Even though it's a top graduate school, Thailand's National Institute of Development Administration, or Nida, has found it increasingly difficult to recruit top-notch lecturers to fill vacancies.

Nida president Dr Sombat Thamrongthanyawong says: "Today, it's tougher than a couple of decades ago to attract young and bright people to join academia. Partly, it's the issue of financial incentives.

"For instance, a young PhD holder will get just around Bt20,000 a month working for a state university, whereas a fresh IT graduate with only a bachelor's degree can easily earn Bt30,000. That's a big difference."

Sombat, who was named president in March this year after working for Nida for the past 17 years, hopes the problem can be partly resolved by soliciting a larger amount of external research funds for new recruits.

"To attract more qualified people so that the university can maintain its academic excellence, we'll offer an additional income to young researcher/lecturers using these external funds.

"Internally, we also offer about 200 PhD scholarships for students with honours who aspire to be lecturer/researchers," he says.

According to Sombat, around 80 per cent of Nida's 150 teaching and research staff are currently PhD holders - the highest ratio among all state and private Thai universities.

If this ratio is any indicator of the quality of human resources crucial for successful national development, then Thailand as a whole has been lagging far behind both Malaysia and Singapore.

"Virtually all lecturers and researchers at Singaporean universities are PhD holders. In Malaysia, the nationwide average is about 80 per cent, whereas in Thailand only 25 per cent of all college and university lecturers are PhD holders.

"If the 25 per cent national average is broken down, we find that the PhD ratios for state universities, Rajabhat colleges and private universities are 39 per cent, 7 per cent and 11 per cent, respectively.

"In my opinion, that's a big challenge for the country if we're going to boost the quality of our national development and stay competitive amid the forces of globalisation.

"I'm convinced that higher education plays a key role in helping to upgrade a nation's well-being. Take Malaysia as an example. Three decades ago, the neighbouring country wasn't ahead of Thailand in terms of national development. Today, the per-capita income in Malaysia is about US$5,000 [Bt173,000] whereas Thailand's per-capita income is just about half, or around $2,600.

"These figures underline the fact that it's worthwhile to invest substantially in human-resource development and education, because spending in these areas leads to an accelerated national growth rate," Sombat says.

"In the past decades we've obviously under-invested in people but over-invested in physical infrastructure such as roads. By the way, lots of tax money has been wasted along the way because these infrastructure projects are corruption-prone.

"To start anew, we ought to focus on people: boosting their productivity in the long run so that their increased output will lead to more income and then more taxes for the government to collect.

"Then, the government will have more resources to re-invest in this virtuous cycle. In this respect, the next government should take action to, for instance, help the 40 Rajabhat colleges nationwide improve their quality.

"Currently, about 50 per cent of the 7,000 lecturers at these state colleges do not have career security since they are not permanent employees, which these colleges can't afford due to insufficient budget," he says.

"The situation has also resulted in a high turnover of teaching personnel, which in turn seriously affects the quality of education provided to about 400,000 students.

"As I've noted, at these Rajabhat colleges, only 7 per cent of the teaching personnel have PhDs. In other words, we may have opened up or upgraded many new colleges in the past years, but the quality is still not right."

Nophakhun Limsamarnphun

nop1122@yahoo.com