COMMENT | Structural reforms in the higher education sector that we had hoped for under Pakatan Harapan are now dust in the wind.

The situational ethics of the education minister and the prime minister in justifying the "backdoor" matriculation of bumiputera students for public university places is politically astute, but morally wrong.

Increasing the intake of non-Malay students to 4,000 does not address the 90:10 racial quota in the matriculation admission. It is certainly not a “win-win” solution. And it is not a “gift” to non-Bumiputera students. It is a false equivalence.

Better qualified non-Malay students are again left to pick the crumbs from the matriculation admission quota, regardless of the expanded overall intake, which risks further lowering the bar in the pre-university education standards.

Admission into matriculation belies the more than six decades of systemic discrimination in our higher education sector. Any which way we take in lobbying for fair opportunities in the university admission, we lose to partisan politics and racist reactions from the Ketuanan Melayu demagogues of the Perkasa and UiTM alumni set.

The narrow vision in keeping the institution exclusively Malay, based on Article 153 of the Federal Constitution, is blind to the fact that continuing the racial isolation of UiTM will not serve its graduates well in the workforce...