4/22/2013

A different kind of World Cup


Not too long ago Singapore was aspiring to be in the World Cup by buying foreigners to play football for the country. It was a wet dream that was best forgotten. Now Singapore is in the World Cup of a different kind. NUS is ranked number Two best university in Asia after Tokyo Unversity and 29th in the whole wide world.

This is indeed something to cheer about. Maybe next year Singapore will be number One in Asia and up from the 29th in the world. It is a mean feat, a great achievement. So, how is Singapore going to benefit from this ranking? Is NUS now recognised as a great academic institution of higher learning? Must be. Is NUS producing some great intellectual minds to do Singaporeans proud? Must be. And there must be a lot of great professors in NUS to give it the ballast it needs to be recognised as one of the best in the world. No need to ask if the great minds there are Singaporeans or foreigners. NUS is even better than Tsinghua and Peking University.

Maybe in 30 years time we will hear and read about great names like Emeritus Professor Tan Khee Giap, or Emeritus Professor Eugene Tan, or Emeritus Professor Yaacob Ibrahim, or Emeritus Professor Kishore Mahbubani. Never mind if the renowned professors now have foreign names and credentials. We will make it there, in 30 or 50 years.

And also we could look forward to some Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Engineering, Medicine or Humanities. Hope they will be Singaporeans. New citizens also can. That is what great universities are for. I dunno how much have been spent to acquire such a brand and how much more to produce more world renowned local professors and Nobel laureates. It is money well spend, every cent of it.

And don’t forget, we have two think tank schools in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and the Rajaratnam School of International Studies staffed by some of the best brains money can buy. Together, Singapore will become famous as an intellectual centre where great minds meet to talk about great stuff. We can forget about being the top casino centre in Asia. This is the Singapore Renaissance. We have the best universities, the best intellectuals all in this island. The only reservation, an unthinking population that needs the help of Third World talents to help it to progress or it will return to Third World very soon. We are still dependent on Third World talents to provide the talents for our economy and industries.

Thus, despite the high rankings of NUS, I remember making a suggestion that Singapore students should enrol in Indian Universities if they intend to seek employment in Singapore. The Indian Universities may have rankings far lower than NUS but they have the right formula and their graduates are in great demand here, and institutions and big companies have greater preference for their graduates than local graduates, or at least the head hunting companies. The general comments are that our local graduates are only good in grades but daft and lack motivation and EQ. Now I am not sure if my suggestion is the right thing. Perhaps with this high ranking, the employers will now look more favourably at graduates of NUS in preference of graduates from Third World countries. I really hope so, I really hope the ranking makes a difference, a meaningful ranking.

But never mind, when NUS becomes number One in Asia, we should have a national holiday declared and street celebrations in town. Looks like China’s and India’s universities would have to start spending more money to employ western professors if they think they want to beat Singapore’s universities in ranking. Money is all it takes to up the ranking.

19 comments:

oldhorse42 said...

No doubt NUS or even NTU are world class universities churning out world class graduates asking for world class pay to liveay in this world class nation. The problem is our world class employers do not want to pay world class pay but they just want to pay third world salary and live world class lives with their world class profit margins.

Anonymous said...

My kids also in local uni, they said bullshit one lar. Many FT professors half past six one

Anonymous said...

Ya, need to pay world class salary to half past six FT professors to gain high rankings.

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

Singapore is well-tapped into the global network of "education inflation" -- which is inflation of the range of qualifications, and the "academics" -- supposedly "book smart" fuckers, who are even too stupid to get a job in the real world.

i.e. if they're not "professori" in academia, they got NO JOB at all -- aka if they'd be in UK or Aust, most of them would be On The Dole

Useless dickheads.

Anonymous said...

Wow Redbean mentioned Tan Khee Giap, NMP Eugene Tan, Minister Yacob Ibrahim and Kishore Mabhubani, dickheads no better than Li Kwo Huang aka Mark Lee of Mediacorp. At least Mark Lee has lots of commonsense.

Anonymous said...

Lectures from certain countries can't even deliver lectures in English understood by the students, and that is called World Class? I wonder...

patriot said...

Cannot compare bookworm, result based talent with born, natural talent.
One is based on paper, the other depends on life skill and commonsense.
Doctorate and professorship can be had from education.
But education cannot provide commonsense.

Anonymous said...

NUS better than Tsinghua Uni China ?

wiki

Tsinghua U

Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology covers approximately 740,000 square meters in total. The actual floor space 100,000 square meters, have one floor space 5,000 square meters scientific researches in the school use the office building—to be able the branch building.

The institute is equipped with 17 laboratories, 14 laboratories, and the courtyard manages the enterprise and the production workshop.

Has one double reactor core of the swimming pool type reactor, one shell type low temperature heating experiment reactor, one high temperature air cooled experiment piles, one set of 900 megawatt water-cooled reactors nuclear power stations simulator. '


Anonymous said...

Wiki

Criticism

Times Higher Education gives much importance to citations on their ranking.

This has been criticized for undermining universities that do not use English as their primary language.[22] Citations and publications in a language different from English are harder to come across.[23]

A second important disadvantage for universities of non Anglo-Saxon tradition is that within the disciplines of social sciences and humanities the main tool for publications are books which are not or only rarely covered by citations records.[24]''


Chinese education look no up by them???

