SIM University (UniSIM) has been renamed the Singapore
University of Social Sciences (SUSS) effective Friday (March 17),
the Ministry of Education (MOE) has announced.
The private university is currently the midst of a
restructuring that will see it become Singapore’s sixth autonomous
university this year. Parliament will still need to pass an Act to
confer autonomous university status on the school.
In a release, Minister for Higher Education and Skills
Ong Ye Kung said the name change will help to “reflect (SUSS’)
mission of driving lifelong learning anchored in disciplines with a
strong social focus”.
“SUSS will add diversity to Singapore’s higher
education landscape and complement the existing five AUs
(autonomous universities). What will be most unique about the
University is its tradition of applied education, and outreach to
adult learners, all of which will be kept and strengthened,” he
added.
According to the MOE, SUSS will continue to offer the
range of programmes that UniSIM had previously. Besides programmes
on social work, early childhood education and human resource
management, the university this year welcomed its first intake of
law students. The MOE says that SUSS will also continue to retain a
limited offering in other areas such as business and engineering,
especially for adult learners.
“SUSS will continue to cater to a wide range of
learners – students, employees looking to upgrade their skills, and
passionate learners keen on gaining new knowledge, while providing
flexibility for their learning,” said SUSS’ president Professor
Cheong Hee Kiat.
Prof Cheong added that the university is committed to
ensuring that it remains at the forefront of innovative, flexible,
and applied tertiary education “through close collaboration with
industry, employers, and the community in the development and
design of our programmes”.
Autonomous universities receive government funding and
are subject to government oversight, but have the flexibility to
set their own direction and differentiate their educational
offerings. Currently, National University of Singapore, Nanyang
Technological University, Singapore Management University,
Singapore University of Technology and Design and Singapore
Institute of Technology (SIT) are autonomous universities.
In 2012, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced that
the Government will add another 3,000 undergraduate places a year
by 2020, and the increase would come from expanding programmes run
by SIT and UniSIM, which would become Singapore’s fifth and sixth
universities.
SIT, which was set up by MOE to offer programmes with
overseas universities for polytechnic upgraders, became an
autonomous university in 2014, and started offering its own
government-funded degree programmes that year.
The then-UniSIM also began offering
government-subsidied full-time degree programmes that year, but it
remained a private university, as the process for restructuring it
as an autonomous university was more complicated.
Last year, an MOE spokesperson said changes to SUSS’
current governance structure would include the transfer of control
over key corporate decisions and key powers of appointment from the
SIM Governing Council to the Minister for Education (Higher
Education and Skills).
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