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The Electric New Paper :

Mr Lee Kwok Cheong, CEO of SIM Pte Ltd says:

Rising rents beyond reach of students

SINGAPORE gets an A for reliability and safety, but a poor grade for affordable student housing.

22 September 2007

SINGAPORE gets an A for reliability and safety, but a poor grade for affordable student housing.

The lack of enough reasonably-priced housing for students is a problem that must be addressed. Otherwise it may hurt Singapore's drive to be an educational hub.

That is the view of Mr Lee Kwok Cheong, CEO of SIM Pte Ltd - the global education and professional development arm of the Singapore Institute of Management group.

Rising rents are making the situation worse. Mr Lee said in an interview with The New Paper yesterday: 'We have more and more students coming here, but rents are going up because there are also more professionals (who can pay higher rents) driving up the demand.'

SUBSIDY

He had this solution to offer. 'Instead of funding a few institutions (like the public universities), the authorities can also subsidise student housing for the private universities,' he said.

A check by The New Paper with three student accommodation facilities in the Bukit Timah area found they are all running at almost-full capacity.

Mr Patrick Ang, 43, who runs a student hostel on the old Nanyang Primary School premises off Farrer Road, said: 'As more students come here, there's definitely a need for more well-located and affordable student housing.'

Mr Lee, who was a leading figure in the IT sector as chief executive of the National Computer Systems before he joined SIM two years ago, also called for more government support for the private education sector.

He suggested a 'portable' subsidy scheme, in which local students are given vouchers which they should be able to use to pay for further education in tertiary institutions here.

Local students of public-funded universities are subsidised, but Mr Lee thinks all students, even those attending private institutions, should get some help.

He also felt it is 'too easy' for people to set up education businesses in Singapore.

'All you need is to register. You don't need to go through a vetting process. And some of them, who get into trouble, end up blackening the name of other good private education providers,' he said.

REGULATION

He hopes the Education Ministry will move quickly to regulate the area.

'Some of the areas which involve many people, like healthcare and education, cannot be left too unregulated,' he said.

Mr Lee, who is originally from Hong Kong and is one of the faces of Singapore's new citizens, said that despite the growing number of private education providers, there is still a huge market of potential students. 'There are actually enough eaters but not enough pies.'

He noted that SIM Global Education, which partners foreign universities like the University of Sydney (see report right), RMIT and Warwick University, runs more than 50 degree programmes and has about 14,000 students.

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