Gears in motion for private higher education players

UCSI still the market leader in hospitality, tourism education

KUCHING: Within the hospi­tality and tourism sector, UCSI University Sarawak Campus (UCSI University) remains the market leader in the provision of private higher education.

UCSI University Sarawak Campus chief operating officer, Lu Huong Ying, underscored the campus’ unique value proposi­tions for both local and inter­national students, especially with the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (SCORE) still fuelling growth for education in the state.

“The SCORE initiatives have identified 10 key industries, whereby one of them is tourism and this is where UCSI Univer­sity’s contribution is very perti­nent,” she told BizHive Weekly in an interview recently.

“We come here (into Sarawak) with this mindset of building this campus and we want this to have a spillover effect into SCORE.”

To note, the initiative will cre­ate about 1.5 million new jobs by 2030 which is worth about US$30 billion.

“There are so many jobs to fill. This is one of the things that we are looking at as well in Sarawak. So our role in this area will ultimately leverage on what the SCORE industries need,” she affirmed.

Speaking on UCSI University’s student demographics, about 80 per cent was made up of be Sarawakian Chinese students, with 10 per cent a mix of all the other indigenous groups and 10 per cent international students.

This was on the back of the group’s growth in the state as exemplified by its upcoming Isth­mus campus, which was in the second phase of development.

“Our Isthmus campus is going to be one of the regional flagships, very dedicated to becoming an eco-campus. These days, when you talk about tourism industry, the trend is about eco-tourism, sustainable tourism,” she ex­plained.

“Thus, this campus has been designed to be energy efficient, more eco-friendly and through this, we would like to put Borneo on the world map for tourism and hospitality and research as well.”

Lu hoped that with this flag­ship eco-tourism campus, UCSI University would be able to bring in a lot more exchange of professors interested to study the state’s rainforest tourism and indigenous tourism which was something attractive to them.

“These are the areas that a lot of research has not been done. So there is high potential here,” she highlighted.

“In order for us to enrich our students’ learning experience, we have to offer a bigger and wider campus which is better equipped in terms of facilities. Then we can actually enhance our student learning experience by not only bringing in more students from diverse back­grounds, but also able to attract more internationally renowned researchers which are interested to look at Southeast Asia,” she explained.

“Say for example, we have our third languages programme like Korean, German or Japanese. We need to consistently ensure that these kind of courses attract lo­cal students to come in and also at the same time attract students from the other countries to come in and want to study these courses with us. They don’t have to go to the countries to learn those languages.

“So anything to do with tourism and hospitality and the language perspective, it’s something that is going to be the niche of that eco-campus of UCSI University.”

Lu went on to note that at the moment, the group had submitted its stage two development plans for its Isthmus plan, “So if every­thing goes well, it should not take more than two years.”

“Based on our current capacity, every semester we can have about 100 to 150 new fresh graduates coming in. The total capacity for this campus is about 550,” she explained. “At the moment, we are quite close to 400 students, and once the number of students here breaches 500, I hope that we would be ready to go to our Isthmus campus.”

When asked about future plans for the group, Lu noted that there were many options available to add on from the entire hospitality or tourism sector.

“Let’s say for example, cul­tural aspects that is unique to Sarawak, it’s not a subject that may be very popular with our own students here, but it’s some­thing that will attract students from other places. So, cultural tourism is something that we are looking at,” she revealed.

“Also we are looking into more aspects of leisure and recrea­tion when we think about new courses. You see, our European counterparts have been telling me that Europeans look at Bor­neo as the adventure type, back to basics experience. So we are looking at that.

“And also at the same time, cultural tourism is very impor­tant.”

“You see, in terms of branding, we do talk a lot about how we are associated – let’s say our key stra­te­gic role in this country as a EPP 10 project leader and the rest for our part­ners here as our pilot cluster for offering a workplace learning diploma programme and that is how we keep on branding our­selves. This is our unique niche programmes.

“We actually get better recogni­tion outside of Malaysia because we look at Borneo as something unique as a package, somehow or rather the local students like from the peninsula, they always choose not to go to Kuching.

“But we do get very good feedback from our international partners.”

“We have set our plan another five to 10 years down the road and we know what we want to do very clearly in Isthmus. At this point in time, we will have no plan to expand to another location within Kuching,” she stressed on.