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Look beyond the glowing record of the foreign university and pay more attention to engage the different stakeholders within the institution.
Doing so could help mitigate future dents on Singapore's education hub ambitions, advised Dr Ravinder Sidhu, a visiting academic who is doing research here on trans-national education providers.
The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Asia shut its doors last Friday. Classes had been operating for one semester before UNSW vice-chancellor Fred Hilmer — who took over last June — decided to pull the plug, due to the poor student take-up rate.
"There needs to be a closer examination of internal governance structures of invited universities — how decisions are made by governing councils, presidents or vice-chancellors and the faculty," said Dr Sidhu, a Research Fellow from the University of Queensland who presented her paper at a closed-door workshop on trans-national education and migration this week.
"More attention needs to be given these different tiers within the institution for a better risk analysis and securing greater commitment."
Media reports had pointed to the UNSW not having deep enough pockets as a key reason for the pull-out. The increasingly corporate approach to governance among universities translates into looking at the world from a market perspective, such as costs and revenues, Dr Sidhu observed.
UNSW Asia is one of a handful of foreign universities that she is looking at for her research on Singapore's Global Schoolhouse initiative. The Economic Development Board (EDB) has targeted to attract 150,000 foreign students to Singapore by 2015 and create 22,000 jobs.
Dr Sidhu said she was about to fly back to Australia to interview UNSW staff when the news broke.
"I was stunned," she told Today. "There was no indication of closure to the people on the ground. They were expecting restructuring, in light of the student numbers."
She also cautioned against perceiving invited foreign universities — which receive funding from the Singapore Government to set up shop here — as bastions of creative and cutting-edge work, as well as talented staff and students.
The challenge is to ensure that the local universities are not limited to just the "bread-and-butter", though important, tasks of administration and preparing students for the labour force, she added.
As for the Global Schoolhouse initiative on the whole? She said Singapore was "certainly developing a name for itself as an emerging education hub", but it was "still early days" to give a fair assessment.
"This is an expensive policy endeavour. The question of whether the money could be better utilised for other ends is a valid one, especially in light of any high-profile 'failures'."
The workshop, held on Tuesday and Wednesday, was organised by the National University of Singapore's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Migration Research Cluster and the Asia Research Institute.
Issues raised included how globalising cities re-invent themselves as education hubs; how educational trans-migrants, especially youth, navigate cultural differences; and the role of local and foreign education providers in this phenomenon.
One other interesting finding for Singapore was Associate Professor Ho Kong Chong's research on young foreign students at universities here.
His initial findings — after discussions with 10 of them from Asian countries such as China, India and Vietnam — showed that foreign students live in a "social bubble", without embedding themselves here, and tend to make friends only among themselves.
This would defeat the purpose of the varsities to expose their local students to a multi-cultural environment, pointed out Assoc Prof Ho, who is with the Sociology department of the National University of Singapore. TODAY/rose
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