Comparative Of Higher Education Among Singapore and India.

Introduction

            The value of education’s has received global recognition over the past two decades. The world today, in the 21^st century, is a very different one. We now live in a very interconnected world. Economies have become globalized, and this has become an irreversible phenomenon. As the term “global village” suggests, people have come to relies that a country’s unilateral actions could have monumental consequences.  In fact, economic globalization has led to greater interdependence between countries and universities around the world are concerned with producing graduates who are multilingual, cross-cultural and possess a global perspective.

            The business of education has also undergone a tremendous revolution. The original of education –gaining knowledge  for its own sake, and learning to play one’s part  in one’s own society-are still important but no longer the sole purposes. Another  purpose of education to prepare and develop a person for the globalized economy. Demand for education has been growing throughout the world, as countries open up and become more economically dynamic. According to, Newman (2004), ‘The advent of the knowledge-based economy (KBE) and the rapidly expanding globalization

[1] are re-shaping the fabric of the higher education landscape’.

            Higher education can bring significant benefits to both individual and society as a whole.  In terms  of  the global economy, the importance of higher education becomes paramount as knowledge plays  an increasingly key role in economic development. The benefits of higher education, showing that uneducated workforce in increases productivity to sustain employment and earn higher income.

            The transformation of universities, form being a community of scholars  devoted purely to the pursuit of intellectual activities to the modern university has taken plays that societies plays on higher education.  According to Flexner, (1930), ‘A university is not outside but inside the general social public of a given era….(It is) an expression of the age as well as an influence operating upon both present and future’.

            Today, in the first decade of the 21^st century, another set of related terms is emerging that  includes transnational education, borderless education, and cross-border education. The term borderless refers to the blurring of conceptual, disciplinary, and geographic borders traditionally inherent to higher education. In recent years, information technology has improved our quality of life tremendously. Technology has a powerful effect on how institutions function in the marketplace. It is also reshaping pedagogy and teaching of learning base on lifelong learning.

            Ironically, technological wonders brought  the rapid advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in its various manifestations. At the fundamental level, ICT will influence and change the lifestyle of the learner.

            This paper commences by examining the recent reforms  and development of higher education throughout the world. The paper then turns to the structure and development of the higher education system in Singapore and India to demonstrate and compare their similarities and differences.

Global Higher Education Reforms

            The world today, in the 21^st century is equated as the era of globalization. According to Sehugurensky (1999),..the development  of higher  education in global context cannot be isolated from the emergence of the knowledge-based economy, in which productivity relies on science, technology, knowledge, management and also human capital.[2] Economies  have become globalized  and this has become an irreversible phenomenon.  We now live in a very interconnected world.

            In  our lives,  we no longer deal with only our neighbors or people of our community and culture, but increasingly, with people from all over the globe. To give a better life for their citizens, countries cannot isolate themselves economically . They must open up to the global marketplace. In order to prosper in this global marketplace, their people must be familiar with the norms of international business and commerce. They must feel comfortable and confident with people with people from all over the world.

            The business of education is the recent development of higher education. Regarding with this situation, private institutions are providing  both access and the skills needed for the economy of the 21^st century. Public universities  increasingly resemble private institutions in funding patterns. According to Philip G. Altbach, (1998), The idea of an academic degree as a “private good” that benefits the individual rather than a “public good” for society is gaining acceptance. The “logic” of today’s market economies and an ideology of privatization have contributed to the resurgence of private higher education and the establishment of private  institutions where none existed before.

            Within a knowledge-based economy (KBE) environment, the “shelf-life” of learned knowledge and skills gets shorter as demands for new skills and knowledge happen at a faster rate. One of the keys to the continual growth and well-being of universities is their ability to successfully anticipate future skills and knowledge, and to provide programmes to support the life-long learning needs of the workforce. There are ‘New Economy’ skills related to hoe to operate in the global economy more in the domain of people, management or leadership skills such as skills for communication, negotiation, innovation and coping the change. These skills are applicable to every one in the workforce.

Higher  Education In  Singapore

            University education reforms has been among the most important  policy agenda item for Singapore in recent years. As a public policy area, university education is not immune from the profound influence of such concepts as accountability, performance-based assessment, quality assurance, and market relevance, which prevail in a wider policy context of public-sector reforms and governance changes since the 1990s.

            According to Michael H. Lee and S. Gopinathan, (2003), ‘Three major elements of university policy changes and reforms can be identified.’ The first is the transition from quantitative expansion to qualitative consolidation in the course of the shift from elite to mass higher education. The second is the diversification of financial resources for the university sector. Finally, there is a common trend of comprehensive reviews of higher education systems.

