Yale-NUS College extends reach of liberal arts’ ‘forbidden fruits’

“Having tasted the forbidden fruits of liberal arts, I realise there are so many amazing aspects to academic life,” says Colette Chiaranussati, who is clearly not regretting her decision to quit her medical course.

The 21-year-old Singaporean had completed her first year at King’s College London, but says she felt “stifled” by the focus on one subject and yearned to explore new disciplines.

Now a second-year student at Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts college established in the grounds of the National University of Singapore in partnership with the East Coast Ivy League institution, she has thrown herself into a range of subjects, from astronomy to behavioural sciences.

“I made my first subject choice based on a very narrow scope of information when I was 18,” says Chiaranussati.

The focus on taking courses whose sole purpose is advancement into the professions is a problem for the Singapore system, she believes.

“You also feel a greater urgency to dive into the job market when you have been in the army for two years,” adds Jevon Chandra, 24, another student at Yale-NUS College, on the added careerist pressure that Singapore’s national service obligation creates in men.

The founding of the college, whose £148 million campus was officially inaugurated by Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s prime minister, last week, may help to solve this challenge for the nation’s education system.

Although its 15-year-olds’ maths and science test scores are top in the world, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the island boasts several of Asia’s top universities, many students who are inclined towards the arts and humanities depart for the US, where its liberal arts degrees allow them to return to major in the sciences, law or other disciplines if they wish.

“Many talented students are moving away from engineering and sciences to expressing an interest in liberal arts,” says Tan Chorh Chuan, president of the NUS, whose modernist campus university west of the main island consistently ranks as Asia’s top university. (It placed 26th in this year’s Times Higher Education World University Rankings.)

With Singapore increasing its higher education participation rate eightfold in the past 25 years to 40 per cent, one of its new goals is now providing new and distinctive offers to students who might otherwise head abroad, he says.

“This is the kind of education in which an increasing proportion of students in Singapore and Asia will be interested,” he believes.

New generation

The rising interest in less safe, more unconventional careers reflects the evolution of Singapore as a nation that has been transformed since independence in 1965 from an impoverished colonial outpost into a thriving metropolis with a prosperous middle class, whose offspring have different ambitions from those held by their parents.

“In the past we were all for…a good economy [and] wanted a job and roof above our heads,” explains Ong Ye Kung, acting minister for education (higher education and skills).

“Now our goals are more complex and we have the luxury of allowing people to pursue more diverse goals, from engineering and medicine to music, the arts and sports,” he told the OECD-Singapore Higher Education Futures conference on 14 October.

Diversifying the higher education offer is part of Singapore’s growing maturity and symbolic of its status as one of the world’s most vibrant economies, he adds.

“The rethinking of the meaning of higher education must include the fact that the collective good is attained – in fact can only be attained – by the ability of individuals to pursue their own talents and passions,” he says.

With such a background, applications to Yale-NUS College are unsurprisingly very strong: about 10,000 students have applied in each of its first three years, with 4 per cent offered a place. A total of 190 students enrolled this year, bringing the student body to about 500 – a number that will eventually reach just 1,000.

Some 40 per cent of students hail from about 35 countries other than Singapore (including 10 from the US), and such a multinational cohort has produced some fascinating discussions in seminars, says dean of faculty Charles Bailyn.

“Western students will often start the discussions, and Asian students will join in later but really advance the discussion with a different perspective,” Bailyn says.

Creating a new curriculum and a set of policies that reflected the values of both the college’s founding institutions has required a lot of work, he adds.

“NUS and Yale both did things differently, so we pretty much had to start everything from first principles.”

For instance, it was decided that the first semester of Yale-NUS would not count towards students’ grade point averages to allow them time to feel their way in the new learning environment – a policy increasingly used by the NUS itself, Bailyn says.

“The first semester is ungraded, and it needs to be because it is when we are talking about new things with students,” he says.

In addition, all undergraduates are required to live on campus throughout their studies to build a sense of community, a nod to Yale’s collegiate system but another step change for the normally home-dwelling Singaporean students.

Cross-cultural connection

While Singapore’s investment in Yale-NUS is considerable, the college’s founding president Pericles Lewis believes it will have impact beyond its relatively small student numbers.

“We’ve seen a lot of college leaders – in Asia, Europe and the US – who are interested in what we’re doing as it genuinely brings together East and West,” Lewis says.

“We’ve a very good set of students who will leave the college to do great things; but while they are here, there is real intensity to conversations they are having on campus.”

jack.grove@tesglobal.com

Yale-NUS: the road to a new college

Launched jointly by the National University of Singapore and Yale University in 2011, the college was from the following year based in temporary housing in NUS’ University Town until the opening of a purpose-built campus this July.

Tuition fees for Singaporeans, non-permanent residents and international students are all subsidised by the Singapore government, which funded the cost of the new campus. Fees, including room, board and grants, are S$25,498 (£11,940) for Singaporeans, which rise to S$43,586 for overseas students – roughly in line with fees at the NUS.

Students follow a common curriculum, including economics, literature, maths, philosophy and anthropology, in the first two years of their four-year degrees before specialising in the final two years.

Staff from both Yale and the NUS live on campus with students, housed in five dormitory towers built for the college.

Richard Levin, president emeritus at Yale, said that he signed, in September 2010, the initial memorandum of understanding with the NUS to consider the college because the project was the “right idea, right partner and right time”.

Yale’s potential to expand overseas had been constrained by the 2009 financial crash in which the university lost $6.5 billion (£4.2 billion) on the stock market, reducing its endowment by 25 per cent. Public funding cuts had also reduced Yale’s budget by $3.5 billion over several years, he said. That left “no resources available to be innovative” until Singapore agreed to cover the cost of the new college, establishing a Yale presence in Asia, he said.