Featured image: Yale-NUS College campus at dusk (Source: Yale-NUS College)
By David Bloom
On the Thursday afternoon of August 25, every student at Yale-NUS College got an email telling them about a surprise town hall taking place the next day. Friday classes were cancelled. Yale-NUS had already told students they’d be announcing some changes to their core curriculum, so when Suman P., a first-year at Yale-NUS, got the email, she said that she “didn’t think much of it.” Simultaneously, the National University of Singapore (NUS), announced its own town hall for students enrolled in the University Scholars Programme, a selective interdisciplinary program within NUS.
Did these town halls just happen to be scheduled at the same time? Rumors began to circulate that the joint town halls might announce some “interesting” new program involving USP and Yale-NUS. No one seemed to know what this new development would be. Yale-NUS was Yale’s only major foreign partnership, and Yale had never contributed money from its own endowment to Yale-NUS. This is why, for years, Yale-NUS students wondered whether Yale would pull out, leaving its Singaporean offshoot on its own. These surprise town halls made those rumors hum just a little bit louder.
That Friday morning, just ten minutes before the town hall began, a fraction of Yale-NUS students opened their phones, laptops, or tablets and were greeted with press reports—NUS was shutting down Yale-NUS college and merging it with the University Scholars Programme to create a new college, unaffiliated with Yale. If these reports were to be believed, in four years, the Class of 2025 would be the last group of people on Earth to receive Yale-NUS diplomas.
The interval between the release of those news reports and the start of the town hall was, for Suman, “the most confusing ten minutes of my life.” She didn’t want to believe that Yale-NUS was shutting down, but sources as varied as the Yale Daily New, mainstream Singaporean papers like the Straits Times, and even a press release from Yale repeated the message in unison. The town hall confirmed that NUS had indeed decided to shut down Yale-NUS college, ending the college’s ten-year-long project to bring liberal arts education to Asia. To understand why, we need to revisit 2011, when Yale University and the National University of Singapore announced plans to jointly establish Yale-NUS College.
In the announcement, Yale described Yale-NUS as “Singapore’s first liberal arts college, and the first with a full residential college model, integrating living and learning.” From the beginning, Yale-NUS occupied a liminal space between being a fully independent institution and the subordinate offspring of its two parent universities. As an autonomous college, Yale-NUS designed its own core curriculum that “synthesize[d] Western and Asian perspectives,” in the words of a 2011 Yale press release. At the same time, Yale-NUS lacks control over its own Board of Governors; Yale nominates half of the board members, NUS another half, and Singapore’s Ministry of Education confirms every nominee. Still, Yale-NUS began with lofty ambitions to, in the words of the 2011 press release, “serve as a catalyst for innovation in liberal arts” and educate “leaders.”
In 2021, even following the closure, Yale administrators were confident that Yale-NUS was living up to its ambitions. When I interviewed Pericles Lewis, Yale’s Vice President for Global Strategy and Yale-NUS’ first president, he said that Yale-NUS “exceeded expectations” in terms of attracting talented students and faculty. In his statement on the shutdown, Yale President Peter Salovey maintained that Yale-NUS was “a unique and remarkable living and learning experience in Singapore.” Both Salovey and Lewis expressed that they wished Yale-NUS could continue. It was NUS, not Yale, that pulled the plug. Indeed, in the statement, Salovey says that NUS President Tan Eng Chye “informed [him] of NUS’s intention” to shut down Yale-NUS, rather than raising the idea and giving Yale a chance to address NUS’s concerns. The closure revealed that Yale and NUS’s views on Yale-NUS were greatly divergent. And yet, both universities were faced with the same facts: both knew that Yale-NUS was falling behind in its capital fundraising goals. They agreed that Yale-NUS’s policy of academic freedom would go beyond what NUS itself allowed. Both universities played a role in writing Yale-NUS’s curriculum. If Yale and NUS agree on the facts, their disagreement must come from someplace deeper: they had different goals or values in mind when they founded Yale-NUS, which they now cannot reconcile.
