UNSW follows Warwick University out

In the end, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), instead of proving Warwick University wrong, proved them right. And far more quickly than anyone expected.

After just 3 months operating here, UNSW announced that it would shut down its Singapore campus. 148 students who had signed up, out of an expected 300 for the first semester (another report mentioned 800), were left pondering whether they could take up the offer of transfer to Sydney. This after having paid fees ranging from S$26,000 to S$29,000 for the first year.

Channel NewsAsia's TV report and videocast showed the Vice-Chancellor of UNSW, Fred Hilmer, giving his take on the likely reason for the shortfall in enrolment. At the press conference, he said,

Last year, the year we started to market here, we actually had much stronger demand in Sydney than we'd had in the last 4 years, and I think one of the things we'd learnt -- and it is really for Singapore to draw its own lessons -- is that geography is really important.

When a student says I want an Australian degree, what they really mean is 'I want the experience of living in Sydney', not just in educational terms but riding the surfboards and doing the things that, at a campus like ours, a lot of students do.

In other words, the city's reputation for its social environment counts. And as we all know, the social environment is often constrained by a place's political limits.

These misgivings were pooh-poohed by the Singapore side, with reminders that the University of New South Wales had just months earlier committed to setting up a campus in Singapore. If the UNSW found Singapore's climate not to be a hindrance, it was implied, then Warwick had no basis to claim so. All that was 2005.

Now Singapore and the UNSW have found out the hard way that it isn't so simple. If a university draws students not just on its brand name alone, but also in terms of its "geography", as Hilmer put it, then the pull of that brand name will not work its magic when transplanted into Singapore.

In other words, one cannot separate financial feasibility from socio-political geography.

This is especially as these foreign universities were not really meant to serve Singapore students, but to draw students from other countries in the region, as part of the Economic Development Board's (EDB's) strategic plan to make Singapore an "education hub".

Hence, it is not what Singaporeans think of Singapore that counts, which is often the result of brainwashing by our own government, but what non-Singaporeans think of Singapore. It goes without saying that we'd be compared with the top, most liberal countries in the world, if the target market is already so mobile.

Quite often, what our highly conservative government thinks is an asset ("a safe place to raise families")  may be a liability. We tend to be victims of our own propaganda.

Consider this for example: students would rather study in Sydney, the city with the world's largest and most flamboyant gay and lesbian mardi gras, than in straight-laced Singapore where homosexuality is banned, and censorship used to prevent young minds from being "infected".

This also demolishes the idea that we can afford to be 2 steps behind the West when it comes to social change and opening up, as the government had in the past suggested. The UNSW and Warwick cases show such thinking to be totally incompatible with being a global city able to attract free-spirited people. Why should people go to the second-best if they can go to the best?

And we're not talking about reality in Singapore, but reputation, so even if we start now to free up this place and give it the "buzz" that the government frequently talks about but in reality drags its feet on (example: homosexuality debate again), it's going to take years to rectify the bad reputation we have acquired.

Furthermore, opening up needs to involve more than just entertainment or censorship; certainly way more than just the gay issue which I merely used as an example. What travels around the world affecting our reputation is our politics above all.

* * * * *

 
The question of how much the EDB had to subsidise (a form of bribe?) UNSW for coming here was highlighted by a quiet change made by Channel NewsAsia in its online text story, a little detail that Jeff Yeo, a Yawning Bread reader, pointed out to me.

The story by Ashraf Safdar, 23 May 2007, said:

The university had projected to get 800 students by August but it is not clear how many there are to date. 

The closure comes despite the fact that an estimated quarter of a billion dollars had been spent on the school's new campus in Changi.

The story by Pearl Forss, also dated 23 May 2007, superceding the Ashraf story, said, 

UNSW has already invested over S$22 million (AUD$17.5 million) in its Singapore campus. 

It was invited by Singapore's Economic Development Board in 2004 to establish what would have been the first private comprehensive university in Singapore. 

The EDB refuses to reveal how much it invested in the school.

Whatever the amount, it highlights the fact that Singapore has to pay academic investors to locate in Singapore. It stands to reason therefore that the harder it is for academic investors to draw students to Singapore, the greater the subvention the Singapore government needs to provide to win them over.

That is to say, the more unsavoury our social-political reputation, the greater the financial cost to Singapore's taxpayers. I have previously argued, in Tell the people that others are singing our praises, that authoritarianism and illiberalism can be clearly seen to translate into economic costs. We spent some S$100 million to host the WorldBank/IMF annual meetings only to generate bad press about Singapore. Now, with UNSW, we're doing it again.

© Yawning Bread 

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