This Singaporean sense of entitlement when it comes to higher education

Now one of my recent articles have ruffled some feathers in Singapore, ironically, it was not even the focus of the topic but a case study which I have used that caused the controversy. Firstly, let me remind you what this case study was: in my previous post on CPF savings, I used the case study of a low-income Singaporean family who were faced with a difficult choice of whether the parents should use their life savings to send their son to Bolton University (ranked 121st out of 123 universities in the UK). I deliberately chose a British university at the bottom of the league tables to demonstrate that this was highly unlikely to be a good investment for their money.

My point is simple: purchasing higher education is expensive business. Too many young people in Singapore think that as long as you study hard, your parents are obliged to pay the costs of your education regardless of whether or not it is a good return on their investment. This sense of entitlement on the part of Singaporean students is sickening to say the least because it doesn't consider just how hard the parents have to work to earn that money. Maybe the parents are the ones to blame as well for not having communicated this effectively to their children, but we do have a situation whereby Singaporean students are treating higher education as a right, rather than a privilege which their parents are paying for with their hard earned money, often their life savings and this is what I want to talk about today.

Is this sense of entitlement embedded in our culture?

Let me deal with some of these comments on TRS from people whom I have offended with my article.

Raymond Tan ·  Top Commenter · Temasek Polytechnic

I wonder did any company print an advertisement asking for only NTU/NUS/ Harvard/ MIT degree only. Come on don't fool yourself with only paper qualification. It make no sense. Are you suggesting that people should just give up caused it's a no name uni? Stupid of you to make the example based on the ranking of the uni. The bottom line is the parents should be given a chance to decide themselves but instead getting judge at. You meant getting a first class honors degree in "useless" school isn't worth as much as a just pass student from (example) NTU/NUS? It still depend on the student itself, not the value of the school. Don't be ahem FKING stereotype can? First part is dumb enough to stop me from reading this lengthy and somehow not conclusive article. Yawn

I have worked as a gatekeeper for many years and am in a position to decide whom should get a job and whom to reject - I have blogged about this role I play in fact. Whilst we would never insist that we only accept applicants from top universities, we do get a pile of CVs the moment we advertise for a role. Now let's imagine if I do receive a CV from someone who went to Bolton University, my first reaction would be, "why did you end up going to a university at the very bottom of the league table?" It is not a good start, I may then go on to look at the applicant's work experience to see if there is any evidence of intelligence or aptitude for the job, but as the gatekeeper, if I let the wrong person through the gate, I will be blamed for wasting the company's time and money. It is a huge responsibility and I don't want to risk making a mistake.

Let's get real here - a gatekeeper can get 20, 50, even 100 applicants for a job. The more attractive the position, the more applications there will be. The gatekeeper doesn't have the time to read every CV in detail, never mind invite every single applicant for an interview. Imagine if the company is recruiting for 5 positions and each position attracts 100 applicants - that's 500 CVs for the poor HR manager to wade through. The HR manager or gatekeeper will have to create a shortlist of applicants and at this stage, if the gatekeeper has the choice between an applicant from a good university and an applicant from Bolton university, don't expect the gatekeeper to be nice and give the guy from Bolton a chance - not unless he's a family friend who owes you a favour. It's a very harsh process indeed.

Thus if you give the gatekeeper an excuse to say no to the applicant, then guess what? The gatekeeper will probably say no because it is a risk to give such an applicant a chance especially if there is stiff competition. Let's not assume that all graduates from top universities will make good employees - let's imagine if the gatekeeper gives an Oxford graduate a chance and the Oxford graduate turns out to be totally useless and has to be sacked after three months. In such a situation, the gatekeeper can say, "well he went to Oxford, you can't blame me for having given him a chance, right? It was a shame things didn't work out, but it was a risk we had to take."

If the gatekeeper gave a Bolton graduate a chance and things went wrong, the Bolton graduate was sacked after three months. The gatekeeper's boss would be screaming, "What on earth made you think that it was a risk worth taking? Now we have wasted three months pay, training someone who turned out to be useless and now we have to start all over again? What were you thinking giving this person a chance?" Is it fair? No, probably not, but the gatekeeper would be taking a far bigger risk in giving the Bolton graduate a chance - thus that is why graduates from Oxford tend to get far more job offers than graduates from Bolton because it is a university at the top of the league table.

Is this an elitist attitude? Yes it is. Is it fair? No. But does it make sense for the employer? Yes it does - because we are living in a risk-averse society. You may believe that graduates from "no name universities" should be given as many opportunities as graduates from Oxford and Cambridge, but when you leave this process in the hands of the private sector, the Oxford and Cambridge graduates will always come out on top and those from Bolton will lose out. Such are the market forces at work: there is always a greater demand for graduates from the top universities in the labour market. I didn't make the rules, I am not even condoning the system: I am just telling you this is how things work in the real world.