            According to (Tharman, (2004), Singapore has a rigorous  education system that consistently deliver high quality education for nearly every student up to secondary level, and about 80% of the primary one  cohort for post-secondary education. The outcome of this system was to produce high averages in the performance of students in schools and universities. However, in order for Singapore to continue to remain a leading Asian centre of excellence, the education system needs to move beyond its current emphasis on effiency to one that ‘promotes flexibility, competition and a diversity of educational pathways’. It will achieve high averages performance among the students.

            Singapore remains one of the largest  markets for transnational higher in the world and is a particularly important market for Australian and U.K. universities. Private institutions, such as Singapore Institute of Management (SIM), are key local partner and have been drawn to foreign partnerships as a way of offering degrees. According to Richard Garret, (2005), “the latest announcements by Singapore’s government desire to reduce dependence on foreign higher education.

According to the Singapore Department of Statistics, in 2003 around 170 private tertiary providers in Singapore enrolled 119,000 students. Of those, 140 offered programs in collaboration with foreign institutions and enrolled 89,000 students in such programs (75 percent of the total). This shows the importance of transnational provision in Singapore. Apart from that, Singapore Department of Statistics (2000a) : 239, mentioned that the higher education sector, including three universities and four polytechnics, as a whole occupies more than 30% of public expenditure on education, which accounts for S$1.1 billion or S$600 million dedicated to university education (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2000a : 239). Strictly speaking, the higher education system of Singapore is universal in nature.

The Singapore higher education market is undoubtedly becoming more competitive. A  government target of 60 percent cohort participation by 2010 and adult learning initiatives spurred by the proposed national open university will see longer term cohort decline offset by increased youth participation and a more active lifelong learning sector.

The cases of Singapore reveal that government tend to follow the principle of “autonomy for accountability” to steer the university from a distance. Instead of implementing direct control, quality audits and governance reviews are commonly adopted by the government to devolve more responsibility upon individual universities and maximize the "value for money" for the public expenditure spent on the university sector. In Singapore university now have to respond to external pressure for achieving better performance and to be more accountable, which makes the universities corporately responsible for their own performance and outcomes. Therefore, quality is more likely to be interpreted as efficiency of resource allocation more than as the quality of teaching and learning processes.

The government  once again revealed a strong economic bias when it announced that these reforms would enable Singapore to “compete in the next century as a creative nation with additional sets of skills and capabilities”.[3] Several notable trends may be detected in the flurry of reforms. First, there is a continuing and overriding concern with the role of higher education in sustaining economic competitiveness. Even the reform of the arts colleges has been undertaken toward this end. This is perhaps not surprising since the government views human resources as the only means of economic survival.

Second, the government is concerned that creativity and innovation take root in higher education. Its curricular reforms and emphasis on Research and Development (R&D) parallel similar reforms in the primary and secondary sectors, where reforms under the banner of "thinking schools" are being planned and implemented at breakneck speed. It will not be easy to persuade teachers, students, and parents that changes need to be made to established modes of teaching and learning, especially since these practices are seen as having served Singapore well in the past. A local researcher has also pointed out further inhibiting factors toward the development of a thriving R&D culture--namely, the lack of an indigenous R&D tradition and the relative lack of interest among many local undergraduates in an R&D career.[4]

Higher Education In India

            Higher education in India also seriously challenged. Globalization has generated a new dilemma. India has significant advantages in the 21st century knowledge race. It has a large higher education sector—the third largest in the world in student numbers, after China and the United States. The system encompasses approximately 304 universities including 62 “deemed universities,” 11 open universities, 14,600 colleges, 10 million students, and 0.5 million teachers. Besides these public and private institutions, the exact number of private colleges, international institutions, and enrollment involved in Indian higher education training and vocational skills is not yet  known.

            According to Suma Chitnis, (2002), when India achieved independence from British Colonial rule in 1947, only a few thousand students were enrolled in higher education. Today, with 250 universities and approximately 8 million students, India has the world’s second-largest system of higher education. Unfortunately, the students enrolled account for barely 6 percent of the population of the relevant age group. This figure is disturbingly low as compared to the countries of North America (60 to 70 percent) and Europe (40 to 60 percent), or the recently developed Asian Tigers (33 to 55 percent), with which India needs to compete as globalization advances.

Despite the massive increase in student numbers, the fact that enrollment (as a percentage of the population of the relevant age group) remains poor in India illustrates how development is defeated by the phenomenal increase in the population of the country since independence—one billion according to the latest (2001) census, up from about 33 million in 1947. At the same time, it is important to recognize that enrollments in higher education suffer because of the slow progress in primary and secondary schooling. With great effort, the country recently achieved 100 percent school enrollment, but 40 percent of the children drop out before they complete primary school and only an estimated 20 percent complete high school.

There are a small  number of high quality institutions, departments, and centers that can form the basis of quality sector in higher education. The fact that the states, rather than the central government, exercise major responsibility for higher education creates a rather cumbersome structure, but the system allows for a variety of policies and approaches.

