Education quality to be improved

In his dialogue with Poly students yesterday at the 17th Polytechnic Forum, Heng Swee Kiat said there was no need to build another polytechnic. The five polytechnics should be adequate for our needs. What is lacking is the quality and this must be improved ‘to make learning more engaging and valuable for students’. This about sums up the education and job situation here at the moment.
 
We are producing enough graduates but lacking in quality. The problem is solved by importing good quality graduates from the third world and they have the numbers we need. In the meantime the urgent matter is to raise the quality of our world ranked education system to compete with those in unranked education institutions in the third world countries. They have got their education system right while we got it all wrong. We are like getting all the branded goods, brand names, but all fake, unusable and of poor quality.
 
The issue of improving the quality of a flawed education system will take a longer time to correct. While the MOE is doing it, perhaps it would be better to correct the clear and immediate problems by sending our students to the third world countries that are producing all the great talents that are replacing our daft graduates. The second step is to send a few teams to these third world countries to learn from them on how to produce graduates that are better than our universities and polytechnics. And certainly, even if the quality does not improve, the cost will be much cheaper if we engaged all their top professors, lecturers and teachers to replace the robots that we are using to teach our students.
 
With this two prong approaches, we would be able to save a lot of cost in education and produce good quality graduates as well. We may not need all the world ranked universities and polytechnics by sending our students to universities and polytechnics in the third world countries. No need to pay expensive western professors and lecturers, no need expensive education institutions and infrastructures, no need to sell ourselves as the education hub when we are producing not employable graduates or graduates good only for second or third tier management, etc etc.
 
That’s the way to go, cheap and good, very good and very cheap.