Malaysia has cut the cash available to its university teachers who want to register for a masters course at foreign universities, Geoff Scott writes.

Many senior academics believe that removing the opportunity for self-advancement will have severe long-term effects on the recruitment and quality of academic staff, and teaching and research in the country's public universities.

Abdul Latiff Mohamed of University Kebangasaan Malaysia, described the move as "disastrous" when it was increasingly difficult to recruit quality academic staff. He said that during his time "we had to scrape the bottom of the barrel as there were not enough students. Now we have ample students but we are still having problems drawing the cream of the crop".

He said that his best students were going into the commercial sector because academic salaries were so low. The cutback in training funds to tutors aiming for overseas masters further weakened efforts to attract and retain tutors.

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Wan Mokhtar Wan Yusoff, president of the university's academic staff association said the government's sudden directive that all tutors wanting to do a masters "must do them locally" caught many tutors off-guard. The university is appealing to the education ministry to fund 30 academic tutors to study overseas.

The Treasury says it "simply does not have enough funds to send the tutors abroad", and the education ministry says that "only tutors doing doctorates can go overseas".

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But critics argue that if educational standards in Malaysia's public universities are to be world class and capable of competing with private and overseas, academics must be exposed to the latest ideas, methods and laboratories. On gaining their masters, tutors are normally promoted to lectureships.