Creating High Performance Universities: The Malaysian Experience

Abstract

This paper aims to assess the effort of upgrading the performance of Malaysian universities. Two interrelated arguments are developed in the paper as a proposed framework. First, the national public policy framework created to improve the status of higher education is an example of what Sabel and Zeitlin (2011) call Experimentalist Governance. The higher education public policy imposed by the government has given broad discretion to Malaysian universities to set their own targets through ‘learning by monitoring’. Second, to upgrade their performance, most universities have sought to deepen the intellectual capital which is argued by Stiles and Kulvisaechana (2003) as improving when innovations at complementary human capital, social capital, and organizational capital are successfully integrated. With the use of a case-study university from Malaysia, this paper portrays the innovations that the university has made.