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Again, the Singapore press trots out, from the usual sources, the hackneyed complaint that people who break their bonds are morally deficient ingrates.
There is nothing new in these arguments.
What’s more interesting, though, lies beneath that veneer of smear. On the same day comes more comments on complacency:
‘Our people must realise that being No.1 is very temporal.
‘We better keep on honing that…Make sure that our young people are hungry. If our young people are not hungry enough, bring in hungrier ones from overseas. Make them feel hungry, increase the hungriness index.’
Strip away the rhetoric, and the stark truth is exposed: Singapore simply cannot continue to grow along its current trajectory. Other countries, other economies, they’ll catch up.
We already know that. We already know the solution: move toward economic activities that require more brain cells that what Fox calls the Ctrl-C-Ctrl-V type job. We have moved away from physically menial jobs to mentally menial jobs, but in order to stay one step ahead, we’ve got to move yet again toward something more ‘value-added’.
We need people to do creative jobs, and yet we cannot find the people to do them. Singapore simply lacks people of appropriate caliber to do them. It’s a problem not unique to Singapore either. The world lacks such people, and desperately wants them. That’s why talent in this century can serve a global pool, not merely a local or even national one.
This is not news either. What perhaps is new, though, is looking at both threads together. Who are the people taking advantage of the global labor pool? There are the scholars that return and others that leave. Are those who leave deficient in moral fiber, or are they simply gravitating toward better deals spun in a free-for-all international arena?
Which scholars leave? Perhaps if these scholarship agencies were to examine their personnel files more closely, they may one day realize that ironically, the people who leave are disproportionately their best and brightest. Bond-breakers aren’t leaving in a huff and then working double-shifts at an assembly line job to pay their liquidate damages; many of them end up at big-name companies like Google, Microsoft, UBS and Merrill Lynch.
Why do scholars leave? If it is as simple as taking the better of two deals, why are scholarship agencies offering the worse deal, despite what they claim during their marketing sessions of taking their charges seriously and offering to nurture them properly? Are scholarship agencies offering careers commensurate with the rates on the global labor market - rates almost certainly higher than those on the regular market? And how about opportunities? perks? fringe benefits? work environment?
Why would people want to get stuck with staid, stolid government careers when they think other people can offer them more challenging, more exciting, better-paid jobs? The proletariat classes have found job security to be based on nothing more than empty promises. Six years of indentured labor is not an asset, it is a fatal liability, a sign that Singapore scholarship agencies don’t trust their recipients to do the right thing. Is it any surprise, then, that the recipients chafe under this paternalistic, supercilious arrogance?
The government agencies handing out scholarships have the power to tilt the balance. They set the rates, they set the agenda. They can make better deals than the ones that have served our country so well in the twentieth century. The government makes a big deal about maintaining Singapore’s competitiveness, and not being complacent. Yet it seems to turn its blind spot on its immense complacence regarding Singapore’s competitiveness in the top-echelon labor markets.
Low-wage policies can only go so far in the current economic climate, as inflation eats away at real incomes and other rapidly-developing economies undercut large swathes of jobs held by Singaporeans in the late 20th century. The only way is up and forward, yet their policies are still firmly entrenched in the vision and rhetoric of our Founding Father. It is no different with the crème de la crème that is so actively sought out by so many people.
Now for the last interesting twist - are the poor better scholarship holders? No doubt that it’s fantastic policy for upward social mobility, but the flip side is that they are obviously the ones that can least afford to bail themselves out. Controlling for that one factor, I cannot think of any reason why they would be less likely to break their bonds. Gratitude can very quickly give way to resentment in the realization of the vast array of opportunities that open up in the process of schooling.
The missing ingredient is this: scholarships are not the only route to a college education at a good school abroad. The ever-growing list at the Incomplete Guide to Financial Aid for Singaporeans is testament to the opportunities being created by universities and private foundations to fund students falling into precisely this category: the bright but underprivileged. And in fact, the increasing number of needs-blind financial aid sponsors shows that one doesn’t even need to be poor to have a foot in the door - there is no significant reason to think that merit and poverty are in any way correlated. The Singapore scholarship agencies are already falling heads-over-heels to clarify that being poor has nothing to do with being any more or less deserving of opportunities for higher education.
At the end of the day, who’s the bigger fool - the Singaporeans who are leaving, or the Singaporeans who continue to harass and mock ex-scholars ten years after the fact, and despite their grandiose schemes have little to show for their efforts?
People are free to mock us who have chosen to leave, but they choose to do so at the expense of revealing their own ignorance.
