Overseas University Degrees Are Not Inferior To Local Ones

By Dayne

I refer to: "Private grads must go for accredited degrees: Steven Lee Ruey Khong"


You are quite wrong. Australian universities are quite alive and well, are governed by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), which is Australia’s independent national regulator of the higher education sector. TEQSA specifies a framework and standards by which higher-education schools are accredited, and it maintains a register of accredited providers — http://www.teqsa.gov.au/national-register


In addition, the quality of the certifications is governed by a separate entity, the Australian Qualifications Framework. All awards by accredited tertiary institutions must meet quality standards as set out under the TEQSA legislation — http://www.aqf.edu.au/


For overseas students, there is also the Commonwealth Register of Institutions and Courses for Overseas Students (CRICOS), which governs universities providing and accepting students from abroad. The Educational Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Act 2000 has the following objectives:


(a) provide assurance to overseas students for courses for which they have paid;

(b) protect and enhance Australia’s reputation for quality education and training services; and

(c) complement Australia’s migration laws by ensuring providers collect and report information relevant to the administration of the law relating to student visas. Under ESOS, any provider must be registered on CRICOS before they can legally accept or provide courses to overseas students- http://cricos.deewr.gov.au/


An Australian degree has a more academically rigorous and quality-assessed framework than Singapore universities, which do not have a similar framework of accreditation. The Singapore government itself doesn’t even have an accreditation system in place for its own local schools, let alone overseas universities.*


You could even say that internationally, Singapore degrees are “less” recognized than Australian ones. An overseas employer looking at an Australian degree can see a tertiary quality assurance framework which accredits the school that awarded it, but when they look at a Singaporean degree… nothing.


*The exception to these are professional degrees, e.g. medicine, engineering, law, etc, which are separately accredited by the respective professional societies. But as a general entity, the university itself has no “accreditation” as such.


This was reproduced with permission from editors of The Real Singapore.


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