This is why I say Singaporean students should smell the coffee and wake up to the realities of this competitive labour market they are going to have to eventually enter. Oh I remember my primary school days, I went to this idyllic little primary school in Sembawang years ago back in the 1980s - it closed down in the 1992 and was demolished to make way for a condominium, but I have such fond memories of my primary school days. The teachers made a genuine effort with the weaker students, going out of their way to help them, encourage them and protect them.

Some students are always going to be smarter than others.

I remember this incident when I was in primary three - the form teacher was giving out the test papers and this boy  (let's call him Teng, not his real name) in my class failed the test with a result of 41/100. Teng had the worst result in the class and when the other pupils saw his result, they teased him about his score and called him stupid. (Well, may I add that this score was pretty typical of what Teng would score in all his tests and exams, as I recall.) Teng started crying upon being called stupid and this caught the teacher's attention: she immediately scolded the other pupils who made Teng cry and made them apologize to Teng. She then encouraged Teng to study harder for the next test so as to improve his results.

Now isn't that sweet? This is the kind of scenario that can only happen in a primary school classroom - the real world is a lot more harsh. Let's imagine if Teng went to Bolton university and then applied for a job with an investment bank like Goldman Sachs, only to be rejected. What can Teng do then? Can he run back to his primary three teacher and ask her for help? "Teacher teacher, that investment bank won't hire me, they won't even give me an interview. Can you scold them and tell them that they are wrong, tell them to give me a chance? They cannot discriminate against me like that, just because I didn't get the results to go to a good university, it's not fair." No, he can't do that, because we all know that Teng's kind primary three form teacher cannot help him in the real world, in a situation like this.

Who can you complain to when you can't get a job?

Thus when Raymond Tan starts berating me about discriminating against graduates from 'no name' universities, I am going to take a deep breath and ask him to take a reality check. You're no longer in primary school and there is no form teacher for you to run to and shout, "teacher teacher he call me stupid". This is the real world where people from 'no name' universities are going to get far fewer opportunities when looking for a job - it is a fact of life, don't shoot the messenger for the message.

So, why am I so harsh when it comes to judging universities at the wrong end of the league table? Indeed, one reader on TRS even questioned the ranking I referred to.

Tan Sri Hwa ·  Top Commenter

If Bolton University is that bad like what you say, it would have close down long ago and will not be in the ranking for you to mention.

Well let's start with some facts: firstly, the ranking system I referred to is the from the Complete University Guide and you can see it here. It's not my personal opinion, it is a league table that is commonly used to compare British universities. Each university gets a score based on the following criteria: entry standards, student satisfaction, research assessment and graduate prospects: there is then an overall score which determines each university's ranking. Allow me to point out the obvious: there are 123 universities in the league table and some unfortunate university will have to take 123rd place in this table, the honour of being ranked last in the entire country. Have a look at the picture below:

This would look pretty familiar - so if there are eight runners in this race, somebody would have to come 8th if the runners are all running at different speed. This is what the set up for a 100 meter sprint would look like - somebody will be the fastest and win, whilst somebody will be the slowest and come in last. So if you have ten runners for the race, somebody will be slowest and come in tenth and last. If you have 20 runners for the race, somebody will come in 20th and last. And if you have 123 runners in the race, somebody will come in 123rd and last - somebody will have to come last, it is simply a statistical probability that you cannot argue against. You cannot have 123 runners in the race and everyone celebrating a top 10 position at the finishing line. So in the case of the university rankings, the overall score ranged from 1000 for the university ranked 1st (Cambridge) to 329 for the university ranked 123rd (London Metropolitan University). Bolton came in 121st with a score of 411 whilst the top 20 universities all had a score above 800.

Like I said, these are statistics, it's nothing personal. This is not even my personal opinion here and these are not even my statistics but the statistics I have taken off the Complete University Guide website.  There is an element of shooting the messenger here - I get it, like crying out aloud, I am from Singapore lah, I grew up in Singapore. I remember how kids from the neighbourhood schools would whine and moan endlessly about those from elite schools looking down on them. Of course, I get it, I can see where this attitude stems from, but it's time for a reality check here.

Did you get the memo? Life is not fair.

If you had straight As for your A levels, would you apply to Cambridge or would you apply to Bolton university? Why would you pick Oxford or Cambridge over Bolton? Okay, let's now make another comparison: say you have managed to earn yourself a place at Lincoln University (ranked 55th) - would you rather go to Lincoln University or Bolton University (ranked 121st)? Why would you pick Lincoln over Bolton then? You get the idea. This is how universities at the bottom of the league tables will always receive the weakest students as the stronger students always choose to go to a higher ranked university.