Philip G. Altbach, (2005), in “A World-Class Country without World-Class Higher Education: India's 21st Century Dilemma”, said that  India educates approximately 10 percent of its young people in higher education, still a rather low number by international standards—compared to more than half in the major industrialized countries and 15 percent in China. India's academic system has an unusually small high quality sector at the top—most of the academic system is of modest quality at best. Almost all of the world's academic systems resemble a pyramid, with a small top tier and a massive sector at the bottom. India has a tiny top tier. None of its universities occupy a solid position at the top. A few of the best universities have some excellent departments and centers, and there are a small number of outstanding undergraduate colleges.

India’s college and universities very difficult to provide top-quality of learning. The education system in India provides few incentives and lack of accountability at any level to perform to highest standards. Even the small top tier of higher education faces serious problems. Few in India are thinking creatively about higher education. There are no field of higher education research. For example, in China more than two-dozen higher education research centers, and several government agencies are involved in higher education policy.

Now, as India strives to compete in globalized economy in areas that require highly trained professionals, the quality of higher education become increasingly important. To compete successfully in the knowledge-based economy of the 21^st century, India needs enough universities that not only produce bright graduates for export but can also support sophisticated research in a number of scientific and scholarly fields and produce at least some of the knowledge and technology needed for an expanding economy.

How can India build a higher education system that will permit it to join developed economies ? India will need to create a dozen or more universities that can compete internationally to fully participate in the new world economy. Several of the well-endowed and effectively managed private institutions maintain reasonably high standards, although it is not clear that these institutions will be able to sustain themselves in the long run. They can help produce well-qualified graduates in such fields as management, but they cannot form the basis for comprehensive research universities. This sector lacks the resources to build the facilities required for quality instruction and research in the sciences, nor can enough money be earned by providing instruction in the mainstream arts and sciences disciplines.

 Apart from that, it also can  promote advanced technical and professional education and research to be self-sufficient and to remain in the forefront of knowledge. Alternately, it can concentrate on providing a variety of vocational and technical courses to equip the population to take advantage of the employment opportunities that are generated as multinationals locate labor-intensive production processes in India. The second alternative may create dependence, but it will enable many Indians to earn well. The challenge is to combine government funding with privatization, to build the resources required to accomplish both options, and optimize the country’s gains from globalization.

Discussion

Higher education reforms between Singapore and India are totally different. This two countries has a difference academic cultures. Diverse social, political, economic, and cultural structures have formed that serve to differentiate outwardly similar countries and influence their organizational environments and those who work in them. That is, institutions of each nation have developed their own shape, and culture and these, at different levels and emphasis, are worthy of reflection.

Our focus here is on the diffencere  in academic cultures in both countries between India  and Singapore. On the surface, one might expect the academic cultures in both countries to be almost identical given their colonial heritage. After all, India was a British Colony for many years and Singapore gaining independence in 1965, Singapore rapidly built up its higher education base on labour-intensive economy. The most obvious difference we have found between academic cultures in Singapore and India is the dominant expectations in terms of research, publishing, teaching and government policies regarding with higher education.

AS far as we are aware, academics in Singapore have yet to experience similar pressure with regard either to professional practice or departmental resources. Fewer external research funding opportunities are available in Singapore, perhaps reflecting a less intense emphasis on large-scale, internationally relevant research projects. While valuable research is conducted in Singapore, in our experience, it is more likely to be personally motivated rather than institutionally or structurally driven and focused on local in-school rather than international issues.

According to Jandhyala, (2002), The government of India’s 1997 discussion paper on Government Subsidies in India provided a revealing insight into government thinking. For the first time, higher education (as well as secondary education) was classified in the discussion paper as a “nonmerit good”  (and elementary education as a “merit good”), government subsidies  for which would need to be reduced drastically. After that, Ministry of Finance has  partly modified its earlier classification  of good. It reclassified  higher education into a category called “merit 2 goods”, which need not be subsidized by the state at the same level as merit goods.

The higher education system in Singapore has gone through the process of massification in tandem with a significant increase in the participation rate of university up to 21%, since 1990s. Education at Indian universities; the faculties of the arts and humanities, which account for 60% of the total enrollments in higher education in the country have fared the worst.

The two public universities in Singapore--the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU)-have been urged by the government to assure and enhance their quality through the recruitment of talented local and foreign academic staff, a stringent tenure policy, and monetary rewards for good teaching and research performance.

At present, the world-class institutions are mainly limited to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and perhaps a few others such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. These institutions, combined, enroll well under 1% of the student population.

