Singapore’s market-based education experiment

Singapore’s market-based education experiment

By Sanford J. Ungar

“Again Singapore “righteous dictatorship” is showing the way to coordinate education and what the market and industry really needs.”

Erreh Svaia

Taken From:The Washington Post

In the seemingly endless, invariably unfocused dialogue about what is wrong with higher education in the United States, the word “skills” is sure to come up often.

The complaints should be familiar to all by now: Our young people are not getting the skills they need from their high-priced college educations. “Practical” (or “vocational”) skills are neglected in the traditional liberal arts curriculum, so graduates are not finding the jobs they need to pay off loans; hence the popular drumbeat that we must let “industry” tell colleges and universities what they should be teaching.

Rarely, if ever, are these elusive skills defined — except perhaps to say, as some economists do, that to enter the workforce successfully, students will have to learn to become “managers,” “communicators,” “goal-setters,” “marketers” and the like. Better, I suppose, than becoming experts in hole-punching, data entry or widget-making.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether a well-rounded, all-American education in the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences helps develop those more sophisticated talents — I happen to think it can and often does remarkably well — a new idea has emerged overseas that deserves serious consideration: Let older students and young workers figure out for themselves what they need to know to get ahead in life.

The concept comes from, of all places, Singapore — a country that is, as acting minister of education Ong Ye Kung put it at a conference I recently attended there, “young and small” enough to get away with unusual experiments and innovations.

Under the SkillsFuture program that will take effect next year, the Singapore government will give every citizen over 25 an account containing 500 Singapore dollars (about $350) to apply to whatever continuing education each person deems relevant and necessary to his or her ambitions, within certain constraints yet to be identified.

Much will depend on the implementation, of course, but the idea is that individuals will vote with their feet on the basis of real-time experience and that providers will succeed or fail as a result of the perceived value of what they offer. In theory, the program would be as useful for those with little previous formal education as for those returning to school for some fine-tuning or upgrading of their knowledge. Many might use it to put a technological gloss on more mundane earlier studies or training.

The implication is that those individuals who use the funds productively and effectively will have their accounts replenished, and their credentials correspondingly enhanced, over time.

Other skills-centered educational programs being put in place in Singapore may reflect a heavier government hand. There is Earn and Learn, for example, whereby educational institutions, including some focused on technical training, will be encouraged to develop programs in conjunction with employers in areas prioritized by the government, such as cybersecurity. Students will receive up to 5,000 Singapore dollars as an incentive to attend, and the employers will be rewarded financially as well. There will also be SkillsFuture Fellowships, offering 10,000 Singapore dollars for those who master their craft further, as well as government-coordinated internships that can be readily interwoven with more traditional studies.

And all of this is in the context of a national system of career counselors in schools, from the earliest grades, and online “career portals” that people can use to plan their futures — leading to a rapidly rising percentage of Singaporeans participating in some form of education beyond high school.

Whether any of these initiatives can be replicated in other countries is uncertain. Singapore is, after all, as the minister said, very young — only 50 years old — and a tiny city-state with a population of 5.5 million in a quarter the land area of Rhode Island. Part of the legacy of its late charismatic, if somewhat authoritarian, leader Lee Kuan Yew is hectic economic growth and extraordinary prosperity for most people. Taxes are ultra-high, and statistics are relatively easy to track. But public protests are, for the most part, banned, and entry documents for foreign visitors unequivocally warn that drug traffickers face the death penalty under Singapore law.

Yet it is just this sort of educational experiment that deserves the attention of the United States, which has one of the lowest higher-education completion rates of any country in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. One could imagine state, county or municipal efforts, for example, to introduce SkillsFuture-type programs that help get Americans back to work.

This just might be more effective than having the federal departments of Education, Labor, Defense and Veterans Affairs, among others, spend billions of dollars on helter-skelter job training and retraining programs, with unclear results. And it might help deflect the blame that’s being placed on colleges and universities for failing to accomplish things they were never really intended to do.