The Gateway to Heaven

I wasnt expecting to post twice on the same day but man, this has got to be one of the most mind-numbingly astounding articles. As they say, truth is stranger than fiction.

WORLD NEWS

Gateway to the Ivy League

Prestigious Singapore School
Sends Droves to Top Colleges;
Just $15 a Month in Fees

By CRIS PRYSTAY and ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 6, 2004; Page B1

Teh Su Ching began gunning for the Ivy League when she was just 11 years old. To get there, the young Singaporean beefed up her grades to win admission to a feeder school for Singapore's Raffles Junior College, the government school that landed her older brother in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other graduates in a host of top universities abroad.

A few weeks ago, Ms. Teh, now 19, was accepted by Yale. "I screamed when I found out," she says. Then she went down to Raffles and gave her teachers flowers and bottles of wine.

The school has plenty of reason to celebrate. Over 40% of the 820 students who graduated in December have been accepted by top U.S. universities. About half of that group will attend elite, Ivy League schools. Cornell University alone accepted 90 of Ms. Teh's classmates; Duke University accepted another 24. Dozens of others this year have been accepted by Britain's Oxford and Cambridge.

Raffles charges students just $15 a month in fees, but it's no ordinary institution. A product of Singapore's highly competitive approach to education, designed to fuel the national economy, Raffles is the peak of a government-controlled pyramid-style school structure that unabashedly pushes the cream to the top.

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Another key to Raffles' extraordinary college-placement success: Money is no object. To groom leaders for its agencies and the companies under its control, the government underwrites the college education of hundreds of top Singaporean junior-college graduates. Students seeking such aid must sign a contract, or a bond, to come back and work for a government agency or corporation for six years. More than half of the Raffles grads who are heading to the U.S. this year are on a government bond, the school says.

"It makes it a little easier for us to accept them," acknowledges Mike Goldberger, director of admission at Brown University, which has a limited financial-aid budget for international students.

Raffles Junior College, established in 1982, has its roots in Raffles Institution, a secondary school for boys established in 1823 by Sir Stamford Raffles, the colonial Briton who founded the city-state of Singapore. Raffles Institution, which still exists, built its reputation as a bastion of meritocracy, accepting gifted children from all socioeconomic classes and producing dozens of leaders over the years -- among them, Lee Kuan Yew, the patriarch of modern Singapore.

Today's Raffles is an Ivy League machine. A recent Wall Street Journal survey of high schools that feed elite U.S. colleges focused on U.S. schools and thus didn't include Raffles. Adding international schools, that list shows that Raffles sent more students to 10 elite colleges than any other international school and topped such prestigious U.S. secondary schools as Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn., and Harvard-Westlake, in North Hollywood, Calif.

"It's very satisfying," says Winston James Hodge, the school's principal and a Singaporean like most of the faculty.

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University applications are taken extra-seriously. There are five teachers who serve as applications advisers, two for U.S. universities, two for schools in the United Kingdom and one for Australian schools. Between July and October, there is at least one talk each week by Ivy League alumni or an admissions officer from a U.S. school.

Those talks motivated Ervin Yeo, 20, now a freshman at Yale studying ethics, politics and economics. "When you hear all these success stories and hear about the students before you who go on to Princeton and Harvard, you feel you can be part of this," says Mr. Yeo, who is the first in his immediate family to go to college.

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Mr. Yeo, who played rugby at Raffles and now does so at Yale, says the transition has been easy. "You're used to being the cream of the crop in Singapore," he says, "and it's just the same thing at the Ivies."


(for full unabridged article, go to this website)



That is some inspirational stuff. Its so heartening to know that there are so many people out there to nurture the individual to attain his full potential. I'm just.. slightly curious about how quickly one's perspective of everything changes with tangible achievements.

If I had read this article 2 years ago, my weak self-esteem would have been ruthlessly blown away. Now of course, I have come to grips with my own paranoid delusions about life and totem poles.

I wont belabour my point too much coz a lot of people have talked about this already. But, upon replacing my glasses for myopia with far-vision goggles, I envision Singapore becoming trapped by its own pyramidal heirarchy. The same thing that strangled ancient Indian society. A society led by Rafflesians in the service of everyone, including and especially Rafflesians, who later carry the torch of progress forward. Sure Singapore is an "egalitarian" society. But we all know what George Orwell said about THAT.