235Not only the quality of students but also the recruitment and retention of talented
and outstanding academics are always a core concern for Singapore’s higher educa-
tion system to enhance quality. Stringent academic recruitment policy is adopted to
ensure that local and international academics with high professional and academic
standards are engaged in order to strengthen the academic leadership and scholar-
ship in Singapore’s higher education institutions. A highly stringent tenure policy is
imposed with only 40 per cent of the academic staff is tenured. A local academic
staff needs to fulfil two 3-year contracts, show teaching and research capabilities
and publish in international journals in particular, in order to be tenured (Selavaratnam
1994 ). It is therefore understandable that junior academics are under much greater
pressure to do research and publish in top international journals on top of their
heavy teaching duties in order to attain tenure term and promotion (Lee 2003 ).
Beside academic recruitment, the quality of teaching, research and services pro-
vided by academics is also regularly assessed with quality assurance mechanisms as
stipulated in the Quality Assurance Framework for Universities, which aims to
enhance the quality of universities through a systematic process involving institu-
tional self-learning and external review. External reviews will be appointed to con-
duct evaluation of individual universities’ self-assessment report and make
recommendations for improvement. The first quality audit was conducted in 2003
and it is conducted every 5 years (Ministry of Education 2013 – External Audits of
NUS, NTU and SMU – Parliamentary Replies, 14 January).
Globalization
Another major theme which has been widely covered and delved into by researchers
in Singapore’s higher education studies over the past two decades especially from
the mid-1990s onwards is concerned about how globalization would affect the
development of higher education in the city-state. Globalization presents Singapore
with certain policy challenges. Has globalization weakened Singapore’s develop-
mental state’s strategies? What strategies are needed to transform an industrial era
economy to a post-industrial one? What roles do the higher education and other
knowledge-using and knowledge-producing centres have? It is certain that global-
ization has profound impacts on Singapore’s higher education strategy, which has to
cope with economic challenges the young nation faces. For Singapore where its
economy is largely based on multinational corporation-led and export-led industri-
alization alongside the more vibrant manufacturing and service sectors, a workforce
being capable of generating and using new knowledge in creative and innovative
ways deems to be essential for the future success of the Singapore economy in the
context of globalization. Therefore, the higher education sector has to be more
engaged in research, which is reflected in various indexes of research citations,
impact factors and university rankings to see how well higher education institutions
can perform. Whether Singapore would be able to preserve its competitive and com-
parative advantages in the global market, universities have definitely a clear role to
13 Researching Higher Education in “Asia’s Global Education Hub”: Major Themes...