There is an element of GIGO (Garbage in, Garbage out) - if a university like Bolton only receives the weakest students who have been rejected by better universities, then the lecturers and teachers have a really difficult task in trying to teach them anything. Conversely, universities like Oxford and Cambridge already receive the very best students anyway, so it isn't hard for the teachers to achieve stunning results with such very high quality students.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Why should you always try to go to a better university? You will always be taught better if you go to a better university. At a university like Oxford, the teachers will be able to push you so much harder, teach you so much more knowing that the students are able to rise to the challenge intellectually. If you were to push much weaker students the same way, they would be unable to follow the lesson.  So a first class degree from Bolton is not equivalent to even a basic degree from Oxford - I am just going to be blunt here: give the students from Bolton an Oxford exam and mark them according to Oxford standards and every single Bolton student would fail without exception. They simply are not of the same caliber of Oxford student, a first class student from Bolton may be more capable than a second or third class student in Bolton, but they are far academically and intellectually inferior to any Oxford student by a very, very long way.

So why don't universities like Bolton at the bottom of the league table just close down? How on earth do they still attract students despite being at the very bottom of the league table? Simple - universities are run like businesses, their ranking may affect their ability to attract quality students, but at the end of the day, like any business, they want to make money. As long as there are students willing to enroll in Bolton for a watered-down degree course and pay the fees, they will run those courses and issue those degrees. A degree from Bolton doesn't come with any job guarantee - so they are not misleading their students at all, that goes the same for any university in the world.

Are Bolton undergraduates blind to just how crap their university is?

Perhaps Tan Sri Hwa is assuming that any university at the bottom of the league table should be so ashamed of themselves that they should hang their heads in shame just close down rather than live in shame - but guess what? It doesn't work like that. There are some students who really don't care if they are going to a university at the bottom of the league table - these are students who will never ever achieve the kind of academic results which will get them into a top 20 university so they don't mind or care being associated with a university like Bolton. Some people who are just not academically inclined will still want a degree and Bolton is the kind of university who will gladly give them a degree - it's a business.

Admittedly, this begs more questions than it answers: for example, even if what Bolton university is doing is legal, is it immoral for them to issue degrees that are not worth the paper it is printed on? Should it be criminal for such universities to be issuing degrees to students, when they know that such degrees will not be respected in the real world? And more to the point, why do people bother going to universities like Bolton which are at the very bottom of the league table? Do they realize what they are paying for? Who are they trying to fool - future employers or themselves?

Do you know your university's rankings?

If your parents are very rich, then there's no moral dilemma at all. But the moral dilemma occurs when your parents have limited resources and if they are spending a large portion of their life savings to send you to university, then you have to ask yourself if it is going to be worth their gamble on spending their life savings on your degree. In that context, the ranking of the university you are going to plays a huge part in judging whether you deserve your parents' hard earned money and life savings. The harsh reality is that there are plenty of unemployed graduates out there, so it is necessary to think carefully if your degree choice will indeed serve you well in the working world.

Perhaps it is a very Chinese thing to hold universities in high esteem - after all, in our Chinese culture, we tend to respect teachers and as children, we are taught to always listen to our teachers and respect them. Thus by logical extension, the school is an institution that we hold in high regard in our society and universities enjoy that high status as well particularly since graduates were rare in our parents' days. Back then, to go to university was a pretty big deal - but fast forward to 2014 and in the UK, we have so many universities in this country. That's why we need league tables to guide students to which choose the best universities and know which ones to avoid. Is it such a stretch of imagination for you to understand that there are some very good universities and absolutely terrible universities out there? If there are 123 British universities, how can every single one of them be just as good as each other?

I would like to finish with a story from my primary school days again. During PE lessons, the teacher would often make us run one whole round of the field and it was a pretty big field. Obviously, some students were a lot faster than others and there was a particularly fat kid in my class who just didn't run. The fastest runners in the class would always compete to see who could complete that lap around the field first and they were fiercely competitive. The kind PE teacher knew that the rest of the class would be waiting at the finish line for that fat kid to slowly make his way around the field, so he kept us busy whilst waiting - he distracted us with various tasks such as putting away the PE equipment. It was a ploy to avoid us focusing our attentions on the fat kid coming in last. What a kind PE teacher he was.

We all knew the fat kid was the slowest one in the class - but the PE teacher did whatever he could to spare him the humiliation of coming in last. Perhaps this is what Tan Sri Hwa expects of the university league tables - to only report on the best universities in the country whilst ignoring anything outside the top 10 or top 20? Perhaps he thought that it was simply in bad taste to name and shame the universities at the very bottom of the league table? Or more simply, perhaps he thought that nobody would want to go to a crap university, so if it was that bad, then it should have closed down years ago - but guess what? Loads of people want to go to crap universities and pay good money for crap degrees - but hint: these aren't exactly the brightest students in the country with straight As.

Am I being elitist for calling a spade a spade? How do you feel about universities at the bottom of the league ta Please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments section below, thank you very much for reading.