E-Paper
The age of Asia
Singapore, with its plethora of courses as well as its solid infrastructure, seems set to become the next educational hub of Asia.
Today, at least 1.8 million international students are pursuing higher education outside their home countries. Forty-five per cent of these students are from Asia, mostly from China, India, Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. And these figures are expected to leap-frog in the near future. Some analysts forecast that the global demand for international higher education will exceed seven million students by 2025. Asia will dominate, accounting for 70 per cent of this future demand, about a six-fold increase in demand from the year 2000.
No wonder, Singapore is gearing up to meet the demand for quality education — a stone’s throw away from ‘home’. The city-state is already a popular option for students from India. Take the case of Aneesh Krishna. This 24-year old is an IT Consultant with IBM Business Consulting Services and a Singapore Institute of Management (SIM) scholar. Krishna chose Singapore to pursue a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical & Electronics) degree with Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in 1997 via the Singapore Airlines-Neptune Orient Lines scholarship. After he had completed his under-graduate studies, he applied for a SIM scholarship to do a graduate diploma. As he says, “I wanted to study in a course that addressed my needs and to learn something different from what I was doing, so that I could widen my perspective. The graduate diploma course at SIM laid a good foundation for me to pursue an MBA in the future. Diversity is essential and it would certainly enhance my understanding of how businesses are run.”
“I feel that in any course, how much you learn depends entirely on the individual. If you do the bare minimum required for a degree, you will only learn that much. But if you are keen and passionate, you can learn a lot more than what the course has to offer,” says Krishna emphatically.
Likewise, Xie Min came to Singapore from Shanghai, China, with the hope of pursuing a Diploma in Management Studies and improving his command of the English language. With China working actively to open up more markets abroad, Min realised that a good grasp of English would help him communicate more effectively with his foreign counterparts and colleagues in the future. When he first started his diploma course, Min had to put in a lot of effort to overcome the language barrier as all his previous academic programmes had been conducted in Mandarin.
China is, however, now focusing its energies on carrying out the “211 Project”, i.e., effective engineering and cultivating 100 universities and an extensive group of important disciplines and areas of study with an eye towards the need of the new century. China is also sending students to study abroad. According to the education web site of the People’s Republic of China, the country has, starting from 1978, sent more than 2,92,000 students to 103 countries and regions; of these, 98,500 have completed their studies and already returned home to ‘exploit their skill-sets.’ Something Min also intends to do.
As he says, “Besides imparting knowledge on how to be a successful manager, the course at SIM taught me how to manage myself. This learning journey was not easy, but I tried my best to achieve my educational goal. Learning doesn’t stop with this diploma as I still have a lot more to learn.”
India too attracts a great number of foreign students. We have cultural exchange programmes with nearly 70 Asian, African, and Latin American countries in the field of higher education. We also have a host of scholarship schemes ranging from one for Sri Lanka and Mauritius and a SAARC Scholarship Scheme to the Apasaheb Pant Scholarship Scheme and the General Cultural Scholarship Scheme. Our universities are centres of learning for a number of foreign students.
Amongst all the institutions, the University of Pune, for example, claims to bring in the highest number of international students. It has around 30 MOUs with various universities abroad, which include the University of Calgary, Canada, the University of Bremen, Germany, the University of Lausanne, Switzerland and the University of Texas. After Pune and Delhi, Bangalore has the highest number of foreign students — 1,786 this academic year — studying graduate and post-graduate courses in colleges affiliated to Bangalore University.
Yet, we don’t seem to have ‘marketed’ ourselves as well as perhaps Singapore has. It seems that we’re not really ready to become the academic hub in Asia. Whatever the future holds, this much, however, is true — in less than a decade, the sub-continent will be the place where student traffic will be at its highest. The West will have to make way for the East for this is where the student of the future will be headed.
With affordable and quality education, huge networking opportunities, a vibrant and cosmopolitan lifestyle, safe and comfortable living standards and a cultural and physical proximity to India, Singapore is gearing up to be the leader in education services in Asia.
