On April 24, 2004, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Singapore Economic Development Board announced that UNSW would be setting up “the first foreign private university in Singapore”. The new entity was to be something quite unusual:
Unlike other foreign universities which set up franchises or joint-campus operations overseas, UNSW Singapore will be wholly-owned, independently governed and run by UNSW. It will be a research and teaching campus with a strong science and technology focus.
The goal was to have 15,000 students in the steady state, 70% of whom would be international students. This initiative was to be a key element of Singapore’s Global Schoolhouse Effort. In other words, this was an important experiment in the globalization of higher education.
This last week, UNSW announced to its students that it was closing down its Singapore campus before it really began.
The only explanation that has been presented so far is that of UNSW, which simply said that initial enrollment did not meet expectations. Clearly this cannot be the only reason, given the significant investment both parties must have made by this point (reports in the media regarding the investments are so wildly different that they don't bear repeating). Thus, one should not leap to conclusions yet about what this says about the globalization of higher education. However, it does make one remember the difficulties that my old institution, Johns Hopkins, had with their Center in Singapore. It was closed down just about a year ago because, according to the Singapore government, it had not met its research and educational goals.
Eric Beerkens has a very nice summary of background and some of the questions raised by this closing in a recent post on his blog Clearly, this situation will need to be looked at more closely as more information comes out so that we can draw some useful lessons.
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