The one thing that the whole UNSW debacle has taught me is that comprehensive university education is best left in Singaporean hands. Call me a narrow-minded nationalist or a bigoted myopic well frog, but we’ve set up three universities without too much trouble. In fact NTU is expanding and setting up a social science department, and SMU has a new law department.
Singaporeans are not better than Australians in setting up universities. It’s just that UNSW failed because a change in their leadership led to a change of heart. If the university were in Singaporean hands it would not have folded so easily. We’d have control over the leadership of the university, we’d also control (overt or otherwise) the board of trustees, and those involved in setting up the university have a greater vested interest in making it work, because they don’t have a main campus to fall back on. It’s a do-or-die kind of thing when you set up a new university instead of a branch.
I believe we should not recruit anymore foreign universities to set up campuses here. Although we should encourage graduate programs to set up satellite campuses here, since those are clearly more successful, like Chicago’s GSB and Insead (strangely enough both are MBA programs, and not Australian). The $30 million plus that was wasted on the UNSW project could have gone to the new Liberal Arts College that was brought up a while ago (more here).
Another problem is branding. A fresh university would require a massive branding campaign (as seen with SMU) but it also does not come with negative stereotypes. UNSW and Warwick would have come with some negative baggage, because, let’s be honest, they’re not really the good schools from their respective countries. They’re not bad schools, but they’re not good schools. So a Singaporean student looking at these schools will be wondering how much better are they compared to NUS, NTU and SMU. Let’s face it, UNSW would have come in fourth, just ahead of UniSIM. A new university (or liberal arts college) would have a chance to place itself ahead of the pack in terms of arts and sciences, just as SMU has with business, and NTU with engineering.
I strongly believe that putting our educational destiny in the hands of strangers who are not stakeholders in the future of our country is a bad idea. To them it’ll only ever be a side business with which to milk until it dries out. If it were a locally run operation, it would be a main business, and it must continuously attempt to out compete its rivals. To fail would mean to lose everything, not just pack up and go back to a nice cozy main business. That doesn’t mean that locally set up universities can’t fail, but it’s nothing a little government statute can’t fix (NUS and NTU are technically statutory boards, as are all the Polytechnics).
