Six years of compulsory schooling starting at age seven.
Racial quotas in public university admissions (the controversial "90:10" for certain courses) create resentment among non-Bumiputera students. In school, you might see the cafeteria split informally: Chinese kids at one table, Malays at another, Indians at a third. The school attempts to mix them via co-curricular activities, but social segregation is a quiet reality.
Students are often trilingual, learning Bahasa Malaysia (national language), English (compulsory second language), and often a heritage language.