In 2020, for every student admitted to Yale-NUS, twenty-two other students were rejected. This year, Singaporean students at Yale-NUS will each be billed $20,500 in tuition fees. In comparison, students at NUS’s College of Humanities and Sciences will pay only $8,200. It’s not surprising that many NUS students view Yale-NUS as an elitist institution that only offers its liberal arts education to a select few. In a speech to the Singaporean Parliament, Minister of Education Chan Chun Sing claimed that merging Yale-NUS and USP into the ‘New College’ would “allow us to scale this experience to many more students, in part or in full, across the NUS.” It makes sense for NUS to give more weight to considerations of socioeconomic access than Yale does. NUS is a public university and the Ministry of Education is a Singaporean government agency. For the Singaporean government, the value of education may be closely tied to pragmatic considerations like its potential to spur social mobility and economic growth. Yale is private, and may be less focused on the material benefits of education. From Yale’s perspective, Yale-NUS’s low admission rate may have been a sign of prestige and desirability and its high operating costs an acceptable price to pay for a world-class liberal arts education. Yale-NUS’s difficulties in raising endowment funds may have been the shock that triggered an earthquake, but the fault-lines between Yale and NUS’s priorities existed from the beginning.
However, the financial walls around Yale-NUS may not be as high as they seem at first glance. Ben Goh, a Yale-NUS student in the Class of 2022, said that Yale-NUS’s “extremely generous” financial aid for Singaporean students drew him to apply. In his first year, he received a 97% subsidy and paid a grand total of $600 in tuition fees. Ben’s experience was not unusual: Yale-NUS doesn’t consider whether Singaporean students can afford to pay the full tuition fee when deciding whom to admit. Once a student is admitted, Yale-NUS guarantees that they will meet that student’s financial need. As a low-income student, once Ben had made it through the admissions office, Yale-NUS turned out to be even cheaper than NUS.
This inclusivity extends to Yale-NUS’s student culture and curriculum. Ben has a hearing disorder, which occasionally causes ringing in his ears that makes it hard to hear. Yale-NUS’s COVID-19 regulations mandate that professors stay at least five meters away from each other in classes. In another college, this could have been a serious barrier to Ben’s ability to hear and learn from his professors. But Yale-NUS accommodated by giving him a mic that he asks people to use when he is having trouble hearing. As a Residential Advisor, Ben ran a session on inclusion for students with learning disabilities. First-years with attention disorders, eye-sight deficiencies, and hearing problems were all directed to the appropriate accommodations. When I asked her about Yale-NUS’s culture, Suman P.’s first response was that Yale-NUS “was a safe space in Singapore for people from minority groups, [queer students], even international students.” Both through its formal policies and norms, Yale-NUS genuinely attempts to give students from every marginalized or disadvantaged group the support they need to succeed.
It seems to me that there are two different metrics we could use to judge whether Yale-NUS is truly accessible: first, equity and second, the sheer number of available seats. By equity, I mean whether Yale-NUS tries to give all students the resources they need to succeed in the liberal arts, regardless of their identities, backgrounds, or disabilities. Low-income students from Singapore are not discriminated against because the application process is need-blind. Once a student with a learning disability gets in, accommodations are made to ensure they learn effectively
But providing equity isn’t the same as making education accessible to many people. Sure, Yale-NUS tries to level the playing field between wealthier and poorer applicants. But, at the end of the day, only asmall and lucky fraction of applicants gets accepted. In this way, Yale-NUS is both pluralistic and exclusive, both culturally diverse and elite. This disjunction between aspiring for equal opportunity and strictly limiting the number of students who are actually accepted is a feature, not a bug, of the liberal arts.
A liberal arts education, and specifically Yale’s flavor of the liberal arts, comes with a resource tradeoff. When I asked Professor Lewis about the liberal arts, he emphasized the importance of “small classes” and “active learning in the sense of seminars and interactive discussion.” When class sizes are smaller, the University has to spend more money on hiring professors, lecturers, and teaching fellows per student. Encouraging students to explore beyond their fields of interest means that students take longer to gain the same level of specialization as their peers in other educational systems, and thus they must spend more resources to obtain their degree. The broader a curriculum and the more niche its offerings, the more expensive it gets.
This dynamic was at play at Yale-NUS. According to NUS President Tan Eng Chye, “Yale-NUS operates with a ratio of 8 students to 1 faculty member – compared to more than 12 to 1 in the USP, and 17 to 1 in the rest of NUS.” It is likely that, per student enrolled, Yale-NUS was more expensive than either the University Scholars Programme or NUS. Many Yale-NUS students are keenly aware of this tension. Ben himself noted that because of “resource constraints,” NUS has fewer professors per student and a greater focus on lecture over discussion-based classes than Yale-NUS does. Given these high costs, it’s not surprising that Yale-NUS only admits 250 students a year.
