07 October 2018

University rankings have to evolve with the times. They should go beyond academic publications and citations, or even student diversity.

Instead, university rankings should take into account graduate employability, and the ability of a university to collaborate with industry partners in both research as well as in terms of job creation.

The International Academic Advisory Panel (IAAP), comprising university leaders and chief executives of global companies, met in Singapore recently to discuss higher education. The panel agreed that current university rankings rely too much on research indicators and overlook other areas such as experiential learning and entrepreneurship.

Institutions of higher learning do far more than passively acquire knowledge.

The National Institute of Education, for instance, not only trains teachers, but also conducts research and spearheads innovation in schools.

Such activities do far more to foster nation building than academic citations or getting large numbers of foreign students.

Times Higher Education is planning to pilot a new university ranking next April which takes into account factors such as the quality of jobs their graduates land, their contributions to economic growth and innovation, and the global partnerships they forge.

10 July 2017

Singapore’s universities should become more flexible and move away from the British-inherited system of forcing students to decide on their majors early in their academic years.

It often takes a lot of time for students to decide on what careers they wish to embark and what their interests are. Consequently, such an “inbuilt inflexibility” in the current university system may not serve students’ interests well, nor be productive for the overall economy.

More flexibility must be introduced into the higher education landscape to accommodate those who may have discovered new interests midway through their academic programmes.

Newer universities in Singapore have recognized this, and when they were established, they tried to incorporate more flexibility in their systems. For example, students at SUTD have to declare their specialisations only at the end of their first year, after taking common modules in subjects such as design, science and mathematics. At Yale-NUS College, most students have to declare their majors only at the end of their second year.

At the bigger and older universities like NUS or NTU though, not many students have the chance to switch their course of study midway through their programme. Less than 1 per cent of NTU’s undergraduates do so, and at NUS, only about 2 per cent of eligible students successfully changed their major or programme in the last academic year.

Several faculties at NUS have revised their undergraduate curricula to allow students to pursue double-major or major-minor combinations that allow them to pursue other interests and disciplines without having to push back their graduation date. The university now offers more than 90 structured double-major and major-minor combinations.