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sustainable development, higher education is perceived as a crucial and strategic
policy instrument facilitating the Singapore government to fulfil its goals of nation-
building and economic development by improving the quality of human resources
and also ensuring a stable supply of well-educated upper-level workforce, compris-
ing professionals, managers and technicians to keep this Asia’s global city growing
and moving on.
The mentality of “developmentalism” and the developmental state model adopted
by the ruling party, the People’s Action Party, which has enjoyed political hegemony
over the past five decades, can explain the strong role of the state in Singapore’s
system of higher education. It is because the state’s intervention in economic poli-
cies and various social institutions, such as education, social security and housing, is
justified for the sake of maximizing national and economic interests (Castells 1988 ,
1992 ; Chua 1995 ; Gopinathan 2007 ; Low 2001 ). Some scholars argue that Singapore
is more aptly understood as “government made” (Low 1998 ). Moreover, the
Singapore government’s strong emphasis on higher education also reflects its belief
in both meritocracy and elitism as higher education institutions, especially universi-
ties, are playing an important role to identify and nurture social elites and future
leaders, who are merit based and subject to individuals’ academic performance in a
highly competitive system (Barr and Skrbis 2008 ; Tan 2008 ; Tan and Ng 2007 ).
Therefore, higher education is indispensable for the nation-building of Singapore.
The past few decades witnessed the emergence of major themes of higher educa-
tion research in Singapore, ranging from the origins and historical development of
higher education system of Singapore to the most recent concerns about the impacts
of globalization with special reference to the transformation of Singapore as a
global education hub in Asia. Assembling major research literature on Singapore’s
higher education, major trends and issues shaping the development of the higher
education system can be revealed and synthesized. It is common for scholars to
highlight the close relationship between higher education and the state, which used
to rely on strong interventionist policy and implementation strategy to ensure the
higher education system to serve the national and economic interests of the young
nation of Singapore (Goh and Tan 2008 ; Gopinathan 1984 , 1989 ; Selvaratnam
1994 ; Tan 2006 ). In this sense, higher education is not totally independent from the
state system as it must work with the government in order to achieve goals of
national development. Since the mid-1980s, when Singapore experienced the first
economic recession since independence, the Singapore government’s policy on
expanding the higher education system for upgrading the quality of labour force to
prepare for economic restructuring. This denotes the transition from elite to mass
higher education in Singapore as similar as other Western developed countries
(Trow 1973 ). It changed the landscape of higher education development in Singapore
even though elitism remains a core ideology for the Singapore government.
Moreover, the research focus in recent years has been turned from quantitative
expansion to qualitative enhancement with questions posed on how to achieve and
maintain academic excellence in face of challenges arising from massification and
globalization, which has brought about fundamental changes in higher education
policymaking that adheres to such notions as marketization (Lee and Tan 2002 ;
Mok 2000 ; Mok and Tan 2004 ; Tan 1998 ) and internationalization (Daquila 2013 ;
M.H. Lee