me in the library were too busy socialising to get any work done. I tried to start a dialogue with a professor and to suggest publishing jointly but was rejected.

Where we are now in our education system may just be as good as it gets. My peers here are always impressed that the Malaysian education system has such excellent indicators - nearly 100 percent access to universal education and a proportionately high 23 percent of GDP spent on education.

Given this, we should be looking at the whole education picture and not just about the tertiary portion. By keeping things in perspective, we might not be so unrealistically hard on ourselves. What is the point of expecting so much more when we forget our limitations?