Are Malaysian Universities Creating International World Class Professionals?

Its not only the way a course is taught between local and overseas universities that is different, its the lack of facilities. Way back in the early eighties, I did a mechanical engineering degree in a polytechnic in London. We had unrestricted daily excess to mini computers (Prime computers) with dumb terminals and we were taught how to use CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacturing) programs for engineering design and manufacturing.

Fast forward to 10 years later in Petaling Jaya, during a careers fair at Malaya University, I went to talk to some students at the Engineering booth and to my shock and horror, found out that they had very little access to or had almost no CAD/CAM experience. In fact, they bitterly told me that they had to pool their money together to buy their own PCs to learn programming (Fortran and the like) because they hardly any access to computers at the university. They didn't know how to use a computer to draw engineering designs or for manufacturing! They were still drawing their designs manually.

10 years previously, we had learned how to draw designs manually but it was supplemented with computers. Our lecturers told us that they could have us use computers totally to draw our designs but they wanted us to have the ability to do both! And not just to rely on one method. Further, we also learn to make tools manually by using old machine tools because they wanted us to know what was physically possible to make and what was not. It was a good blend of the old with the new.

Some time later, during a live radio interview with the secretary of the Malaysian Institute of Engineers, I managed to call in and ask him why was it that engineering students at our so-called premier university did not have the computer access and training that I had 10 years previously in the early eighties in London. His stupid reply was that we are training local engineers for local standards and environment.

So, an admission that our local students were not trained to compete with overseas international engineering standards and quality. When I told some senior engineers about this, they were absolutely pissed because it meant that we were not advancing and improving. The mildest word they used for him was stupid. Mind you, these engineers were all trained overseas, the majority in UK and they confirmed that local engineers were not on par with those trained overseas.

This was in the early 1990s. Has the situation improved almost 20 years later in 2010? Does anybody know? Does anybody care?