COMMENT | End unhealthy obsession with research papers, degrees

COMMENT | Referring to the recent article 'Publish or perish' mentality driving academicians to questionable journals by Martin Vengadesan, we might be scratching only the tip of the iceberg.

It is also known that most of these journals are not replicable and some of them are manipulated.

Would these published journals with extremely flawed and unusable results help in moving our research and development to the next level? Definitely not. If this situation is left unchecked, we will be experiencing a large waste of resources and this could severely cripple the reputations of our institutes.

Unfortunately, we also have bigger issues that come along with the publishing of questionable journals. From another Malaysiakini letter by YS Chan titled Holistic education trumps paper qualification, the opinions stated there are valid.

We have a lot of universities and colleges being established here but yet we are still struggling with youth unemployment and underemployment year after year. Why are we paying a lot of money for higher education just to end up without a proper job? Have we missed out on something essential for our graduates to be gainfully employed?

Employers lament about the majority of our graduates’ appalling command of the English language and their lacking of technical skills.

These skills are absolutely required for the survival of the workforce nowadays. Ideally, we thought that these higher education institutes would have sufficiently imparted these skills to the students before they attended their graduation ceremony.

But now we are searching high and low for quality graduates in the nation only to realise that this is almost a futile effort by employers.

When graduates fail to be employed, this leads to also another major problem that is plaguing this country ...