The three separate bills to turn the universities into autonomous entities are being deliberated and scrutinised by parliamentary committees before they are submitted to the NLA for final approval later this month or early next month. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the three bills are expected to sail through the process.

The idea has been a long time coming. But a shift to the self-governing system will require dramatic changes in administrative structures, work processes and mind-sets. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that some faculty members and staff who are accustomed to the civil-service system - which is mired in red-tape and corruption - tend to view the move toward greater independence with suspicion. The anti-reform camp has been joined by some students who fear that, once granted autonomous powers, these state universities will receive less funding from the government and will be compelled to charge higher tuition fees. There may be some cause for concern in this respect.

Although the government has promised to maintain the present level of budgetary allocation to state universities that opt out of the state bureaucracy - at least in the foreseeable future - the size of the subsidies may gradually be reduced as newly independent universities strike out on their own and achieve a certain level of financial self-sufficiency. Already, administrators of Chulalongkorn, Thaksin and KMIT universities have given assurances that those students who cannot afford the eventual rise in tuition fees will be made eligible for scholarship grants, student loans and other assistance programmes. A rise in tuition fees at state universities - which currently charge a small fraction of the amount asked for by private universities - is inevitable.

Thailand, which is a middle-income developing country, does not have unlimited financial resources for education. The ongoing education reform requires the government to invest much more to provide 12 years of free schooling to all children. That means the level of state subsidies for primary and secondary education will rise at the expense of funding for tertiary education.

It must be said that the government's priority is to ensure quality teaching at the primary and secondary education levels, which will bring greater benefits to society at large. State universities will be required to make up for the shortfalls in subsidies by increasing their own tuition fees, and by setting up endowment funds and other fund-raising activities. But these are practical issues that all state universities will eventually have to learn to live with if their primary objective to achieve academic excellence is to be realised. Freeing state universities from government bureaucracy will enable their administrators to more effectively improve the quality of education by pushing faculty members to work harder. This will include doing more research work and forging closer partnerships with the private sector to ensure students are well equipped to compete successfully in the job market.

Continued opposition to the move toward greater autonomy suggests that there is still ambiguity on how state universities will go about shifting toward greater autonomy, particularly in areas of financing and personnel management. Some private universities, which have never received any financial support from the government at all, have become quite successful both as producers of well-qualified graduates to supply the job market and as providers of education services. Some of them are doing well financially. But one of the weak points of private universities is their emphasis on student head counts and profitability at the expense of quality research work.

State universities can have the best of both worlds if they strike the right balance between improvement in the quality of education they provide while also maintaining the high standard of excellence of their research facilities.