It is widely believed that in India no student has ever been denied admission at any of the six IIMs for lack of funds. However, the Singapore government, which does not suffer from a shortage of public funding, intends to take a preventive approach to avoid the over reliance of universities on the government as their sole source of funding before the problems of financial cutbacks occurs. (Michael H. Lee & Gopinathan , 2003)

The most recent change in Singapore lies in the restructing of the university sector. The National University of Singapore (NUS) will be transformed in a university comprising three autonomous campuses, while the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) will expand into a full-fledged, comprehensive university and Singapore Management University (SMU) will continue it role as a “niche” university specializing in business and management education.

Based on Indian Universities, Anthony Stella, (2002), said that,  with 259 university-level institutions, more than 10,750 colleges, 8 million students, and 400,000 teachers, India has one of the world’s largest higher education systems. While the numbers may look impressive, they cover only 6 percent of the relevant age group, and 88 percent of student enrollments are in undergraduate education. Ensuring the quality of education provided to this small percentage is vital to the success of the nation. There is at present no system of quality assurance and accreditation of cross border education operating in India.

The case of Singapore reveal that government tent to follow the principle of “autonomy for accountability” to steer the university sector from  a distance. Quality audits by the government to devolve more responsibility upon universities and maximize the “value for money” for the public expenditure spent on the university sector.

The core mission and values of higher education in Singapore – to educate responsible citizens and for active participation in society, to advance, create and disseminate  knowledge through research and to provide an open space for higher learning and for life-long learning. (Michael H. Lee & Gopinathan, (2003).  Regarding  with higher education in India, that is not clear who bear the responsibility. From the policy perspective, when the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) was established it was given the mandate to advice the University Grants Commission (UGC)  and the Ministry for Human Resource Development on standards of higher education, and a formal mechanism to dispense this function is yet to be put in place. Although established and funded by the UGC, the extent to which the NAAC’s advisory role will have a direct bearing on policymaking is not yet clear.

Conclusion

            In conclusion, this  paper discusses and comments on the recent higher education reforms in Singapore and India. The realities of a rapid changing world of interdependence  and competition in international trade, focus on the university’s responsibility to serve the societal needs in response to financial and public pressure imposed  upon higher education institutions. The challenges facing higher-education are both global and local in nature. While the trends set forth by globalization and the advent of ICT will influence and change the learning processes.

            Reforms has been introduced because universities in this two countries want to transform themselves before they can serve their communities. Indian universities have not yet reached the status and prestige of excellence compared Singapore universities. However, universities still have to meet with various frustrations like the shortage of resources and the lack of appreciation by their communities on their way towards international excellence.

            From my perspective, the academic working culture in both countries offers different types of reward and opportunity.

            The opening up of the education sector to private schools and universities will make the system more robust to internal and external challenges. Private higher education is emerging as one of the most dynamic of ideology of privatization that is so influential at present and with the trend worldwide to cut public spending.

            Higher education provides a board array of benefits to both individual and society. The quantifiable benefits of higher education extend beyond labor market and economic impacts and warrant more scrutiny. In any country, higher education reforms could go a long away toward improving the prospects for local and sustainable economic development, social stability and individual prosperity.

References:

Altbach, P. (1995). "Problems and Possibilities: The US Academic Profession." Studies in Higher Education, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 27-45.

Altbach, P. (1998). Comparative Higher Education: Knowledge, the University and Development. Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong.

Altbach, P. (1999). "The Logic of Mass Higher Education." Tertiary Education and Management, no. 5, pp. 107-124.

Gopinathan, S. (1997). "Globalization, the State and Education Policy in Singapore." In: Lee, W. O., and Bray, M. (eds.) Education and Political Transition: Perspectives and Dimensions in East Asia. Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong. pp. 68-80.

Schugurensky, D. (1999). "Higher Education Restructuring in the Era of Globalization: Towards a Heteronomous Model?" In: Arnove, R. F., and Torres, C. A. (eds.) Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. pp. 283-304.

Singapore Department of Statistics. (2000a). Yearbook of Statistics 2000. Singapore: Singapore Department of Statistics.

Winter, R., Taylor, T., and Sarros, J. (2000). "Trouble at Mill: Quality of Academic Worklife Issues within a Comprehensive Australian University." Studies in Higher Education, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 279-294.

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[1] Globalization has also underscored the imperative for institutions to internationalize. Internationalization poses a major challenge to higher education system.

[2] Human Capital - The set of skills which an employee acquires on the job, through training and experience, and which increase that employee's value in the marketplace.

[3] Co Committee to Upgrade LASALLE and NAFA, Creative Singapore: A Renaissance Nation in the Knowledge Age (Singapore: author, 1998), 38.

[4] C. B. Goh, "Science and Technology in Singapore: The Mindset of the Engineering Undergraduate," Asia Pacific Journal of Education 18, no.1 (1998): 7?24; C. B. Goh, "Imported Technology: Its Idea and Development," part 1. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 71 (1998): 41-54.

This essay mainly publish in year 2005*