By Teresa Kok, MP for Seputeh

Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Wee Ka Siong announced yesterday that the Cabinet has decided to increase the intake of medical students by 100, bringing the total of this year’s intake by public universities from 919 to 1019.

He also revealed that the intake figure of 418 students announced earlier by Deputy Education Minister Kamalanathan did not include those students recruited by the research universities.

The first question that comes to mind is why has the Cabinet not decided to ask the 11 public universities to fill up the total of 1550 quotas approved to them?

According to statistics revealed by the Malaysian Medical Council, the public universities were allocated a total quota of 1550 places. So what is the reason that the universities have chosen not to fill up the quotas when many top scorers have failed to gain admission into the medical programmes?

Kamalanathan revealed on August 18 that for this year, a total number of 1163 students with Cumulative Grade Point Average of 4.0 had applied for medical programmes, and a total of 418 were successful .Last year, 699 succeeded gaining admission into the medical proigrammes.

However, Health Minister Subramaniam subsequently clarified that the figures mentioned by Kalamanathan did not include those recruited by the research universalities which did their own recruitment. He said the overall total was 919.

However, what Kamalanathan revealed shows that for non research universities, there was actually a reduced intake of 281 students.

So for this year’s overall intake ( research plus non research universities) , it is likely that even with yesterday’s increase of 100, there is a real decrease.

Wee did not reveal what last year’s overall intake was, was it more than or fewer than 1019?

The government must practice transparency and accountability and reveal whether there is a reduction in this year’s overall intake of medical students, if so, why?

Further, the Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin must also explain why public universities have not been instructed to fill up their total approved quotas to resolve the problem of top scorers failing to obtain their favoured medical programmes when an increase of 100 is obviously insufficient?