22 universities on visiting workshop in Singapore and Hong Kong

The governance framework of public and private universities, their admissions policies, student life and a lot more issues were in the limelight of attention throughout the workshop, which saw the team arrive first at Singapore Management University (SMU). Founded in 2000, it is the 3^rd publicly-funded university in the country with 6 schools, around 7,300 undergraduate and 1,000 postgraduate students. SMU is held up as the model of new education in Singapore. It was the result of the former Deputy Prime Minister Dr. Tony Tan’s efforts to establish a new university that would be an experiment in diversity and that would make SMU different from the already existing two universities – National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU). This ensured that SMU had broader-based curriculum, flexibility, smaller classes (max. 45 people), interactive pedagogy, overseas exposure and voluntary services, adding up to all-rounded education.

Dr. Tony Tan said in his speech during SMU Commencement 2004: “From its conception, SMU was designed to provide a different model of university education here in Singapore. We wanted to start with a clean slate instead of just adding another public university in the mould of the existing ones. From this starting point emerged a confluence of factors that make SMU special.”

Senior advisor to President of SMU Professor Tan Chin Tiong says that 75% of funding comes from the government.
“Greater autonomy is granted to the publicly funded universities to better empower them to chart their own directions and build on their areas of strength to achieve their own peaks of excellence. It also enables the universities to explore different ways to build up teaching and research excellence, raise international standing, and enhance students’ experience.”

Moreover, public funding and accountability are balanced by an agreement with the government and universities, which points out that the government commits to fund the universities’ operating budgets and the universities commit to a set of key performance indicators including graduate numbers and research output.

Doctor of History professor Yerkin Abil, Provost for Academic Work and International Relations at Kostanai State Teacher-Training Institute, said that it had been refreshing to see how even small things were put together to form a more creative way of teaching. He added that it was more encouraging to know that SMU had been able to reach outstanding performance in just 14 years.

“I really enjoyed the workshop and the biggest impression that I’ve had was the fact that in principle there’s nothing unattainable for Kazakh universities. Because some of the currently flagship universities in Singapore had been following the same pathway as we are taking now. I really liked the idea of voluntary work among students. The idea itself that states that a person might be average in academic progress but they might be engaged in the various kinds of activities and it would be their other contribution to the personal growth. Unfortunately, universities are prone to extremes, focusing on a particular thing at any one time, be it discipline, academic progress, community work or examinations. The concept of all-round education is something that is very appealing to me.”  

Philip Zerillo, Executive Director of SMU’s Centre for Management Practice and Case Writing Initiatives has said that the Centre had turned out 92 of its own cases written by SMU faculty and for SMU students.

“It’s really something that when you’ve written the case it’s very easy for you to teach the case. Because you know the story, you know it very, very well. When the students have questions you can answer those questions and things like that. So it really makes our faculty experts. The other thing is that students enjoy it. You feel like they are being taught by the people who wrote the cases so it’s not the situation when the student is in class and they are being taught by a case that was written at a distant university and in a distant world that their professor doesn’t really know about.”

A presentation made by senior researcher at QS Intelligence Unit Samuel Wong gave a deeper insight into the ranking of universities. Mr. Wong started off with some background information about QS rankings and the generally ambiguous impact that rankings might have on universities and even likened them to poison, relating back to the overall obsession prevailing in the world. Mr. Wong pointed out how QS ranking is different from other rankings.

“In QS case we put heavy ratings on qualitative data arising from survey results. As I mentioned earlier the other rankers they base on hard data – research, citations, other hard data and the tendency with a skew on more established universities, those who are English-speaking universities they will obviously feature very well in the typical ranking. In QS we want to include more, especially those who are not so strong in these aspects but it’s strong in arts and humanities, they are strong in social sciences but you notice that in relative terms they may not have that many research and citations as compared to those who are traditionally strong in natural sciences and life sciences. But the argument is that when we send our survey to the academic experts spread geographically over the world. These people know who are the ones that are good, beat all countries, beat regionally or maybe globally.”

Mr. Wong also showed how Kazakhstan universities compare against each other and globally, adding that improving academic peer and employer reputation, increasing research and attracting international faculty and students were so far problem areas for Kazakh universities. The charts, however, showed how in 2013 Kazakh universities had improved on 2012 results, having gained greater academic and employer reputation. The faculty-student correlation data was one of the best in the global ranking, whereas citations per faculty remained hard to achieve.

However, Professor Tiong’s belief is that as long as universities are doing their job well, accreditations and ratings will come in due time.

“Good faculty with good students that would be the two things that you would need to produce high-quality graduates. As long as you do the right things, you will have all the pieces right. Like for instance if you take the example of NTU (Nanyang Technological University). They have actually been around longer than 25 years that they said. For 10 years they were NTI – Nanyang Technological Institute. So they became research-oriented together with the rest of Singapore only in the last 20 years. Therefore, for 20 years if you put in resources, you are serious about wanting to become world-class – it can happen. Resources are important. In the case of Singapore the government put in a lot of resources, funding not just in universities, in science, research so that is a national research foundation and there’s a whole cluster of research labs and institutes created by A-star.”

Galiya Zhussupkaliyeva, Provost for Academic and Methodology Work at Utemissov West Kazakhstan University said the value of such workshops primarily lay in the different people that one gets to meet.

“The most interesting thing is the people.  The people that are in our delegation and, of course, the people that we’ve met at this university. Surely, Singapore has an interesting education system and the resources that local higher education institutions have are admirable. I think that a lot of things could be transferred, not even at the government level, but stepwise, at smaller levels. The biggest advantage that regional universities have is that we are more flexible and we are able to change something internally. Just yesterday we learned a lot of things and a lot depends on how you treat that information. I think that the purpose of my trip was to make friends and colleagues.”

Chancellor of Zhubanov Aktobe Regional State University Amantai Nurmagambetov said he was ready to transfer a series of ideas on to his university.

“Methods of encouraging leadership skills in students, critical thinking and experience of working on joint projects, as well as efforts to make them not be shy make me think about ways to adopt this practice. I also liked a varied extra-curriculum activity: participation in volunteering events, international internships and various practical experiments that enable students to have competitive CVs and get employed fairly quickly. Student-faculty ratio adds up to 1:25, permitting higher salaries for professors and more rigorous requirements on quality; universities’ research efforts are aligned with the needs of local industry. Moreover, there are big endowment funds set up by the government as well as sponsorship assistance form local magnates who then receive tax remissions. I think that factors which make universities in Singapore and Hong Kong a success are academic autonomy, English language as the medium of instruction, an opportunity to hire the best faculty from world’s leading universities, interactive pedagogy, excellent technical equipment of classrooms and laboratories as well student participation in tangible projects. I should also add that the meeting with representatives of QS Asia was very useful.”

Organiser of the tour International Academy of Business is an innovative university with a rapidly sharpening focus on entrepreneurism and start-up initiatives. It is the oldest private business university in Kazakhstan and one of the first to have brought a new level of education to our country – the MBA and DBA programmes. They are the only MBA programmes in Kazakhstan and Central Asia recognised by AMBA (Association of MBA’s, UK) accreditation, putting IAB side by side with the world’s 202 best business schools.