When New York University and the National University of Singapore announced this week that they would end their six-year-old joint law program, it was natural to ask how the move fit in with the high-profile—and, in some circles, highly contentious—overseas plans of NYU’s president, John E. Sexton.
Although NYU officials have been careful to say that the decision to end the program was the law school’s, it is clear that a one-off degree program was not in keeping with Mr. Sexton’s idea of a grand worldwide network of campuses and programs.
In the future, deans have been encouraged to focus on developing projects within “a model that we know works, rather than independently undertaking the creation of an entirely new presence unconnected to the network,” said John H. Beckman, a university spokesman.
But the move may say as much about Singapore’s international ambitions as it does about NYU’s global vision.
And as with other closures of overseas programs and campuses, it suggests that American colleges need to think carefully through the risks, financial and otherwise, before they set up shop abroad. Both NYU and NUS blamed the split on the fact that the dual-degree master’s program was never able to become self-supporting.
For more than a decade, Singapore has sought to establish itself as an international-education hub, working to attract students, researchers, and universities from around the world. The city-state is home to more than a dozen foreign branch campuses and has even more joint programs with top international universities, among them Cornell in hotel management, Duke in medicine, and Insead, one of the world’s leading business schools.
More recently, it has drawn on the expertise of MIT and Yale to build two ambitious new institutions, one a university focused on technology and design, the other the country’s first liberal-arts college, which will welcome its first students in August.
Limits to Generosity
But the past few months have seemingly been as much about endings as beginnings. Earlier this year the University of Nevada at Las Vegas said it was shutting its program there in hospitality management. A few months prior, NYU’s Singapore-based Tisch School of the Arts Asia announced it would stop accepting new students.
Each closure is bound up in questions of sustainability and strategy. While all three projects received subsidies from the Singaporean government to get off the ground, both the Singaporeans and their American partners appeared reluctant to continue to underwrite them. And with insufficient numbers of local students apparently willing to pay American tuition rates, the projects proved financially unviable.
Unlike some other education hubs, such as those in the deep-pocketed Persian Gulf, Singapore’s generosity has its limits, with most subsidies to foreign universities containing a sunset clause. Indeed, news of the impending shutdown of Tisch, which offered graduate degrees in the arts, caused an uproar in Singapore’s Parliament, with lawmakers demanding to know how much the government had spent on the project—nearly $15-million in loans and grants, it turns out—and raising questions about the overall price tag of the country’s global-education efforts.
That’s a sensible approach, said Gabriel Hawawini, a former dean of Insead who has written extensively about international partnerships. “I believe this is a healthy way of building an educational hub,” he said.
Mr. Hawawini noted that Singapore’s strategy had long kept the bottom line in mind. Two earlier projects—a branch campus of Australia’s University of New South Wales and a research partnership with the Johns Hopkins University—both foundered, in part, because of financing.
Still, some observers say that, as Singapore’s higher-education system matures, its leaders are becoming more results-oriented. In recent written testimony to Parliament, for example, Singapore’s minister for trade and industry said the country’s signature global-education effort would focus on building up research and increasing degree-holders in areas critical to the economy, rather than merely seeking to attract many students or international collaborators.
“Singapore’s a savvy, business-oriented country,” said Jason E. Lane, a co-director of the Cross-Border Education Research Team at the State University of New York at Albany. “They’re looking at these projects and asking, What’s the return on investment?”
Choosier Students
Singapore’s students, too, can afford to be choosier, said Janice R. Bellace, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a former president of Singapore Management University. With universities there among the world’s best, students have quality educational options, often at a lower cost than an American degree program.
One problem for the joint NYU-NUS law program was probably the price tag, which was double that of NUS’s own stand-alone master-of-law program.
For American prices, Ms. Bellace said, many in Singapore’s large middle class might just opt to send their children to the United States. “The education market in Singapore is very competitive,” she said.
The fact is, unlike new, untested markets, Singapore may no longer need to offer large subsidies to persuade skittish foreign partners to take a chance, said Mr. Lane, who is also a Chronicle blogger. “It’s maturation,” he said. “It’s a changing environment.” (Some years down the road, presumably, the Persian Gulf emirates may reach the same conclusion about their education hubs.)
In fact, Mr. Lane suggested, other universities might just be willing to come to Singapore in NYU’s stead. Turn’s out he’s right. NUS recently signed an agreement with Tsinghua Law School, in China, for a joint law program.