By DayakDaily Team
KUCHING, Dec 20: An education policy that claims to be inclusive should be based on who the students are, rather than where they pursue their studies, said Democratic Action Party (DAP) Sarawak chairman Chong Chieng Jen.
He said that while the Free Tertiary Education Scheme (FTES) is widely promoted as a key policy to ensure no Sarawakian is left behind, its current design confines full benefits to students enrolled in four Sarawak government-owned institutions, namely Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak, Curtin University Malaysia, University Technology of Sarawak (UTS) and i-CATS University College.
This, Chong said, has the effect of automatically excluding Sarawakian students who pursue their studies in public universities nationwide, even though they constitute a substantial portion of the State’s undergraduate population.
“These students are Sarawakians as well, yet they are denied assistance under FTES simply because they are studying at different institutions,” he said in a recent statement.
Chong further pointed out that the exclusion is difficult to justify on financial grounds. He noted that students in public universities already benefit from significant federal subsidies, with about 90 per cent of their tuition fees covered by the federal government. — DayakDaily
