Why are we paying so much for education system?

There was an article being circulated recently on why employers here preferred foreign graduates or foreign talents rather than local graduates. To put into perspective, the local graduates are from three branded universities that ranked pretty high in all the fictitious ranking systems that you can think of. And the foreign graduates are those locals that cannot get a place in our local prestigious universities and went overseas to second or third rate universities. And the foreign talents that came to take over the places of local graduates are mostly from third world universities that are not even listed among the top universities in the world. And to make matter worst, and more sickening, many of these foreign talents actually got a piece of paper from some degree mills or bought from a back lane without going through universities.

And we claim to have some of the best universities in the world, lectured or tutored by the best academics, and great exchanges with foreign graduates here and in overseas exchange programmes, but somehow still found lacking and not up to the mark.  What is going on?

The Govt is paying billions to attract the best academics from around the world, game the ranking systems to stay among the top universities. There are also many joint campuses with reputable foreign universities. For the money spent, what is the Govt trying to achieve? To produce a Newton or an Einstein, or to rank high in university rankings or to produce graduates that employers shunned?

Does the Govt need to spend that kind of money and other than the latter two objectives, the possibility of producing a Nobel Prize winner is near to zero. Even if there is one, is it worth the money spent? A genius is not produced by having high international rankings or buying famed lecturers or professors. Such talents are inborn and come once in several life times. They are not nurtured. Any good university and a good learning environment and culture should be able to produce them. Newton discovered gravity by sitting under an apple tree. And better still, the irony of it all, if you want a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates, you can’t find them in good universities.

Why are we spending billions to fatten so many foreign lecturers and professors for? For sure they would not be able to produce the genius that we want and neither would they be able to produce the Nobel laureates if the input, the quality of students, is not up to speck. Are the money worth spent or can be put to better use instead of gaming the ranking system?