What have I learnt today? Blogging about books, media, words, Singapore and the world today. The blog that was Blowin' in the Wind.
Tertiary education has taken a big leap forward in Singapore since the influx of foreigners. University graduates make up 23 per cent of the resident population, up from 12 per cent a decade ago, and more Singaporeans are going for higher education.
According to the Ministry of Education data catalogue, 72 per cent of the eligible age group was enrolled for tertiary education in 2011, up from 45.3 per cent in 2000. The growth in tertiary education has coincided with the foreign influx.
I was shocked to read in the Straits Times today that Singapore's Nanyang Technological University was found below average in teaching in the Times Higher Education world university rankings. NTU dropped a hundred places to 174th spot this year while the National University of Singapore fell only four places to 34th. You can see the rankings here.
The Economist magazine, however, rates the Nanyang Business School higher than the NUS Business School.
The Nanyang Business School is 69th and the NUS Business School 84th in this year's Economist rankings of MBA programmes. The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, is 85th. INSEAD, which has campuses in both France and Singapore, is 23rd.
The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business is first and Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business is second. The University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business is third and Harvard Business School fourth. "America rules the roost," says the Economist. See the full rankings here. Click on the links there to see short profiles of the business schools, showing their fees, student-faculty ratio, their strengths and weaknesses, the starting salaries and career prospects of their graduates.
The National University of Singapore is 34th and Nanyang Technological University 174th in the 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings powered by Thomson Reuters, released today.
American universities swept the board. Here’s the list of the world’s top 100 universities.
I just read a Straits Times report on the Transitioning.org website that said:
Generally, the older and less qualified you are, the more likely you are to be unemployed for any length of time.
Labour statistics highlight the fact that unemployed Singaporeans tend to be older workers – aged 40 and above – who do not have degrees or polytechnic diplomas.
That's a sweeping generalization. There were 19,500 unemployed degree holders last year. That's almost twice as many as in 2007, when there were 10,900 unemployed degree holders – and only about 3,000 less than the number of jobless secondary school certificate holders last year: 22,300. I am quoting from the Singapore Yearbook of Manpower Statistics 2010.
State-owned enterprises or government-linked companies (GLCs) are taking a bigger and bigger share of the economic pie in both Singapore and China. And, in both countries, labour gets the lowest share of the national income in the form of wages.
So says Singapore-born Linda YC Lim, a professor of business strategy at the University of Michigan, in a paper which asks: Why do East Asians save so much?
One reason is high property prices. Then again, "Some economies—Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong—have forced-saving schemes or national “provident funds” with high rates of mandatory contributions out of earned income."
Nevertheless, there is a growing income gap between the rich and the poor. It is the high income earners, GLCs and multinationals that are thriving in "corporatist" Singapore, she adds.
Unlike in other East Asian countries, domestic consumption in Singapore fell from 46.3 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 1990 to 38.6 per cent in 2007 and in China from 50.6 per cent to 36.4 per cent, says Lim. Private consumption and wages are probably held in check in Singapore by the presence of a large and growing foreign workforce which, like the multinationals, wants to send money home, she adds.
David Adelman, the incoming American ambassador to Singapore, studied journalism at the University of Georgia, where he managed the student-run radio station, before getting a law degree from Emory University.
So, obviously, the 45-year-old former George state senator — who threw his support behind Obama even before Obama announced his candidacy, and who is younger than most of Singapore's ministers — knows a thing or two about journalism.
But that doesn't mean he won't be a good diplomat. Consider Strobe Talbott, the former Time correspondent who served as Ambassador-at-Large under fellow Rhodes scholar President Bill Clinton and is now president of the Brookings Institution.
Adelman, a father of three who with his wife Caroline is learning Mandarin before coming to Singapore for the first time, wants to forge even closer relations between the two countries.
Yes, he caused a flap when Senator Jim Webb asked him whether he intended to engage Singapore on the issues of democracy and press freedom.
Singapore is no country for old men and women. Although Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew continues to hold office at 86 and his former deputies Tony Tan and S Dhanabalan are corporate bigwigs in their 70s, age can be a disadvantage lower down the job market.
Older laid-off workers are likely to remain unemployed longer than younger workers, no matter what their education level.
They may have the same problem in other countries, but now we know how acute the problem is in Singapore.
A Ministry of Manpower (MOM) report shows nearly half of those in their 30s and more than 50 per cent of those in their 40s and 50s remained unemployed six months after losing their jobs. Younger workers were luckier, with 68 per cent of the under-30s re-employed within that time.
Long-term unemployment is on the rise, with almost a quarter of the jobseekers looking for work at least for 25 weeks, according to the ministry report. It says, "The number and share of unemployed residents who had been looking for work for at least 25 weeks (i.e. long-term unemployed) rose from 12,900 or 18% of job seekers in December 2008 to 13,900 or 23% in December 2009."
Singapore residents aged 40 and over made up 47 per cent of the jobless workers in December 2009, up from 43 per cent in December 2008.
