Abstract
East Asian countries are latecomers in restructuring their key universities for international higher education, instituting necessary changes within the last 10 years. Yet amidst the dust of reconstruction, major features can already be discerned. This chapter highlights historical legacies, as well as Singapore’s status as a city state in shaping the distinctive path to building its world-class universities. This chapter also outlines the particular institutional configuration of its universities, in terms of its governance, resource allocation, university-industry relations and faculty recruitment policies. The author draws on a survey of international students in four major Asian cities to show the distinctive features of the Singapore case. This chapter concludes with the view that the next decade may see some moderation in East Asia’s ambitions to build WCUs as leading universities settle in their established positions and as resources are diverted to creating alternative university models.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the NTU website, “Nanyang Technological Institute was established on the same campus (Nanyang University) in 1981 with government funding to educate practice-oriented engineers for the burgeoning Singapore economy”. Source: www.ntu.edu.sg/aboutntu/ntuataglance/Pages/Ourhistory.aspx
- 2.
See Jason Tan (1998) for a more detailed description of the government’s efforts to liberalise the pre-tertiary education sector.
- 3.
Both NUS and NTU moved from public universities under the direct control of the Ministry of Education to become non-for-profit companies in 2006, to allow them to operate as private universities (Today, 1 April 2006).
- 4.
The data comes from a survey of students conducted in mid-2009–2010 supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education (The project title is ``Globalising Universities and International Student Mobilities''; supported by the Academic Research Fund Tier 2 grant [Grant number: MOE 20089-T2-1-101] with Assoc Prof HO Kong Chong of the National University of Singapore as the principal investigator) covering nine national universities in five countries, Singapore, China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. A common non-random quota sample is designed to replicate the international student population in each of the nine universities along the following dimensions: gender, science versus nonscience enrolment, undergraduate and graduate enrolment. In terms of sending countries, 50% of the sample comes from the top two sending countries, and the other 50% is from the rest of the sending countries. Respondents were asked to complete a 15-min questionnaire which collected data on how they selected the university in which they are enrolled, their adjustment process and their future plans.
- 5.
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Ho, K.C. (2013). Peering Through the Dust of Construction: Singapore’s Efforts to Build WCUs. In: Shin, J., Kehm, B. (eds) Institutionalization of World-Class University in Global Competition. The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4975-7_13
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