19 February 1998

SPEECH BY DR TONY TAN KENG YAM, DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER AND MINISTER FOR DEFENCE, AT THE NTU MINISTERIAL FORUM HELD ON THURSDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 1998 AT 7.00PM AT THE NTU MAIN LECTURE THEATRE

1. Last month, when I was in New Zealand, I gave a speech outlining the impact of globalisation on the world economy.

I understand that copies of the speech have been made available to all of you and I will not therefore go through the speech in detail.

What I would like to do as a backdrop to my speech this evening is to summarise the main points of the speech I gave in New Zealand.

2. Essentially, I said then that liberalisation of trade and advancement of technology have integrated the economies of the world into a single global economic system.

Globalisation has opened up new opportunities for growth and has generated vast economic opportunities and rewards by creating bigger export markets, more jobs and higher standards of living for much of the world's population.

At the same time, globalisation has brought about greater competition among countries to attract foreign investments and win export markets.

With globalisation, the economic prosperity of countries is bound even closer together.

What happens in one country can very rapidly, in fact, almost instantaneously affect the economies of its neighbours and of other countries.

This is vividly, indeed, painfully shown by the unprecedented speed with which the effects of the devaluation of the Thai Baht in July spread rapidly to affect the currencies, stock markets and economies of the other countries in Asia and even further afield including Latin America, Japan and the United States.

3. I ended my speech in New Zealand by stressing that there are two policy choices which countries have in dealing with the trend of economic globalisation -- one is to open up and the other is to close up.

To close up is to revert to protectionism and go down the road to poverty and ruin.

The only feasible course of action, particularly for a small country like Singapore, is to gear up our economies to better deal with the uncertainties and challenges of a global economy by accelerating the liberalisation of our markets and strengthening banking and capital market supervision structures and systems.

4. The new globalised economic system will be dominated by processing and dissemination of information rather than by production of goods.

In other words, knowledge industries will be the growth industries of the 21st century.

The prosperity of a country in the coming years will be determined not by how much land or natural resources a country has but by how many skilled, trained personnel the country can produce.

In other words, intellectual capital becomes a factor of production, in fact the most important factor of production, and talent development and acquisition the major soure of competitive advantage for a country.

We then have to ask ourselves what type of education system will best prepare a country or a people to succeed in this globalised economy.

5. The characteristic which will enable our students to succeed in the 21st century is they must be flexible and be willing and able to adapt to change.

The solution is not to throw out the high standards and discipline which we have established, with much effort, over the last thirty years.

What we need to do is to build on these high standards and infuse more flexibility into our education system.

6. The members of the International Academic Advisory Panel (IAAP) who met in August last year, were concerned with the rigidity and early specialisation of our education system whereby children as early as the age of 15 or 16 had to make critical decisions which will affect their choice of careers.

The IAAP Members felt that students should be equipped for life-long learning and needed a broader education to help them adapt to change.

As one IAAP member put it: "University education should not only prepare students for the jobs of today but also for jobs which have yet to be invented and careers which do not presently exist."

7. To gear up our tertiary education sector to better cope with the demands of a globalised economy, I stressed in a talk at NUS last January that it is timely to re-structure tertiary education in Singapore through three initiatives:

1) Fostering a research culture in NUS and NTU by expanding postgraduate education and research at the two universities;

2) Reviewing the undergraduate curriculum at NUS and NTU in order to bring it more up to date and to put more emphasis on Thinking Skills and fostering of creativity; and

3) Providing a wider range of educational opportunities at tertiary level for Singaporeans.

8. I would like to take the opportunity this evening to brief you on progress in these three initiatives.

First, post-graduate education and research at NUS and NTU have been expanded through collaborative research projects, joint post-graduate and professional courses and student-exchange programmes with well-established universities overseas such as Imperial College, Cambridge, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Cornell and Tokyo.

In addition to overseas universities, NUS and NTU have also increased substantially the number of projects which they have undertaken in collaboration with multinational companies, governmental bodies and small and medium size enterprises.

More inter-disciplinary research projects are also being undertaken e.g. the Biomedical Engineering Research Programme which is a joint project between NTU and four major hospitals in Singapore.

