SINGAPORE: Asian students who traditionally looked to English-speaking Western countries for higher education are increasingly turning closer to home – to Singapore, educators say.

Backed by a government-led initiative to capture a slice of the great paper chase in Asia, Singapore has managed to woo more than 16 of the world’s leading schools to set up campuses as part of the city-state’s “Global Schoolhouse” ambition. Singapore’s education blueprint aims to attract 150,000 foreign students by 2015 in an industry that has mainly been the turf of American and British institutions.

There are currently 80,000 foreign students in Singapore, up from 50,000 in 2001, mostly from Malaysia, Vietnam, China, India and South Korea, government figures show.

The country’s two main universities – National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University – are already held in high esteem by their regional peers but getting the world’s elite schools to run courses here has further raised the city-state’s academic standing, educators say.

“The splashy news coverage of several prominent foreign institutions entering Singapore has created visibility and awareness of Singapore as an alternative location for education, to the more traditional locations of the UK or US,” said Narayan Pant, dean of executive education at global business school INSEAD.

“Singapore has become a credible alternative to those well-known locations, especially for people in the region,” he said.

Christopher Ziguras, associate professor of international studies at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, said Singapore’s well-defined goal of catering to global demand for higher education has paid off.

He said the city-state has successfully planted itself as a serious rival to institutions in Australia and New Zealand, the two main Asia Pacific study destinations for Asian students.

“I think what we see as being most impressive is strong government support for the education sector. It’s been very successful in putting Singapore on the map of education,” said Ziguras.

Singapore is “taken very seriously by Australia and New Zealand as a competitor,” he said.

INSEAD, which also has a campus in France, was the first international business school to have a full-fledged Asian campus when the Singapore offshoot opened in 2000 offering MBA, executive MBA and PhD courses.

New York’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, whose alumni includes Oscar-winning director Ang Lee, is the latest to set up a base in Singapore. Its Asia campus opened in October.

With the likes of INSEAD and other luminaries including North Carolina’s Duke University offering specialised courses in Singapore, the city-state’s standing as a high-quality destination for study has increased tremendously, said Pant. —AFP