That’s the other thing that we mentioned that we are not allowing right now, not so easily. Transfers, right? I mean, we have the most ridiculous situation because if you go to other universities, other countries, you'll find that nobody applies both for School of Law and School of Medicine at the same time. They're totally different. But in Singapore, foreigners coming here, and actually this is what happens because essentially at the age of 17 or 18, if you're really a good student, your parents also pushing you. Just apply for law, apply for medicine because they're the hardest to get in, the most prestigious. And has nothing to do with whether the students at the age of 18 really want to practice law or medicine. And yet they're being forced to choose. So that's just the two extremes, but why is it that so long as you accumulate sufficient credits, foundational credits to graduate? And that's the beauty of the criticism, that you can spend a year in economics but decided that an adjacent school - normally you won't go from economics to go to medicine or anything - but you could have gone to economics and felt that I really like sociology instead. You can graduate in sociology or something else. The ability to (have) more mobility once you are within the university is something I would fully encourage.
We can start with the College of Integrative Studies. I've often believed that the advantage, the British educational system and the American educational system both have their own respective advantages. The British system is quite narrow and very deep. The American one is very broad-based but relatively shallow. Now how can we marry that so have a unique educational system in Singapore that would have the best of both worlds? We, in the past still stuck to the British model and just tried to make it broader so that within your chosen discipline, it's a bit broader. And you could also have double degrees, double majors, and so on. But it's still very much a British system, meaning at the age of 18 or the age of 20, 21, depending on boy or girl. At a very early age, when you enter university and you apply, you have to apply for a particular school - now, that's the British system. The American system, as you know, you don't apply to a particular school, you apply to the university. And then once you're accepted into university, you then choose your discipline. And very often you create your discipline through credits - a credit system. I think that has a lot of strength for those who are not quite sure what they want to do at a relatively young age. Whereas the British system is excellent for those really knew what they wanted to and when to go, just go deep, dive deep.
How can we have both? And I wanted all along to start a system whereby we accept you into the university, and you then can take time to decide in your first year, maybe even go into the second year, what school you wanted to go to. We managed to do this, within the idea of a College of Integrative Studies. But that's how the College of Integrative Studies started. So that it is partly residential to give them a sense of community, but they're basically students who go for the first year, then you decide what to do. That is part of a process which I think I hope will continue after I retired. And I'd love to see a system one day where we can be fully open. You can come in, into your interview, university so long as we accept you. You can either have chosen a discipline beforehand. Or you come in, maybe even after the first year or so, you decide which major you want to do, like in an American university. And you build, you even create within your school, your actual area of strength, like in an American university, you can graduate with economics, but because I want to choose credits from particular courses, actually create my own, my own degree, even within the field of economics or the school of social sciences or the school of management or whatever. And we're moving there. So that's part of a big transformation.
This is going to be a small minority of people whose ambitions cannot be fulfilled within the normal structure. That's not my final goal. My final goal should be any student who enters SMU, then you should have the choice already having applied for the school. Or, everybody should have the choice of being in the College of Integrative Studies. It will take time to get there, but we're beginning, by MOE even accepting this, that it is good to have a small group of people to try out through CIS. Gradually the CIS may even transform itself to become a norm.
