SINGAPORE: Doubts about fifth public university

Singapore's plans to establish a fifth public university are in doubt after Minister of State for Education Lawrence Wong said during an end-of-year speech that places could instead be expanded at Singapore's existing four high quality public research-intensive institutions.

The city-state has been looking to expand the number of places for Singaporean students in higher education while keen to maintain quality. Its institutions rank highly in Asia.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said that by 2015 the country's universities should be on course to admit 30% of the school-leaving cohort, compared to 25% now.

Lawrence Wong said in a speech on 26 December: "We haven't decided whether the expansion should be done through a new institution or through the expansion of an existing institution so that's something we will deliberate [on]."

He said expansion of the university sector should focus on teaching and providing young people with workplace skills, rather than another research university.

Wong added that research should not be fragmented and dispersed, as could be the case were another research-intensive university to be established.

"If you look around at examples of research universities, you really need critical mass, you need economies of scale to do research well," he said, pointing to France, which has been trying to pull together some research universities to create greater critical mass "because they had developed in a more diverse and disparate manner".

The National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University were already doing well, Wong said. "I don't think we need to develop even more research-intensive universities for a small country like Singapore."

Although Singapore has a number of private foreign branch campuses, Wong said publicly funded universities would continue to play a core role in the country's higher education sector.

"When you have a publicly funded institution you are able to think through the programmes you are offering, you are able to ensure a certain quality in the programmes you are offering, you are able to make sure that the mix of offerings that you have is closely tied to industry."

The government is supporting the expansion of Singapore Management University, Nanyang Technological University and a partnership between the National University of Singapore and Yale in the United States to set up a new liberal arts and humanities college.

The new Singapore University of Technology and Design in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had its groundbreaking ceremony in November and is officially regarded as Singapore's fourth publicly funded university.

The Singapore Institute of Technology, intended to help polytechnic diploma holders to upgrade their qualifications to degree level, is being set up with five campuses located in Singapore's five existing polytechnics in collaboration with staff from Munich Technical University in Germany, Newcastle University in the UK, and the US University of Nevada, DigiPen Institute of Technology and Culinary Institute of America

The government had mooted setting up a separate campus for the institute with its own staff, possibly as Singapore's fifth public university.

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