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 AS PRESIDENT of a university, an occupational hazard – if one can call it that – is receiving the out-of-the-blue telephone call from a friend whom you have not heard from in years and who would now like to know if you are able to help him with a “small matter”.
More often than not, the “small matter” turns out to be whether I can do something about his child’s (or sometimes, a friend’s child) application to study at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). I explain our admissions criteria and the rigour we exercise over it. As a publicly funded institution, we uphold meritocracy above all.
While we do practise discretionary admission for up to 10 per cent of each cohort, this discretion is exercised in a rigorous manner: A composite assessment is made of not only the candidate’s grades, but also of his or her other achievements and accomplishments that would make the candidate a valued addition to the NTU community.
Neither the size of the parent’s cheque book nor his ability to “pull strings” is a factor when reviewing a candidate for discretionary admission. We would do ourselves a disservice if we bowed to such pressures, as some universities in the United States have done, as chronicled in Daniel Golden’s The Price Of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges – And Who Gets Left Outside The Gates.
Accepting – or rejecting – admission applications is an unenviable task. Since becoming president of NTU in 2003, I have seen the quality of our applicants vis a vis their GCE A-level grades improve each year. Unfortunately, given the limited number of students we can admit, and in order to maintain the quality of the education we provide, we had no choice but to turn down a majority of those who applied to us last year.
Dashing a young person’s dream of pursuing a course of study is something none of us in the university wants to do. I have heard many stories of bright students with perfect A-level grades who applied to study medicine at the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, but failed to get in – not because
they were not exceptional, but because the annual intake is limited to only 260 places. I would then heave a small (silent) sigh of relief that NTU didn’t similarly disappoint so many bright young men and women, since we do not have a medical school.
But all that is about to change, as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced in his recent National Day Rally speech. In partnership with Imperial College London, NTU’s new medical school is expected to take in its first cohort of 50 students in 2013, building up eventually to 150 students each year.
This will be in addition to the increased annual intake of 300 students at NUS’ Yong Loo Lin School, as well as the 50 new students Duke-NUS Graduate School of Medicine will enrol annually.
But the fact is that despite this increased intake, and the recruitment of foreign doctors, Singapore will still face a shortfall in catering to the needs of our growing and rapidly ageing population.
Thanks to advances in medicine and better living standards, people in developed countries like Singapore are experiencing longer life expectancies than ever before. However, increased longevity also brings with it an increased burden of chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol levels, with many patients presenting multiple pathologies.
Faced with this challenge, a change in focus from expensive hospital-based health care to more affordable community-based health care has already begun. Singapore’s ability to support a healthy and chronically sick, ageing population without overcrowding our hospitals will be a key factor in helping to keep health care affordable for all.
To implement this policy successfully, we need to train more doctors to be not just specialists, diagnosticians and therapists based on clinical reasoning and evidence-based medicine, but also to be overall care managers. As medicine and technology play ever more intertwined roles in patient care, the doctor of tomorrow
will also need to be knowledgeable about the latest advances in medical technology. In short, he or she needs to be a physician, health-care manager and clinical scientist rolled into one.
While the long-term goal of the new medical school is indeed to boost the number of doctors here, more immediately, it will serve the purpose of helping our brightest young minds pursue medicine on our shores, instead of overseas. Once they are overseas, it can be an uphill battle to lure them back to Singapore. This is
a “brain drain” we can ill afford, especially in the light of a fast dwindling birth rate.
As an engineer, I am also greatly excited by the prospect of having a medical school that will be able to leverage on NTU’s established strengths in engineering to come up with solutions for some of the medical problems we face, taking a leaf from Imperial College’s experience in successfully integrating engineering and medicine.
The interface between engineering and medicine provides fertile ground for research into areas such as medical devices that can revolutionise health care, the same way that once-revolutionary devices such as pacemakers, dialysis machines, prosthetics, MRIs and artificial organs have done. Imagine if something as phenomenal as the Jarvik-7 artificial heart – an example of a biomedical engineering application of mechanical engineering – were to emerge from the new medical school.
While this may seem somewhat farfetched when the school has not even admitted its first student, it is a hope that may well be fulfilled in the foreseeable future, when the healers (doctors) and fixers (engineers) come together. As an engineer heading a university about to create from scratch a new medical school, I anticipate
such a fusion with relish. Shouldn’t we all?
The writer, president of Nanyang Technological University, joins the roster of Think-Tank today. This is a weekly column rotated among eight leading figures in Singapore’s tertiary and research institutions.
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