Is Singapore turning against internationalisation?

As the “big four” anglophone countries clamp down on international student recruitment amid concerns about their local impact, many of the Asian source countries of those students are making plays to become significant host countries in their own rights.

India wants 500,000 students by 2047 and has recently approved more than 15 foreign campuses. South Korea recently surpassed its target of 305,000 by 2027. Other Western institutions are expanding into countries including Sri Lanka, China and Indonesia. Hong Kong has recently increased the number of international students universities are permitted to enrol, in response to turbulence in the US. And the likes of Vietnam, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan are also ramping up efforts to attract more international students.

Amid this buzz of activity, one nation appears to be an outlier: Singapore.

The city state, often dubbed a bridge between East and West, has long been a bastion of internationalisation, hosting foreign universities, international students and many international staff – not to mention numerous global companies. Yet it has had little to say on international students since the demise of the Global Schoolhouse Project, an initiative launched in 2002 that aimed to enrol 150,000 international students by 2015. That target was missed and the programme was kicked into the long grass, with even higher education academics in the country unsure whether it was officially retired.

Government spending on international students fell during the 2010s, and recent data from StudyPortals shows that global demand for study in Singapore fell during the year ending June 2025, with a 17 per cent reduction at bachelor’s level and a 15.4 per cent reduction at master’s level compared with the previous 12 months. In the same time period, increased international demand for at least one level of study was reported by Japan, China, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Nepal and Pakistan.

Some put this down to the same debates about the pros and cons of immigration that are pervasive in the West.

“There are tensions surrounding the attraction of talent from overseas, especially given Singapore’s relatively small population base,” said Ja Ian Chong, associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Calibrating the right mix is “a constantly moving target that is difficult to predict,” he continued.

Currently, foreign students make up about 10 per cent of total undergraduate intake across Singapore’s seven public universities. More detailed statistics are hard to come by. Unlike many other host countries, the government does not release data disaggregating student numbers by nationality.

“It is unlikely that the government will seek to increase the intake of international students as this would reduce places for local students given capacity constraints, which would not go down well with locals,” said Terence Ho, adjunct associate professor at NUS’ Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Part of the issue is that, unlike in many other emerging destinations, Singaporean taxes contribute towards the education of incoming international students, who are permitted to apply for a limited number of government-subsidised places at public universities.

At NUS for example, a Singapore citizen would pay S$9,650 (£5,650) a year for an undergraduate business course, while a non-ASEAN subsidised international student would pay S$22,100: nearly S$11,000 less than the full fee for non-subsidised students, S$33,050. The most expensive courses, such as medicine and dentistry, can cost upwards of $S180,000.

International students who receive the subsidy are required to stay and work in Singapore for three years after graduation. “The main idea is to attract international students to not only study but also to work in Singapore…upon graduation,” said Jason Tan, associate professor at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) National Institute of Education. “But, at the same time, there’s also political pressure on the government of Singapore to differentiate between citizens and non-citizens.”

Neither the total number of subsidies for international students nor the allocation given to each university is made public but, in 2019, the education minister at the time was forced to answer questions about government spending on foreign students. He reassured policymakers that the education budget was “overwhelmingly” spent on local students. He also said that annual government spending on scholarships and tuition grants for foreign students had fallen by about 50 per cent over the previous decade.

As well as grappling with concerns about public sentiment, Singaporean universities have less of an economic imperative to recruit foreign students than exists in other study destinations.

“Singapore’s approach to attracting international students is strategic and selective, rather than expansive,” said Yi’En Cheng, a lecturer at NUS College. While in some countries “international student tuition fee contributes significantly to the economy, Singapore’s universities do not depend as much on them and, hence, take a more measured approach, whereby international student flow is carefully managed to align with national goals, such as that of social integration and national identity-making.”

