A concerned Malaysian writes about Malaysian affairs. "You are the Change you Seek" Barack Obama

Monday, April 14, 2008

Why Scholarship Holders Don't Bother to Fulfill Their Obligations

Each year Malaysian taxpayers lose millions of ringgit because scholarship holders refuse to return home to serve out the terms of the scholarships.

I would like to offer the following reasons why this has become a self-perpetuating problem:

1.The selection process is not transparent and many get JPA scholarships on account of their connections.
2.Recipients have no honour or integrity. They were not sincere when they agreed to return home asp after graduation.
3.JPA too lenient to allow extensions of stay for whatever reasons like - spouse wants to complete course in Architecture, children want to complete primary schooling, ETC. All are contraventions of the scholarship terms.

How do we solve this problem that has been going on for many years?
We can explore the following:

1.Take action against the guarantors.
2.Publish the names of the parents of the schoalrship holders so we can see which families benefitted.
3.Get a court order to enforce the repayment of the scholarship amount. Then explore the possibility of reporting these
to the UK credit rating agencies.
4.Make it a term in the scholarship agreement that the Malaysian passports will only be renewed overseas only to a date up to one month after the convocation date. Other applications can only be done in Malaysia.
5.Make working conditions and pay for new doctors more amenable.
6.Open the JPA to a few educational NGOs to improve the screening process.

PS. Please take the poll on the left column. Then send the poll to 5 friends who may also want to share. Just click2 the second last sentence on the poll. Thanks.

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