Hi editor,

    I believe the bond breaking saga has taught Singaporeans that talent is mobile, and trying to use words like 'moral obligation' no longer holds water in this new economy.

    Yet, I felt a chilling in my bones to hear some of the potential bond breakers stating that scholarships are like trophies that look good on resumes, even when these students have the means to finance their overseas education without the scholarship.

    I would think that the main losers in this saga are those Singaporeans, like Mr Yew Zhong Ming in the letter "Others deprived of funding", who could have gone to overseas Universities but could not secure sufficient funding.

    In this aspect, I would like to offer a suggestion, one would help these Singaporeans realize their dreams and at the same time, help to reduce the prestige value attached to overseas scholarships.

    This entails extending the current subsidy given to Singaporeans enrolling in local universities. For Singaporeans who qualify for foreign universities, we could give them the same equivalent Singapore dollar subsidy they would have got had they enrolled in NUS/NTU/SMU. This scheme is the voucher scheme that many economists advocate.

    At the start, perhaps we could restrict the number of overseas universities to the more well known ones, for the sake of quality control. It is important not to have any bonds attached to such a scheme as the objective is to help Singaporeans fulfill their dreams unconditionally. In this new economy, bonds are not the way to secure the talents of people, I feel we need to trust Singaporeans and let them decide whether they feel any obligation to come back to serve in Singapore without any explicit or implicit threats.

    No doubt there would be a higher cost with this kind of scheme, but if we reduce the number of bond-attached scholarships that Singapore currently has, more money can be freed to finance such a scheme, which would reduce the prestige factor in the current overseas scholarships. Such a scheme would be more equitable as it applies to any Singaporean who manages to qualify for an approved foreign university, whether or not they could have afford the cost on their own. Furthermore, families whose children could not qualify for local universities but qualify for foreign universities would have much to gain from this scheme.

    As a side benefit, Singapore would be able to gauge better how our local universities stand against foreign competition, since we would have remove much of the cost advantage of attending a local university, from the equation. 

Kelvin Tan Tuan Wei