However, beyond finances, internationalisation is key to Singapore’s future in other ways. “Singapore’s development has historically relied on its pivotal geographic location and extensive international engagement,” said Jack Lee, senior lecturer in higher education at the University of Glasgow – and that is unlikely to change any time soon. Moreover, the city state’s ageing population and declining birthrate make recruiting international students even more important for workforce capacity and national development.

“The challenge is to strike a balance between addressing policy goals for the country and [responding to] the sentiments of the population. While the recruitment of international students may be essential for national growth, there are legitimate concerns from locals,” Lee said.

Tan agreed: “Unlike Hong Kong, I haven’t yet heard of any public plans to substantially increase the intake of non-local students in our universities, in response to declining fertility rates, and I find that interesting. I think that the political sensitivities in Singapore are still rather raw with regard to the effects of large migration numbers on social stability and the perception, as in many other countries, that locals are being deprived of opportunities.”

Beyond local universities, there are also signs that transnational education (TNE) in Singapore is stagnating compared with the wider region.

“Singapore was an early mover on TNE,” said Ishan Cader, senior director of consultancy at Times Higher Education. Indeed, in 2003, 75 per cent of the 119,000 students enrolled at Singapore’s private institutions – at a time when there were still only three public universities – were taking programmes offered in collaboration with foreign universities. Almost from the outset, TNE has been part of the development and capacity-building of the country’s now world-class higher education system.

Although Australia has been the dominant country in establishing branch campuses – with the likes of James Cook and Curtin universities still present today – UK institutions have also run joint programmes with Singaporean institutions for decades.

Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency shows that UK universities had 29,820 TNE students enrolled in Singapore in 2023/24, compared with 26,080 in 2019/20. And Singapore remained the sixth top TNE market for UK universities, behind the likes of China, Sri Lanka and Malaysia. However, five years earlier, Singapore had been the third biggest market.

“It’s not so much that [Singaporean TNE] is going down. It’s more…that its rate of change is much slower [than elsewhere],” said Cader. TNE growth has been particularly rapid in China and Sri Lanka, as well as Nepal, India, Pakistan and Vietnam. The consequence is that “where Singapore may [previously] have been able to draw in students for TNE from South-east Asia and South Asia, there are now more alternatives in those regions”, said Cader.

Moreover, although some foreign institutions are still interested in Singapore – including New Zealand’s Massey University, which recently launched a partnership with the local, private PSB Academy to offer its degrees in the city state – the growth potential is far greater in some other South-east Asian countries, said Haike Manning, founder of Lightpath Consulting Group.

“[Singapore] remains really important for the UK and for Australia [but] you’re not necessarily seeing the growth, and market entry is quite challenging,” he said.

Navigating the regulatory system can be onerous; which is why recent newcomers have tended to partner with existing private providers rather than try to secure their own operating licences. Earlier this year, for instance, PSB opened a third campus in Singapore, offering qualifications from the UK’s Coventry University.

Institutions might also be put off undertaking larger ventures by previous high-profile failures, including the 2007 closure of the University of New South Wales Asia – the first foreign campus in Singapore – after only a few months of operation and, more recently, the shuttering of Yale-NUS College.

The branch campuses that do remain appear, for the most part, to be well established. James Cook University (JCU) Singapore, for example, was set up in 2003 and today hosts mainly international students.

“We always planned a long-term presence, and we’ve built that up very carefully and gradually over the years,” said Carole Anne Upton, deputy vice-chancellor Singapore at JCU, whose home campuses are in northern Queensland.

“We are very mindful that if we want to have a place in the Singapore ecosystem of higher education – where I think we do occupy a unique space, which is recognised by the Singaporean authorities – we have to constantly earn that by demonstrating the quality of what we do, and by being very respectful of the regulatory environment that we’re working in.

JCU Singapore receives “really good support from the government, and we’re increasingly able to collaborate – not only with the autonomous universities in Singapore, which have a slightly different remit and can’t necessarily do as much internationally as we can, but also with employers.”