There is nothing new in these arguments.
What’s more interesting, though, lies beneath that veneer of smear. On the same day comes more comments on complacency:
‘Our people must realise that being No.1 is very temporal.
‘We better keep on honing that…Make sure that our young people are hungry. If our young people are not hungry enough, bring in hungrier ones from overseas. Make them feel hungry, increase the hungriness index.’
Strip away the rhetoric, and the stark truth is exposed: Singapore simply cannot continue to grow along its current trajectory. Other countries, other economies, they’ll catch up.
We already know that. We already know the solution: move toward economic activities that require more brain cells that what Fox calls the Ctrl-C-Ctrl-V type job. We have moved away from physically menial jobs to mentally menial jobs, but in order to stay one step ahead, we’ve got to move yet again toward something more ‘value-added’.
We need people to do creative jobs, and yet we cannot find the people to do them. Singapore simply lacks people of appropriate caliber to do them. It’s a problem not unique to Singapore either. The world lacks such people, and desperately wants them. That’s why talent in this century can serve a global pool, not merely a local or even national one.
This is not news either. What perhaps is new, though, is looking at both threads together. Who are the people taking advantage of the global labor pool? There are the scholars that return and others that leave. Are those who leave deficient in moral fiber, or are they simply gravitating toward better deals spun in a free-for-all international arena?
Which scholars leave? Perhaps if these scholarship agencies were to examine their personnel files more closely, they may one day realize that ironically, the people who leave are disproportionately their best and brightest. Bond-breakers aren’t leaving in a huff and then working double-shifts at an assembly line job to pay their liquidate damages; many of them end up at big-name companies like Google, Microsoft, UBS and Merrill Lynch.
Why do scholars leave? If it is as simple as taking the better of two deals, why are scholarship agencies offering the worse deal, despite what they claim during their marketing sessions of taking their charges seriously and offering to nurture them properly? Are scholarship agencies offering careers commensurate with the rates on the global labor market - rates almost certainly higher than those on the regular market? And how about opportunities? perks? fringe benefits? work environment?
Why would people want to get stuck with staid, stolid government careers when they think other people can offer them more challenging, more exciting, better-paid jobs? The proletariat classes have found job security to be based on nothing more than empty promises. Six years of indentured labor is not an asset, it is a fatal liability, a sign that Singapore scholarship agencies don’t trust their recipients to do the right thing. Is it any surprise, then, that the recipients chafe under this paternalistic, supercilious arrogance?
The government agencies handing out scholarships have the power to tilt the balance. They set the rates, they set the agenda. They can make better deals than the ones that have served our country so well in the twentieth century. The government makes a big deal about maintaining Singapore’s competitiveness, and not being complacent. Yet it seems to turn its blind spot on its immense complacence regarding Singapore’s competitiveness in the top-echelon labor markets.
Low-wage policies can only go so far in the current economic climate, as inflation eats away at real incomes and other rapidly-developing economies undercut large swathes of jobs held by Singaporeans in the late 20th century. The only way is up and forward, yet their policies are still firmly entrenched in the vision and rhetoric of our Founding Father. It is no different with the crème de la crème that is so actively sought out by so many people.
Now for the last interesting twist - are the poor better scholarship holders? No doubt that it’s fantastic policy for upward social mobility, but the flip side is that they are obviously the ones that can least afford to bail themselves out. Controlling for that one factor, I cannot think of any reason why they would be less likely to break their bonds. Gratitude can very quickly give way to resentment in the realization of the vast array of opportunities that open up in the process of schooling.
The missing ingredient is this: scholarships are not the only route to a college education at a good school abroad. The ever-growing list at the Incomplete Guide to Financial Aid for Singaporeans is testament to the opportunities being created by universities and private foundations to fund students falling into precisely this category: the bright but underprivileged. And in fact, the increasing number of needs-blind financial aid sponsors shows that one doesn’t even need to be poor to have a foot in the door - there is no significant reason to think that merit and poverty are in any way correlated. The Singapore scholarship agencies are already falling heads-over-heels to clarify that being poor has nothing to do with being any more or less deserving of opportunities for higher education.
At the end of the day, who’s the bigger fool - the Singaporeans who are leaving, or the Singaporeans who continue to harass and mock ex-scholars ten years after the fact, and despite their grandiose schemes have little to show for their efforts?
People are free to mock us who have chosen to leave, but they choose to do so at the expense of revealing their own ignorance.
They still don't get it that creativity cannot be taught in a classroom.
