The recent announcement of local university applications results has left me saddened and angry.

According to a report in [#1]thestar.com[/#], local universities are capable of accepting a total of 38,000 new students this year. However, only 30,000 applicants have been offered places. The reason given by the Education Ministry is that there are simply not enough qualified bumiputras to maintain the 55 percent level of enrollment mandated by the much-debated quota system. Rather than fill all available spaces, the government has chosen to reduce total enrollment by 8,000 students in order to meet the quota requirements.

Even the staunchest supporters of the quota system will agree that the decision to cut enrollment is a terrible mistake. Let us imagine an analogy to the situation:

Imagine that there is a country whose population is starving. The country has a limited amount of food to distribute. In this country there are two groups: one is generally hungrier than the other. The government decides to implement a policy of giving more food to the hungrier community. Although the policy causes some of the better-fed people to suffer greatly, the system is tolerated because it is assumed to serve a greater good.

Now let us imagine that the hungrier community lives far from the capital city, and the government has no way of getting the food to them. In this case the obvious moral choice would be to give the food to the less-hungry people in the capital. Instead, the government chooses to maintain the quota system for food distribution, letting the undistributed food rot and waste. As a result many people starve to death unnecessarily, leaving the country with fewer healthy people to overcome its problems.

I would like to think that no one will perish as a result of the ministry's decision not to fill the university system to capacity. However I believe that as a developing country, Malaysia should value education as much as a famine-stricken nation would value the supply of food.

To those who believe that the quota system is justified and necessary, I ask you this: What does the bumiputra population gain by cutting the university intake? The answer is simple: Nothing. Not one ounce of good. There isn't any pride in saying that 55 percent of students are bumiputra when, after all the special opportunities have been granted, not enough bumiputra students qualify for the number of spaces allocated.

And what does the country as a whole lose from this decision? I think the answer is again obvious. We lose 8,000 much-needed doctors, engineers, social scientists and teachers; people who could individually and collectively make a huge contribution to the future of our great country.

Education, particularly for a young developing country such as ours, is the single most valuable resource we can exploit. For the past two years I have had the great fortune of attending one of world's finest universities. Yet nothing that I will ever contribute to the country that I call home will come close to what those 8,000 lost opportunities could have produced. The supporters and opponents of policies such as the university quota system can debate each other until the buffaloes come home, but no one can deny that on this day we have inexplicably shattered a great many dreams, squandered a great many opportunities, and set a terrible precedent for the future.