Upton joked that JCU has trained most of the psychologists in Singapore – one of the university’s most popular courses among local students. And it is these sorts of subjects, which complement the programmes public universities already offer, that Lightpath’s Manning assumes the government is looking for in international partners today.

Foreign institutions looking to enter the market need to “find a niche that the Singaporean government cares about”, Manning said. “In recent years, some institutions have done quite well offering top-up degrees in nursing, because that’s something that the Singaporean government has been focused on.”

Coventry’s new partnership is focused on paramedic education programmes, which it said “were intended to help address Singapore’s rising emergency call volumes and workforce shortages”.

Although it seems unlikely Singapore will be setting any bold international student recruitment targets anytime soon, there are hints that the Lion City is still cautiously embracing a certain quota of international students.

“A number of immigration changes have been introduced in the recent past that suggest there is a welcome mat for select groups of international students,” said Ravinder Sidhu, associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland.

“Waiting times have been reduced for students wishing to apply for permanent residency, and graduates from local higher education institutions can now remain in the country on a Long Term Visit Pass for up to 12 months to look for employment.”

Some Singaporean universities are also attempting to grow their international offers, including launching new Mandarin-taught degrees to cater for Chinese students. And, despite some data suggesting demand may be waning, universities report strong admissions pipelines in response to global turbulence.

“We’ve always had a steady growth in admissions, but…we are seeing heightened interest, both from students and faculty, who increasingly view Asia and Singapore as stable, dynamic hubs,” said Lily Kong, president of Singapore Management University (SMU), the third of Singapore’s universities to be established, in 2000 – after the NUS (1905) and NTU (1981).

“At SMU, our interest is not in predatory opportunism but in ensuring that students and faculty find welcoming, nurturing and high-quality environments for transformative learning and impactful scholarship.”

For Singapore’s public universities, part of the incentive to adopt a more global mindset is to strengthen their research and climb up the university rankings. At SMU, for example, international staff make up 38 per cent of faculty.

However, when top academics began departing the US in response to Donald Trump’s crackdown on higher education, Singapore declined to launch the specific national initiatives to attract them seen in the UK and parts of Europe.

This, again, could be down to sensitivities around public opinion. In 2019, the Straits Times reported that “aggressive recruitment schemes” by NUS and NTU had “sparked a debate on whether Singapore’s two leading universities prefer foreign academics and if they did so to chase rankings”. At the time, the NUS was 23rd in Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings and Nanyang 51st – up from 26th and 76th respectively five years previously; they are now 17th and joint 31st. The Ministry of Education defended initiatives to attract foreign academics but said universities would continue to “build a strong Singaporean academic core”. That, in a nutshell, is the “tightrope” that Singaporean universities have to “balance on”, according to Nanyang’s Tan.

Singapore’s attractiveness to foreign faculty, apart from its tropical climate and quality of life, revolves around its “promise of a stable environment and the possibility of funding”, said the NUS’ Chong. “It can be a highly bureaucratic environment,” he conceded, and its emphasis on research with “immediate returns” can be “in tension with investments in more basic research”. Furthermore, “Questions about academic freedom remain in the minds of many.” Yet as concerns about academic freedom and the stability of funding have grown in the US, scholarly interest in Singapore appears to be on the rise.

NTU president Ho Teck Hua said a university programme focused on bringing outstanding early career researchers to the institution had attracted four times more applications than usual last year. And when the institution made offers, more were accepted than rejected – in his opinion, “simply because Singapore is a very attractive environment for people to do science and learning”.

So even if the scale of its international recruitment is unlikely to increase significantly in the coming years, it is clear that Singapore is not about to pull up the drawbridge.

“Singapore has long recognised the importance of internationalisation,” the SMU’s Kong said. “Policies have made it possible for us to recruit global talent and build partnerships abroad while also developing local talent. This is a real strength of our system.

“Of course, there are tensions. Openness must be balanced against the need to develop local talent, and universities must constantly navigate that. The key is to sustain this supportive environment, especially in an uncertain, volatile world.”

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