A small but growing cohort of Singaporean undergraduates are charting a less-trodden path. By Teo Kai Xiang - 14 Apr The overwhelming majority of Singaporeans pursuing their studies abroad do so in one of three countries: the United States, Britain and Australia. Nearly eight in 10 local students heading overseas made a beeline for these three countries in , according to Unesco data on the global flow of higher-education students.
However, a small but growing cohort of Singaporean undergraduates are charting a less-trodden path, towards countries such as the Netherlands , Germany and Japan. However, a small but growing cohort of Singaporean undergraduates are charting a less-trodden path, towards countries such as the Netherlands, Germany and Japan. Her parents did not have to fork out any money. She also did part-time jobs, tutoring and delivering food, in Tilburg.
For Ms Sabrina Suhaimi, 22, who initially applied only to industrial and product design programmes in the US and Britain, Japan was not on her shortlist. But the Covid pandemic derailed her plans, and she started applying widely. Her tuition fees worked out to an affordable , yen a year. With the scholarship she received from her university, and by working part-time in retail and teaching in Fukuoka, she could fund her studies without monetary support from her parents by her second year in the Japanese city.
It helped that the relatively lower costs of living in Fukuoka — compared with cities such as Tokyo and Singapore — kept her rental and grocery expenses low. The main challenge for Ms Sabrina in terms of costs was finding affordable halal meal options, which were often double the price of non-halal ones, there. Ms Sabrina Suhaimi in a kimono for a coming-of-age ceremony in Japan.
She feels that renting alone and becoming a young adult among a wholly new community of friends are things not easily found among those in their 20s living in Singapore and other anglophone countries.