This table shows the percentage of Singapore residents who were re-employed within six months of losing their jobs. It shows their age groups and education levels. The figures show how hard it is for older university graduates to get new jobs.
| Total | Below secondary | Secondary | Upper secondary | Polytechnic diploma | Degree | |
| Total | 52.1 | 54.9 | 63.4 | 53.9 | 54.8 | 47.3 |
| Below 30 | 68 | s | 79.6 | 75 | 69.6 | 66.2 |
| 30-39 | 54.1 | 54.5 | 72.9 | 44.4 | 44.2 | 53.4 |
| 40-49 | 48.1 | 61.8 | 54.2 | 60.4 | 41.2 | 36.8 |
| 50-59 | 39.6 | 51.5 | 50.9 | 34.5 | s | 12.5 |
(The letter s indicates "data suppressed due to small number of observations", says the report.)
How seriously can you take university rankings by a group that does not even keep up with university appointments?
The Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings make headlines from Britain to Singapore. But someone behind the rankings has been sleeping on the job.
How else can you explain a mistake like this?
THE-QS World University Rankings page has this quote:
"The THE-QS World University Rankings can help distinguish the dormant from the active volcanoes."
— Prof Shih, president, National University of Singapore.
But Prof Shih is no longer president of the National University of Singapore. He is now the founding president of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.
How can anyone ranking universities make an oversight like this, about who heads which university?
Still, here are the 2009 rankings for what they are worth.
Two Singapore universities are ranked among the world's top 100. The National University of Singapore is still ranked 30th, same as last year, while the Nanyang Technological University has moved up from the 77th to the 73rd spot.
China also has two. Tsinghua University has moved up from 56th to 49th while Peking University has slipped from 50th to 52nd.
Hong Kong has three. The University of Hong Kong has moved up from 26th to 24th. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has also moved up from 39th to 35th while the Chinese University of Hong Kong has slipped from 42nd to 46th.
Japan has four. University of Tokyo, down from 19th to 22nd, is the highest ranked Asian university. Osaka University has inched up from 44th to 43rd. Tokyo Institute of Technology is up from 61st to 55th. And Nagoya University has moved from 120th to 92nd.
South Korea has two. Seoul National University is up from 50th to 47th and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology up from 95th to 69th.
Taiwan has one. The National Taiwan University is up from 124th to 95th.
The Australian National University, down from 16th to 17th, is the highest ranked university in Asia-Pacific.
The seven other Australian universities in the top 100 are University of Melbourne and University of Sydney, tied at 36th, Monash University, up from 47th to 45th, University of New South Wales, down from 45th to 47th, University of Adelaide, up from 106th to 81st, University of Western Australia down from 83rd to 84th.
Only Britain and America have more.
How NUS beat UCLA
One wonders about the rankings, though. How can the National University of Singapore be ranked higher than the University of California, Los Angeles, and Northwestern University?
But then you see the National University of Singapore has got 100 out of 100 for peer review score, international staff score and international student score and 96 out of 100 for employer review score. It has got 75 out of 100 for citations/staff score and only 40 out of 100 for staff/student score. That is how it ended up in the 30th spot with an overall score of 84.3.
UCLA, on the other hand, received 100 out of 100 for peer review score, 98 out of 100 for employer review score, 46 out of 100 for staff/student score, 100 out of 100 for citations/staff score, 21 out of 100 for international staff score and 33 out of 100 for international student score. That is how it ended up below the National University of Singapore with an overall score of 83.5.
But the grades show which is better at research and academics. UCLA got 100 out of 100 for citations. What pulled NUS ahead was its higher international staff score and international student score.
To get an idea about a university, one should look at all the scores and not just the overall score.
NUS vs NTU
Now let's compare NUS with the other Singapore university, Nanyang Technological University.
Singapore has an excellent education system. This is once again proved by Singapore’s fourth and eighth graders ranking first in science and second only to Hong Kong in an international survey by Boston College. The complete report on the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study can be downloaded here.
Singapore’s excellent school system is complemented by world class universities with the National University of Singapore (NUS) ranked 30th on the 2008 QS Top 100 Universities list. The only Asia Pacific universities ranked higher are Australian National University (16th), University of Tokyo (19th), Kyoto University (25th), and University of Hong Kong (26th). Nanyang Technological University (NTU), also in Singapore, is 77th on the list. The top 10 are
Ranked 11th to 15th are all American universities: University of Pennsylvania (11th), Princeton (12th), Duke and Johns Hopkins (13th) and Cornell (15th). Others in the top 20 are Stanford (17th), University of Michigan (18th) and McGill University (20th).
Singapore is naturally proud of its universities, which attract academics and students from various countries.
But Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, Chicago, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, Caltech, Cornell, Penn, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Imperial College, University College London, Tokyo, Kyoto have produced Nobel Prize winners and are regularly in the news for various studies and achievements.
What is it that makes the two Singapore universities, which are much younger and less often in the news, world class?
Visit the QS World University Rankings website and check the detailed rankings.
Singapore universities are world class because they attract international faculty and the highest number of international students in Asia Pacific outside Australia and their academics get good peer reviews. National University of Singapore graduates also get the best employer reviews in all of Asia Pacific outside Australia. But they lag behind other top schools in research work, All these factors are taken into consideration in the world university rankings. But what counts most is academic peer review -– a survey in which more than 100 academics from Singapore took part.
Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.
