The ITE visit included a talk, whom the speaker tries to convince us that ITE is a good institute for post secondary education and that ITE is a world leading institute for technical training. Looking at the facilities they have, I have to agree that it has got to be world leading in terms of infrastructure investments but I had learnt since young not to judge a book by it's cover. Over the hour long talk, of which I almost fell asleep midway, some interesting statistics were given to prove their points. That ITE is important and ITE is good. Here's some thoughts generated from my short "sight-seeing" trip to ITE college east.


Overview of the Singapore education system.

Well, I had to agree with the speaker that Singaporeans (at least me) are very familiar with the JC/Poly route for post secondary education since most of our immediate friends and relatives went through one of the two routes. I did not have a clear picture what sort of qualifications and advancement routes are available to ITE students. All I know is that the mass media once reported on several ITE students who managed to get their degrees after years of hard work.

So here it is. The ITE offers 3 types of qualifications, the Nitec, Higher Nitec and Master Nitec. The Nitec is the basic technical qualification for ITE and is opened to all secondary school leavers. If you do well for your Nitec (get a merit), you can proceed to do a higher Nitec. Alternatively, if you go to ITE after getting your 'O' levels, you can opt to go straight into the higher Nitec courses. Master Nitec are awarded only to those "sifus" who demonstrate great skills in their area of technical expertise, which I suppose will include several years of on job experience, much like master teachers in education.

After your Nitec or Higher Nitec course, students can progress into polytechnic for their diploma courses and the rest is well known to all of us (but based on what citeria to get admission into Polytechnic is not clear to me). ITE Nitec courses comes in full time or part time courses and works in a modular system like Universities. They even have a grade point average (GPA) system, or cumulative average point (CAP) for NUS, in place. An ITE full time Nitec course is suppose to last 2 years but with a modular system, it will be possible to accelerate by getting exemptions for certain modules for example.

What is more interesting than the education system is the statistics that were provided. According to the speaker, 25% of secondary graduates go into JC/CI, 40% to Polytechnics while 25% to ITE. The rest, 10%, goes to "other training providers". Other training providers? Does it include other courses offered by institutes such as Informatics? And apprenticeship to the zi char chef at Bukit Bollocks kopi house? What about the Ah Seng who do graffiti and calligraphy on the doors and walls of HDB flats writing literary classic works such as O$P$? And the list goes on... I just wonder what goes on at the 10% "other training providers".

If we can assume that the education level of Singaporeans today is reflected by the statistics given (i.e. ~25% obtained degrees and higher, ~40% have diplomas and ~35% have technical or no qualifications), it would be interesting to note what are the possible implications to Singapore. First, is 35% sufficient to fill up all the technical or unskilled jobs in Singapore, or on the other hand, are there sufficient jobs to employ "highly educated" Singaporeans? I'm first and foremost a Physics person so I don't know economics or whatsoever, so pardon my naive questions.

Pondering over how education level would affect one's vote and stuff like that aren't really my forte. And I doubt anyone could give a complete and indisputable answer for these questions like I could get in the field of physics and mathematics. Besides learning facts from the speaker on how ITE ticks, I hope to learn something else by asking myself the right questions. Unfortunately, I don't have answers to my own questions too. Perhaps I would, someday, perhaps you do now.

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