Speech by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the Official Opening of University Town

NUS Pro-Chancellors

Mr Wong Ngit Liong
Chairman of the Board of Trustees

Prof Tan Chorh Chuan
President of the University

Distinguished Guests, ladies and gentlemen

I am very happy to be back here to open the NUS UTown.  These are our first residential colleges in an integrated living and learning environment.  And it is an important development for NUS and our broader tertiary education landscape.

Our universities have come a long way since independence.  In the publicly-funded universities, the enrolment has gone up by almost 10 times, and that doesn’t include Singaporeans who are studying in private universities or overseas.  Our universities have professional, well-resourced faculty, modern facilities, and they are well-respected in Singapore and around the world.

Our challenge is for these universities to keep on improving and serving Singaporeans better.  We watch our international rankings, but we cannot be measured by our international rankings alone, because our universities are unlike top universities in bigger countries – Harvard and Stanford in the US; Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) in Britain; Beida or Qinghua in China; University of Tokyo or Kyoto in Japan. These admit only a very small percentage of the university students in their countries, whereas in Singapore, our universities admit the bulk of Singa¬porean students who are going to university.  And therefore, besides maintaining good research rankings, our universities have to work hard to develop each student to his or her full potential.  There are models for this.  Many state university systems in the US, for example the California state university system, have done this well – maintain high standards and high reputation.  And our universities also have improved significantly in these respects.

Besides academic excellence, our universities also have important national and social roles.  They have to develop students’ character and conscience, social conscience particularly; to encourage students to build lasting friendships and camaraderie amongst themselves, especially amongst their cohorts; and to imbue in them the Singaporean values and ethos, the spirit of wanting to contribute back to society and the sense that they have a responsibility to take Singapore forward.

In order to do this, each university has to customise its education offerings, and not copy what other universities do.  Learn from best practices, but don’t just copy others, whether in Singapore or abroad.

UTown

The UTown is one example of how NUS is enhancing the experience of its students.  It shrinks NUS to a smaller community, so that students can foster closer ties with their schoolmates and teachers.  Its four residential colleges and the UTown Residence for graduate students will house more than 4,000 students from very diverse backgrounds.  Each college will have its distinct features, but all of them will emphasise multidisciplinary learning, with intensive small-group sessions to encourage interaction and discussions.  UTown will be a new focal point for NUS.  It is connected to NUS’s entire ecosystem of institutions, faculties and halls, including CREATE which is co-located in UTown.  It is also a great place to hang out too, as you can see just by looking around you – Starbucks@UTown is Singapore’s largest Starbucks branch!  And just looking across from here, we can see “Nasi Padang”, “Sichuan” food and various other signs in the café in the students’ centre.

Beyond enhancing the students’ learning and living environment, UTown will also facilitate community engagement and active citizenry.  For example, through the Chua Thian Poh Community Leadership Programme, which the President told you about just now, students can learn about social challenges and community leadership through research and attachments to social service organisations; through the Capstone Programme at the College of Alice & Peter Tan, which is a project for the students to work with ITE College Central and the Wellness Centre at Teck Ghee Community Club to develop a "Healthy Eating" programme for 100 seniors.  And I hope we will see many more such initiatives by our students.  

Improving Our Tertiary Education System

UTown fits in the broader context of our efforts to upgrade our whole tertiary education system.  We have expanded and diversified the university sector: From NUS and NTU, to SMU, then SUTD, and now UniSIM and SIT.  We are increasing the number of publicly-funded university places to reach 40% of our cohort by 2020.

But improving tertiary education cannot just be about increasing university places.  Other countries have found that having large proportions of students going to university does not necessarily lead to happy outcomes.  Take for example South Korea, where 70% of students attend university, but the Korean economy cannot generate jobs for all of them, especially jobs to match their training and aspirations, so unemployment among university graduates is higher even than unemployment among graduates of their vocational high schools.  Or take Denmark, a Scandinavian country much admired and with much to learn from: 50% of each cohort attend university, but after they graduate, within a year, more than a quarter of those who graduate are still unemployed.  Therefore, we must learn from these lessons and avoid these pitfalls.  Our universities must equip students with skills that are relevant in the future and which enable them to hold good jobs and be productive members of our society.  They must imbibe a spirit of free inquiry and pursuit of knowledge, but they must also acquire a practical sense of that training and discipline that will help graduates to succeed in a rapidly changing world.  We have to maintain the rigour and the standards of our universities.  The degree must mean something – you have applied yourself, you have learnt, you have mastered the discipline, you have reached more than a respectable standard.  One OECD Study found that university graduates in several countries have lower literacy levels than high school graduates from Japan and Netherlands, and these are OECD countries.  To take a specific example, Italian university graduates typically have lower literacy levels than the Japanese or Dutch high school graduates, and I think that is a cautionary tale for us. 

These considerations are very much in mind as we expand our tertiary sector.  In this context, I welcome the announcement by SIT and UniSIM that they will introduce full-time applied degree programmes starting next year, earlier than originally planned.  They will cater to students with an aptitude for a particular niche or a particular specialisation, and integrate classroom knowledge with real-world practice to produce graduates with relevant skills and experience.  That includes training which has structured work attachments with defined learning outcomes so students can work on projects which their employers are interested in.  And thereby, the universities can produce high quality graduates with the skills and knowledge that will be valuable to them in their careers.  That is another example of how we create multiple pathways to success in our system.

Conclusion

Meanwhile, I would like to encourage students to take full advantage of what UTown and NUS have to offer.  The “U” in UTown is not just for “University”; it is for you, “y-o-u” – the students.  As I was chatting with the Chairman of your Board just now, he says we wish we were young again and in university with these facilities.  But you are young.  Enjoy these facilities and programmes.  More importantly, build up the community – make friends, immerse yourself in campus life, take care of your surroundings and change it for the better while you are studying and after you graduate.  So I wish NUS and UTown every success for many, many more years to come!  Thank you very much.

. . . . .