231Globalization also implies more direct economic challenges facing Singapore
from other less developed or newly developed economies, such as Brazil, Russia,
India and China, which are also known as BRIC economies. In view of these new
challenges, Singapore’s higher education system has to engage more in research to
contribute to the existing manufacturing and financial service sectors and explore
new niches such as biomedical research and info-communication technology to be
further developed in order to maintain Singapore’s competitive advantage in the
global market by upholding its leading position in those economic sectors in order
to remain attractive as an investment destination from multinational corporations,
which have long been a major source of foreign direct investment in Singapore since
the 1960s when the city-state embarked on its process of industrialization
(Gopinathan and Lee 2011 ).
What Singapore has done is not to be challenged by globalization but instead to
co-opt globalization in order to keep the nation moving with new directions of eco-
nomic growth and development being identified. It is clear that higher education has
to play a significant role to create new knowledge through R&D, which is heavily
financed by the Singapore government, to favour the commercialization of scientific
research outcomes into new technologies, products and services following the
model of Silicon Valley. Furthermore, without sacrificing the quality of higher edu-
cation, the Singapore government insists on pulling in world-class universities to
the city-state and forging a number of alliances and partnerships between local
higher educations, including universities and polytechnics, and those world-class
universities to improve the international rankings and prestige of universities in
Singapore. Apart from consistently increasing financial input into the higher educa-
tion sector and R&D, such strategic alliances and partnerships are proved to be
highly instrumental to make Singapore as a global education hub within a rather
short period of time since the World-Class Universities programme and the Global
Schoolhouse initiative managed by the Economic Development Board were
launched between the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The collaboration with world-
class universities overseas is vital for newly established and young universities like
Singapore Management University and Singapore University of Technology and
Design for they are capable to compete for the best students, faculty and resources
with other established higher education institutions in and out of Singapore. In this
sense, strategic alliances and partnerships between local and overseas higher educa-
tion institutions are definitely a core element of the emerging “Singapore model of
higher education”.
As what has been discussed in this section, it is clear that both the developmental
state and globalization factors are the most important factors determining the ways
higher education has to be developed in Singapore especially since the 1990s. The
Singapore state has long been emphasizing the role of higher education in propel-
ling national and economic developments over the past five decades since 1965.
This is to justify the interventionist state in Singapore’s higher education for the
state leaders are the ones who are best qualified to find the ways out for the nascent
nation’s progress and development in the long run. The state is therefore not only a
major financier of higher education but also a regulator, provider, promoter and
13 Researching Higher Education in “Asia’s Global Education Hub”: Major Themes...