The rationale for overseas education representative offices should not be reduced to a choice between fiscal prudence and institutional excess.
While cost efficiency and administrative streamlining are legitimate policy concerns, focusing solely on expenditure risks obscures a more fundamental question of public value: what is the strategic return on investment of overseas education offices and how does it compare to other forms of overseas state representation?
From a policy standpoint, the question is not whether rationalisation is necessary, but rather whether it is carried out with a sufficiently nuanced knowledge of function, impact and long-term national interest.
Unlike many overseas offices, which primarily perform regulatory, ceremonial, or episodic interaction tasks, education offices are part of a self-sustaining economic and diplomatic ecosystem.
International education is one of the few areas where public investment continuously yields quantitative results.
Tuition fees, living expenses, employment spillovers, tourism, alumni networks and long-term bilateral goodwill are all components of a cumulative return that goes far beyond annual budget cycles.
Prior to the pandemic, international education brought in tens of billions of dollars each year for countries like Australia and the United Kingdom, significantly exceeding the operational expenditures of their overseas education networks.
Malaysia, albeit operating on a lesser scale, reaps multifaceted benefits from overseas students, including foreign money inflows, institutional capacity building and increased worldwide visibility.
In this setting, overseas education offices serve as market-making organisations, lowering transaction costs, minimising reputational risk and maintaining demand.
This contrasts dramatically with the ROI profile of many non-educational overseas offices, whose advantages, while politically or diplomatically significant, are sometimes broad, indirect and impossible to quantify.
Trade offices may facilitate discussions that take years to complete. Cultural or information offices can contribute to soft power in ways that are intangible. Education offices, on the other hand, work in a field with both quantitative and renewable outcomes.
From a governance standpoint, strategic difference is the proper policy response, rather than closure or blanket consolidation.
Not all overseas education offices have to be the same size or function, but each should be evaluated based on its alignment with national priorities, target markets, and measurable contribution to Malaysia's higher education ecosystem.
A policy-oriented rationalization framework would begin by clearly defining the objective of international education offices beyond student recruitment and overseas student welfare caretaking.
Their roles should explicitly encompass educational diplomacy, qualification recognition, regulatory liaison, market intelligence and partnership facilitation.
Digital platforms and private agents cannot easily mimic these functions since their objectives are more economic than strategic or national.
Furthermore, international education offices play an important role in preventing market failures. In emerging and developing countries, information asymmetry remains a substantial barrier to access.
State-backed representation provides legitimacy, consumer protection, and quality assurance, which commercial intermediaries are neither built nor driven to promote.
The desire to establish Malaysia as a regional and global education hub enhances the rationale for retention. Infrastructure and regulatory openness alone do not sustain education hubs; nevertheless, persistent worldwide visibility and trust do.
Countries that successfully occupy this sector sustain their international education representation even when the budget is tight.
Recalibration, rather than retrenchment, is a more positive policy option. Rationalisation should prioritise right-sizing, professionalising and integrating international education offices into a cohesive national education diplomacy plan.
Performance criteria should expand beyond enrollment statistics to include partnership outcomes, policy influence, alumni engagement and market diversification.
Importantly, abroad education offices should be weighed against alternative uses of public funding, such as other overseas representatives.
When viewed through a value-for-money lens that considers economic, diplomatic and human capital returns, education offices generally outperform other forms of external representation that provide fewer direct and long-term benefits.
Finally, the policy question is not whether Malaysia can afford to keep its abroad education offices, but whether it can afford to diminish one of its most productive tools for international involvement.
In a global economy increasingly dominated by talent mobility, information sharing and reputational capital, education remains one of the few areas where public investment produces compounding benefits.
Dr Mohd Azmir Mohd Nizah is a lecturer at the Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sinar Daily.