Pemuda Sosialis welcomes the Prime Minister’s indication that the government is considering abolishing PTPTN. For generations, Malaysian youth have entered working life already in bondage to debt – sold the promise that knowledge would set them free, only to discover that knowledge itself had been turned into a commodity, priced, financed, and collected upon. Education under this arrangement ceases to be a right and becomes a transaction: the student a debtor, the university a creditor, and the years of study a mortgage on a future not yet earned.

The abolition of PTPTN, if it comes, cancels a debt. However, it does not yet abolish the relation that produced the debt.

Capital does not retreat when one instrument is taken from it, it seeks another. If public funds are permitted to flow into private institutions without discipline, those institutions will simply raise their fees, confident that the state, and through it, the public, will absorb the difference. What is announced as relief for the student becomes, in practice, a subsidy for the shareholder. The public bears the cost, private capital collects the surplus. This is not a mere hypothetical but it is the pattern by which private interests have repeatedly appropriated public wealth in this country, wherever regulation has been weak enough to permit it.

Higher education is a social product. It is built by public labour, public teaching, public research, and it should return its value to the public that sustains it. It should not be siphoned off as private profit disguised as tuition.

Pemuda Sosialis therefore calls on the government to accompany the abolition of PTPTN with the following:

• Direct and sufficient public funding for public universities, so that quality education can be provided without relying on commercial programmes, expensive private pathways.
• Firm statutory limits on the fees charged by private higher education institutions, so that public money cannot be converted into private profit.
• Begin a programme to bring strategic private universities and colleges into public ownership, so that the institutions which educate our people are answerable to our people, thus ensuring that higher education serves actual public interest.

For decades our universities have been remade in the image of the enterprise, and our students addressed not as citizens acquiring knowledge but as consumers purchasing a credential. Abolishing PTPTN is an opening, a chance to reverse a process that has, step by step, transferred a common good into private hands.

Malaysia must aspire to build a higher education system that is publicly funded, publicly accountable and accessible to everyone.

The abolition of PTPTN must be the first measure in a longer struggle to reclaim higher education for the public!

Amanda Louis
Chairperson
Pemuda Sosialis