Higher education | Ho Iat Seng aims to turn universities into businesses

The Macau government aims to turn higher education into a new industry that can contribute to the local economy. The information was revealed in a reply from Chief Executive Ho Iat Seng at the Legislative Assembly on Tuesday during a question and answer session with the legislators about the Policy Address.
Ho said that contrary to the trend in previous years, higher education has to be seen as a self- sustaining business and cannot continue to exist at the expense of the government.
According to the Chief Executive, “each student [at local institutions] costs around 250,000 patacas per year and we need to support over 100,000 of those.”
The situation is aggravated by the fact that many of these students are not local residents and their academic qualifications and training will never be put to the service of Macau society.
“We cannot continue to spend so many resources on students [mostly] from the mainland who afterward will not even stay in Macau and work in Macau,” the Chief Executive said, adding, that due to the hefty support from the government, local institutions are currently charging the students tuition fees “that are lower than some kindergartens in China.”
For Ho, it is time for the institutions to change their mentality and become a high-quality education system desired by those aiming to receive a high-quality education and who are able to pay for it.
“There are many people interested in coming to Macau to study. We need to balance this matter. We need to develop this into an industry,” he said, giving the example of the U.K., which has several highly reputable universities such as Cambridge and Oxford despite not being a very large country, according to Ho.
The Chief Executive said that the government would carefully consider the studies and experiences offered by the U.K. to develop new policies regarding higher education.
One of the measures from the new government for this year is the merging of the Education and Youth Affairs Bureau and the Higher Education Bureau; the latter created just one year ago to replace the former Tertiary Education Services Office.
Questioned on that topic by lawmakers, the Chief Executive noted that Macau currently has only ten higher education institutions with a relatively small number of students, which is even lower than the number of local students who are studying abroad. The Chief Executive stated that he considered that having a standalone entity to manage this small matter was a “waste of resources.”
At the same time, he expressed his belief that with the merging of the two education bureaus into one, there will be a greater interconnection of ideas, measures, and policies that span throughout all education sectors, hinting that this might also contribute to creating conditions for more local students to choose local institutions over those abroad.
“We need to take into account that even if the number of students is low, the number of teachers [and other staff] is high. We need to find a balance and to take local education to a higher level,” said Ho.
On the sidelines of the event, lawmaker José Pereira Coutinho told the media that in his opinion, the reason many choose to study abroad is the lack of quality of local universities and also the lack of options in terms of career paths offered by their tuition.
“If you want to have a more technical career you need to study abroad as local universities are all oriented to the same types of courses,” he said.
Coutinho suggested the government prioritize these technical subjects at local institutions to first give Macau students the option of studying locally, instead of working to attract wealthy students from the mainland.