While we can read Yale-NUS’s closure as a clash between NUS and Yale’s visions of accessibility, NUS’s explanation of why it closed Yale-NUS and how the New College will solve Yale-NUS’s supposed deficiencies has been amorphous and even contradictory at times. Yale-NUS students are skeptical of whether NUS is sincere about expanding access to the liberal arts. For instance, the New College is set to admit 500 students a year, only ten more than Yale-NUS and USP’s enrollment of 490. Ben chuckled as he told me “I’m not really sure what expansion there is.” This belies NUS’s argument that merging Yale-NUS with USP would increase access to interdisciplinary education. Moreover, NUS seems unable to decide whether Yale-NUS’s fundraising woes were a primary cause for the shutdown. In a September 11 statement about the merger, NUS President Tan Eng Chye focused on the the high cost of running Yale-NUS, noting that “Since I became President in 2018, Yale-NUS’ finances have weighed heavily on my mind.” In a speech to Parliament just two days later, Singapore’s Minister of Education Chan Chung Sing said exactly the opposite: that the main reason NUS closed Yale-NUS was not its cost, but rather to pivot NUS toward “interdisciplinary learning.” Indeed, according to Minister Chan, the New College will retain “a residential component, small-group teaching, a common curriculum, and an immersive experience,” the very things that President Chye said caused high costs at Yale-NUS. Minister Chan said that the New College would benefit from “economies of scale.” But it is hard to believe that increasing the student population from 490 to 500 will bring significant economies of scale.
NUS’s contradictory messaging hints at an uncomfortable truth: NUS might have an ulterior motive for shutting Yale-NUS down—they just won’t admit it publicly. Charles Bailyn, Yale-NUS’s first Dean of Faculty has suggested that NUS wanted to close Yale-NUS so that it could admit fewer international students and more Singaporean students. Yale and Yale-NUS faculty members in the past have raised concerns about Yale-NUS’s support for free speech, particularly given the Singaporean government’s history of controlling speech. One can imagine that NUS would hesitate to claim that the cause for their closure of Yale-NUS was to discriminate against foreign students or to censor campus speech. It is impossible to verify which of the various possibilities was the real reason why NUS pulled the plug, but it is disheartening that we can’t discount nativism or authoritarianism as possible causes.
Minutes after NUS administrators surprised Yale-NUS students with the news that their college would be shutting down, anguished screams of students could be heard emanating from residential colleges. Currently enrolled Yale-NUS students will all graduate and receive their degrees. There are not likely to be cuts to Yale-NUS’s resources in the transition period between now and 2025. So where does this anguish come from? In his last three years at Yale-NUS, Ben advised first-years at his residential college, debated competitively for Yale-NUS, and threw the History Society’s first ever Halloween party. Like many of his peers, Ben improved and enriched the Yale-NUS community. Now, Ben says that “We’re grieving the loss of the community.” Yale-NUS students are also hurt by what they see as the opaque and disrespectful way that NUS has treated the community. Some Yale-NUS students learned about the closure of their school through the Yale Daily News, before NUS told them. NUS still hasn’t fully explained why they chose to close Yale-NUS. This has left a sour taste in the community’s mouth. Their college isn’t just closing—NUS yanked it from under their feet without telling them why, leaving students dizzy with confusion.
The Yale-NUS closure raises far more questions than it answers. We may never know what NUS’s real motivation for shutting Yale-NUS down was, and it’s still too early to judge Yale-NUS’s successor, the New College. The Yale-NUS closure cannot be distilled into a nice, self-contained story because it forces us to choose between two good things: an expansive liberal arts curriculum and a curriculum that schools can provide to the majority of prospective students. It is precisely because of this difficult tradeoff that NUS and Yale have an obligation to speak about it openly, to explain why they chose one goal and not the other, or to tell us how they plan to reconcile the two. It’s unfortunate that NUS didn’t use the Yale-NUS closure as an opportunity to have this conversation.
David Bloom is a first year in Timothy Dwight College. You can contact him at david.bloom@yale.edu.