The Internationalization of Higher Education in Singapore: An Elitist Model at the Crossroads of “Worlds”?
As a result of internationalisation policies, Singapore is now one of the world’s most selective centres of higher education. How did these policies take hold in Singapore? Did they develop according to a Western hegemonic model? Has competition between public and private institutions intensified? Have the student elites been renewed? To answer these questions, the article analyses the impact of internationalisation dynamics on the higher education system in Singapore over the past fifty years. The intensification of the international dimension in Singapore reflects a reconfiguration of the structuring of its education and the production of its elites. On the basis of a field survey combining analysis of interviews with institutional actors, political discourse and documentary sources, the article shows that Singaporean public universities have become elite training programmes ranked among the best in Asia, welcoming primarily the most academically gifted national students, whose flows have been increasing since 2010 to the detriment of international students. On the other hand, the lucrative private system of off-shore institutions in Singapore meets high quality requirements and enables the recruitment of a larger number of mobile students. The result is a dichotomy between a public elite trained in the more academically selective national universities and a private elite embodied in the more economically selective private institutions. The survey shows that Singaporean higher education has achieved regional dominance through decisions based on values inspired by both the technologically developed Western world and the rapidly growing Eastern world.