A Quantitative Research On Contribution Of Higher Education To Economy And Its Experience In Singapore

Singapore is a island with a Area of 692.7 square km, a Population of about 4.5 million and very few natural resources. However, Singapore finished all the beginning, developing and blooming steps within 20 years which would take almost 200 years by other countries. The per capita GDP equal to that of the Big 4 Western European countries. And one of the most important reasons for this miracle is that Singapore insist the policy of"Developing the education with the economic need".This paper will do a research about how Singapore's higher education coordinate with its economic development and what is its result–the return of higher education to economy in Singapore from 1994 to 2004. And in the last part of this paper, I propose some suggestion for the development of Chinese higher education after I analyzed some current problems in Chinese higher education and the experience of the development of higher education in Singapore. Here are the main point of the suggestion: (1) pay more attention to the government police making and planning, and set up the Industry Association System within the whole country to collect the information about the talent need. (2) adjust the structure of higher education by declining the percentage of general higher education and increasing that of higher vocational education. (3) emphasize the practical teaching in general higher education. (4) develop the high level of higher vocational education.It's true that Singapore's higher education had made a big contribution to the development of the social economy, but most of the current research about that is in the qualitative way which makes this quantitative research more meaningful. The innovation of this paper is as follows: (1) the computation method. The method I used revised the coefficient in the classic method used by Denison, E.F which expresses the degree of income influenced by the education. (2) I proposed a small program called"internship plan"and try to solve the problem in practical teaching of Chinese higher education.