Much has been touted about making the field of dreams a level playing one for our children who aspire to enter our public universities. It has been a painful saga year after year watching the pain of our brightest students who fail to gain admission into the course of their first or second choice.

Equally painful has been the excuses trotted out by ministry officials and their ilk as to why these students were unsuccessful while at the same time singing the success of the newly implemented meritocractic system.

While our prime minister has given the green light for the initially rejected 128 top scorers to enter medical school, this is a short term band-aid fix to a longer term problem.

The Higher Education Ministry has edified us with statistics of the successful candidates accompanied by a racial breakdown of entrants by courses. Would the ministry also enlighten us about the racial diversity of the originally unfortunate 128 top scorers?

Would they also provide us with the average CGPA of the bumiputeras who were successful in gaining entrance into the six public medical faculties?

Let's assume for now that the matriculation and the STPM examining systems are equal. If this was really meritocracy at work, the laws of statistical averages should not really reveal any skew towards a particular group in the scores - whether derived from the STPM or matriculation.

The deputy minister of health is the only one in the cabinet who has made any sense about the importance of ensuring that those who go into medical school are committed to the medical profession.

It is vital that those who aspire to be doctors not only have the aptitude (demonstrated perhaps by their scores) but also possess the right attitude as practitioners of medicine and givers of health care.

In this sense, given the intense competition to study medicine, coupled by the high attrition rate of government doctors, consideration might be given to requiring medical school graduates to serve in community health centres or government hospitals for five years.

Those opting to serve less or not serve at all could pay back the government the difference between the cost of public versus private medical college.

There has also been concern about the lack of qualified medical personnel to staff our expanding medical faculties. Could adjunct professorships be created and such professors sourced from the medical community at large where real world medical experience can be brought to the classroom?

Additionally, a research track could be set up within the top public medical schools for students who aim to become medical researchers and professors instead of practitioners. In this way, we can help bring about a regeneration of teaching and research talent to our resource-starved medical schools.

An honest, courageous, and non-political perspective needs to be brought to the table to resolve this annually recurring issue of how to fully realise the potential of our young people.

We cannot afford to squander our human talent, especially at so promising a stage of life. If we do, we will in time look back with regret when we end up in the more pathetic sections of the global village.