NUS and NTU have set for themselves the target of doubling their number of post-graduate students by the year 2000.

9. As regards reviewing the undergraduate curriculum at NUS and NTU, the two universities are taking steps to broaden the education of undergraduates.

Starting from this July, NTU will enrich its professional courses with the addition of elective courses on non-technical subjects such as Economics, Business Law, Communication Skills and Regional Languages.

NUS' approach to improving undergraduate education is through implementing a Core Curriculum i.e. a set of courses which are intellectually challenging and designed to broaden students' knowledge, skills and habits of thought in areas deemed to have lasting value.

NUS has drawn up a structure for the Core Curriculum and this has been circularised to NUS faculty for their views and comments.

NUS is planning to start off the Core Curriculum with a selected group of under-graduate students in July 1999.

The review of the NUS and NTU undergraduate engineering curriculum being conducted by MIT is progressing well and the results of the review will be announced in May or June this year.

10. Finally, more educational opportunities at the tertiary level will be made available to Singaporeans with the setting up of the Singapore Management University (SMU) by the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM).

SMU will not only offer the traditional undergraduate business school curriculum currently covered by NUS and NTU but will eventually broaden its scope to include courses like Economics, Sociology, Finance and other fields relevant to business and management.

SIM is presently assembling a core group of senior academics to head up the SMU and is also discussing with the relevant government authorities to settle the site for SMU's city campus.

SIM intends to announce its decisions on these two important matters by the second half of this year.

11. The committee reviewing LaSalle-SIA College of the Arts and the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts has made much progress and Dr Tan Chin Nam , Chairman of the Committee, will be outlining the main ideas of the review at the 60th Anniversary Dinner of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in April.

The committee has adopted a total systems approach towards the upgrading of LaSalle and NAFA and its recommendations, when accepted by Government, will be a landmark in the development of the arts in Singapore.

12. At the school level, much has been done in order to stimulate creativity in our schools and use Information Technology more widely.

These initiatives are aimed at making our schools Thinking Schools which will stretch the imagination and intellectual capabilities of our children and provide more flexibility without lowering the high standards which have served us so well in the last thirty years.

13. These developments at the Universities and the schools have to be coordinated because the Universities' inputs are the outputs from our schools.

The main point of interaction between the Universities and the schools is through the Universities' entrance requirements.

14. Presently our university admission system is based largely on 'A' levels evaluating a student on three subjects at 'A' level together with General Paper and the Mother Tongue.

Points are given for each subject. The points are then totalled up and, subject to students' choice of courses, students with scores above the minumum cut off score for a particular course are admitted to that course.

The advantage of the present university admission system is that it is straight forward and simple.

But the system has limitations. It is based almost entirely on academic performance as assessed by the grades obtained at the 'A' level examinations and does not take into account the student's extra-curricular activities and achievements, personality and communication skills, deductive capacity and general knowledge, all of which are necessary attributes for graduates to succeed in the 21st century.

15. To align the university admission system to the innovations in our schools and universities, we will need to revise the university admission system.

This is going to be difficult because many factors have to be taken into account.

1) The system must continue to emphasise high standards and will not displace the use of 'A' levels which will still occupy an important place in university admissions although perhaps not the central place which the 'A' levels occupy today.

2) Competence in the Mother Tongue and English will continue to be featured in the revised admission system because bilingualism is the cornerstone of our education system; and

3) The new admission system will have to be phased in gradually so as not to disadvantage students who are already in our junior colleges.

16. To workout a new structure for the university admission system, I propose to set up a Committee to review the present system and recommend necessary changes to be made.

The Committee will include representatives from MOE, MTI, NUS, NTU, SMU, junior colleges and the private sector.

It will study practices for university admission adopted in other countries (see Annex) and will submit its recommendations to the universities and Government by the end of the year.

17. To sum up, reviewing and re-structuring of our education system is necessary so that we can put in place a system which will enable our students to be well educated for the 21st century so that they can realise their full potential, enjoy lifelong employability and contribute to the nation's well-being.

The outlook is for greater change in university education in the coming years but if we plan carefully, we will be able to introduce these changes without too much difficulty and trauma.