Anonymous said...

Basically the ranking is anglo-saxon centric !!

Please this is Asia century..

Discard those ranking for goodness sake, this is a globalised world.

Read news about a big donation to top China U from a USA businessman?

Commonsense lah country with nuclear weapons, advanced ICBM how can their U be inferiors to Spore??

Got shadow or not?

Germany a powerhouse of Europe, birth place of Albert Einstein, scored lower than SG ?

Totally abdurd to say the least.

Anonymous said...

>>'Money is all it takes to up the ranking.'

Finally you got it. Ranking is all about how much money was collected, how much money can be made. Education is also all about money. The really talented and intelligent people will never survive the educaiton regime which aim is to institutionalised people and condition people to certain behaviour and thinking to become productive components of the business.



Anonymous said...

They implemented the foreign talent method on everywhere to help them get the name/ranking and more bonuses but very little benefit or negative benefit on most of the citizens.

Anonymous said...

It should rightly be call anglo-saxon ranking not world ranking.

Anonymous said...

A stupid ranking system to get the silly Asians to hire and pay for more anglo saxons as lecturers. How stupid can Asians be?

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

Neo colonisation of the education system world wide. Asians deserve to be ruled by the Anglo Saxons. Every little trick they sell the Asians will buy.

Soon our universities will not have local lecturers and professors.

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

@1054:

>> How stupid can Asians be?

Asian stupidity is infinite.

This is aided by the fact that they swallow too much of Big White Daddy's cum everytime they suck Euro cock, so that they too can be "white". Ingesting Whiteman cum decreases intelligence. (So please don't do it. And stop your whore mothers, nympho wives and slutty daughters from doing it)

Got Banana?

Anonymous said...

Ongoing experiments in Italy, the United States and Japan are now being joined by a fourth in China, called PandaX.

Installed in the deepest laboratory in the world, 2,500 metres under the marble mountain of JinPing in Sichuan province, PandaX will this year begin monitoring 120 kilograms of xenon. The team hopes to scale the tank up to 1 tonne by 2016, which would mean that the experiment had developed more quickly than any other dark-matter search.

“We want to demonstrate that world-class research in dark matter is possible in China,” says Xiangdong Ji, a physicist at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and a spokesman for PandaX.

Spore rank 2nd in asia got or not ?

Anonymous said...

Top U in Holland but they ranked lower than NUS read the following >

Utrecht University counts a number of distinguished scholars among its alumni and faculty, including 12 Nobel Prize laureates and 13 Spinoza Prize laureates:

Wim Aantjes (politician)
Clarence Barlow (composer)
Lulzim Basha (Mayor of Tirana, Albania)
Nicolaas Bloembergen (physicist, Nobel Prize laureate)
Arend Jan Boekestijn (historian, politician)
Els Borst (former Dutch minister of Health)
Henk J. M. Bos (historian of mathematics)
James Boswell (author, lawyer)
Pieter Burmann the Younger (philologist)
C.H.D. Buys Ballot (meteorologist)
Michael Clyne (linguist)
David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, (author, lawyer)
Peter Debye (physicist, Nobel Prize laureate)
René Descartes (philosopher, mathematician)
Christiaan Eijkman (physician, pathologist, Nobel Prize laureate)
Willem Einthoven (physician, physicist, Nobel Prize laureate)
Johann Georg Graevius (scholar)
Louis Grondijs (Byzantologist, war correspondent)
Gerardus 't Hooft (physicist, Nobel Prize laureate)
J. H. van 't Hoff (chemist, Nobel Prize laureate)
Jacobus Kapteyn (astronomer)
Tjalling Charles Koopmans (mathematician, physicist, economist, Nobel Prize laureate)
Arie A. Kruithof, developed the Kruithof curve, describing the influence of colour temperature on visual perception
Jan van Leeuwen (Computer Scientist)
Aristid Lindenmayer (biologist)
Jack van Lint (mathematician)
Renate Loll (physicist)
Rudolf Magnus (pharmacologist and physiologist)
Maung Maung, (7th President of Burma)
Erik Meijer (computer scientist)
Marcel Minnaert (astronomer)
Heiko Oberman (historian)
Mark Overmars (computer scientist)
Abraham Pais (physicist, science historian)
Perizonius (scholar)
Maarten van Rossem (historian)
Wilhelm Röntgen (physicist, Nobel Prize laureate)
Lavoslav Ruzicka (chemist, Nobel Prize laureate)
Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (physician, scientist)
Jan Hendrik Scholten (theologian)
Boudewijn Sirks (Roman law specialist)
J. Slauerhoff (poet, novelist) worked as an assistant at the University's clinic for Dermatology and Venereal Diseases from 1929–1930.
Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland (statesman)
Jan Jakob Lodewijk ten Kate (poet)
Jan Terlouw (politician, novelist)
Gerard Verschuuren from the former Institute of Human Biology
Martinus J.G. Veltman (physicist, Nobel Prize laureate)
Frans de Waal (zoologist and ethologist)
Hugh Williamson (politician)

Anonymous said...

The ranking is basically discrimination, prejudice against those non-english unis.

Imgaine in a contest, only those written in English got higher marks but if written in Chinese, German, France, Dutch, Russian , Jewish sorry hor!

What do you call this ? Pray tell