The problematic tertiary education system

The  problematic tertiary education system exhibits the following worrying symptoms:


Symptoms: lots of students' complaints; poor academic performance, especially on dissertation projects; severe and widespread plagiarism; poor course content and teaching quality, etc..


Underlying  factors:

1. Dominance of the transmission metaphor in education shared by students and education institutes;

2. Students suffer from time poverty and life stress from work and non-work sources;

3. Low existing intellectual competence and intellectual curiosity of students;

4. Perceived low relevance of intellectual knowledge to address real-life problems and concerns;

5. Inappropriate education policy and priority of the government;


Overall, the existing education system is wrongly designed; the problematic education system symptoms and underlying factors are inter-related such that education problems are systemic, controversial and conflictual in nature.

Many people are asking: "how to do things right in a wrong system?". The problem is: doing things right or more efficiently in a wrong system leads to poorer overall short-term and long-term outcome(s).