KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, 18 January 2013 –- When the Petronas Towers opened in 1998, it’s a fair bet that plenty of people in the West had never heard of Kuala Lumpur. Among those who had, I’m sure almost none could have imagined that the world’s tallest skyscrapers would one day located there. And yet, KL managed to wrest away a distinction that had resided exclusively with the United States for nearly a century.
Malaysian higher education is not rising quite so fast as its skyline is, but it’s going in the same direction.
Perhaps no one was more surprised by Kuala Lumpur’s rise to prosperity than the people who live there. This week I had the pleasure of visiting several of the city’s many international schools, including the International School of Kuala Lumpur. ISKL has some gifted, veteran faculty members who first arrived in the mid-1970s. They stayed for obvious reasons: it’s a fascinating, gorgeous city and a mix of East Asian, South Asian, and even Middle Eastern cultures.
But the teachers with whom I met told me of a KL that scarcely had a building over ten stories. It was a pleasant, if ragged, capital city in a typically less developed Asian country. Not quite Third World, but no Singapore either.
A lot has changed since then.
Supplanting petroleum for palm oil, Malaysia has made the most of its drilling claims off the Borneo coast. Malaysia’s national oil company, Petronas, is housed imposingly in the namesake towers. Its proceeds have funded construction of an impressive highway system and electrical grid, and that wealth has multiplied by way of real estate development and all manner of business. Today, those towers are just two of seemingly hundreds of office and residential towers that dot an enormous metro region.
Malaysia’s national prosperity has, of course, resulted in individual prosperity. While wages for much of the city’s population remain modest (with rampant poverty in rural areas), Malaysia’s wealthy families are growing in number and net worth by the year. Many of them are spending money on the next generation.
Along with KL’s skyscrapers and highways, no fewer than 20 universities have been founded in the city in the past three decades. Malaysians have enrolled in these schools in droves, presumably creating a positive feedback loop leading to ever higher levels of economic development. The director of Malaysian American Commission on Cultural Exchange, told me that, as a result, Malaysian enrollments in US universities have remained fairly consistent in recent years, averaging 6,700 per year (contrasting with steady increases from neighbors such as China, Indonesia, and Vietnam).
Nonetheless, many Malaysians still favor the established universities of the United States (as well as those of the UK and Australia, among others) over the fledgling local universities—and many actually study at both local and American universities. Because Malaysian high schools operate on the British educational system, many students sit for their GCSE (formerly “O-Level”) exams at age 16 or 17 and essentially graduate from high school. They enroll in local colleges for a year or two and then apply as freshmen to American universities.
Since these Malaysian colleges are, naturally, not set up to advise students on applications elsewhere, these students often lack guidance in what can often be a confusing process of choosing appropriate colleges, assembling applications, and preparing for SATs, ACTs, and TOEFL exams. In this regard, Malaysian transfer students may be well prepared to attend college in the US but do not necessarily get the sort of guidance as do their counterparts at high schools such as ISKL.
Even so, there’s a palpable sense in Malaysia that the opportunities facing today’s Malaysian youth are vast indeed. It’s easy to think of ultra-tall buildings as gimmicks built as much out of hubris as of steel and glass. Likewise, countries in this region know all too well how fragile economic success can be (just ask Thailand, ca. 1998).
Then again, think about the cities that held that title before KL: they include such no-name backwaters as Paris, Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago. If architectural icons are any guide, the prospects for Malaysia and its youth are looking up.
