227Lee and Gopinathan 2007 ; Mok 2008 ; Olds 2007 ; Olds and Thrift 2005 ; Sidhu
2006 , 2009a, 2009b; Sidhu et al. 2011 , 2014 ; Tan 2006 ; Toh 2012 ; Waring 2014 ;
Ziguras 2003 ). Focusing on the issues related to higher education governance in
Singapore, there were studies on the trend moving towards “centralized decentral-
ization” (Lee and Gopinathan 2003 ) or “decentralized centralism” (Tan and Ng
2007 ) with the state playing its role as a “market accelerator” (Mok 2011 ). More
recently, there were also research works on the entrepreneurialization of higher edu-
cation with reference to the linkages between higher education and industrial devel-
opment (Ho et al. 2010 ; Mok 2015 ; Wong et al. 2007 ).
The main thrust of this chapter is to document and analyse the changes that have
appeared in the themes and orientations of higher education research in Singapore.
It is argued that the changing focuses of higher education research are not only
linked to the prominent trends prevailing in the international academic community,
but they are also tightly linked to the changing higher education policies of the
Singapore government. It also examines the factors affecting the development of
higher education in Singapore. It is believed that important lessons can be drawn
from Singapore’s experience of higher education development for other countries,
no matter they are small or large, developing or developed, to develop their higher
education systems in order to strive for survival in a highly competitive global mar-
ket. Apart from this introductory section, there are five sections in the remaining of
this chapter. Firstly, it gives a brief overview of the research community of higher
education in Singapore. Secondly, it highlights the factors affecting the develop-
ment of higher education in Singapore. Thirdly, it provides a review of major themes
of Singapore’s higher education system with reference to the existing research lit-
erature. Fourthly, it turns to discuss lessons to be learnt from Singapore’s experience
of developing and reforming higher education. Finally, it concludes with some
observations about implications for the future research agenda of higher education
in Singapore.
Higher Education Research Community in Singapore
The growing importance of higher education in Singapore has drawn more attention
among government policymakers and academic researchers of higher education
studies especially since the 1980s when there have been more frequent and signifi-
cant policy changes in higher education in line with the ever-changing local, regional
and global contexts. In Singapore, rather than being treated as an independent aca-
demic field, higher education is considered as one of the education policy research
areas undertaken by researchers from a range of disciplines like business adminis-
tration, economics, education, geography, history, international relations, public
management and policy and sociology. Among these scholars, for instance,
S. Gopinathan and Jason Tan of the National Institute of Education have been work-
ing consistently over the years on education policy research, including higher edu-
cation, which covers a wide range of topics such as the impacts of major policy
changes in Singapore initiated by the government with reference to the development
13 Researching Higher Education in “Asia’s Global Education Hub”: Major Themes...