academic sorting - a Singaporean experiment
a brief overview of the Singaporean education system and downstream effects
The recent discourse bemoans how universities don’t select for IQ and how public schools do not separate by ability, and the solution is often more selective schools or homeschooling.
I grew up in Singapore, where kids are separated into different levels of a subject at the end of fourth grade, called Foundational or Standard (sorting happened in third grade when I was younger, and the kids who do the worst on tests end up in one classroom, and every class has a different tier). This does accelerate learning, but also leads to intense stress for parents since sorting is based on tests, and not many kids are willing to study at such a young age. The solution seems to be stress the kids to study and send them to after-school tutoring. Parents routinely would tie monetary or non-monetary rewards to how well the child does at school.
This sorting system pushes the best kids to perform very well but creates a very different society compared to America.
The Singaporean System
Compulsory education is only 6 years long, but sorting occurs across the 12 years of education if one stays in the system. As part of the Commonwealth, Singapore adopted the British education system with O-Levels and A-Levels. All the tests themselves are Singapore-produced, and the difficulty levels are much higher (one of my engineering friends said that math classes in the first two years of university was pure review; she had went to a top junior college).
At age twelve, the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) sorts students into three distinct tracks: Normal (Technical), Normal (Academic), and Express. The PSLE is graded on a distribution, and about the 90% of students enter the Express track.
Each track leads to different secondary schools with varying curricula and expectations. Students in the Normal tracks attend four to five years of secondary education before taking N-Level examinations, while Express students complete four years before O-Levels. Most of the students in the Normal track enter trade school (Institute of Technical Education), while the best scorers have the option of sitting for O-Levels the next year.
Students in the Express track could apply for Direct School Admission (DSA) to a subset of schools (Specialized Independent Schools), and some of these allow one to bypass the O-Levels and directly sit for A-Levels at the end of 6 years.
O-Levels determines whether a student can attend junior college to eventually attend university or polytechnic/vocational school (some percentage also end up at trade school or arts school, depending on their scores and interests, but most go to junior college or polytechnic). The type of subjects that you took during O-Levels and the score you received also determine the ranking of the polytechnic (and the subject matter) and the junior college that you could attend.
The year before these tests was a year of sleep-deprivation and stress for most students. The curriculum taught towards the test, but the sheer breadth and depth of the subjects required concentrated study.
Polytechnic was three years long and typically taught courses in operations, nursing, accounting, etc. Graduates from polytechnics could choose to attend university, but they would be one year later than those who went to junior college, and their poly subject determines which subject they could study in university. Poly graduates are typically between 19-20, and most enter the workforce directly.
Junior college is two years long, with a test called A-Levels at the end. These again often have subjects that are separated into two difficulty levels, and your score determines whether you get admitted into university, while low performers would go to polytechnic.
Through this process of sorting, only ~40% of the population ended up at an university (below 30% fifteen years ago). Compare this to ~60% of Americans have attended some level of college.
Cultural Impacts
As the average citizen, all this sorting and emphasis on academics leads to a sense of inferiority if you didn’t do well at school. Blue-collar workers1 are generally viewed as less smart than white-collar workers, even though they may not be so.
The government also has a scholarship called the President’s Scholarship, awarded to top performers at the end of high school. This is the highest honor for a Singaporean citizen, and recipients typically ended up working at important positions in the civil service, and perhaps even a Member of Parliament for the People’s Action Party (PAP), who have not lost power since Singapore’s independence. There are a handful of other scholarships awarded to top performers as well, and they all enter civil service after university. Until recently, over 60% of these scholarships went to graduates from two junior colleges.
A common view among Singaporeans is that the government employees figuring out the national budget, setting policies, etc. are all smarter than you when you were both in school, so you should listen to them because they’re smarter and have thought about it a lot more.
So there’s relatively low pushback against stringent rules during COVID, large defamation lawsuits against opposition parties, or policy changes in general. People tend to listen to what the government tells them to do. Many Singaporeans will praise the government for taking care of them, for building infrastructure, for keeping the apartments maintained, etc.
For example, COVID vaccination rates were >90% in Singapore because the government told everyone to do it. The government put huge pressure to vaccination, such as banning unvaccinated individuals from eating in food courts or entering stores, and there were no big protests or public backlash (imagine doing this in America!).
People also trust Temasek, a government-owned investment fund, to manage the mandatory retirement saving accounts called CPF. Close to 40% of an employee’s salary goes to this! Social Security taxes are only 12.4% by comparison; if you factor in 401(k) contributions etc., the American savings rate is only around 25%.
But the government is also pretty competent. It’s a minor inconvenience to travel an hour to the city center to drop off or pick up documents, but nobody talks about it like how Americans dread the DMV (or the IRS for that matter). Government policies typically make sense; Singapore does not have a minimum wage or rent control. Taxes are fairly low and simple to file. Variable congestion pricing exists on major expressways.
Public transportation works; one can go from one end of Singapore to the other end within 90 minutes on public transit. Your fare is calculated based on your route and how many transfers you made.
But the government still puts its finger on the scale at times. To reduce congestion, Singapore has a quota on new license plate issues, and buyers have to bid for them. A license plate could go for more than $10k SGD (~$7800 USD). They also limit what you could do with a HDB (Housing and Development Board) apartment in a prime location to curtail buy-to-rent owners. But they will not, for example, allocate a certain number of apartments to people who earn under a certain amount (they do have racial quotas that are representative of the general population percentages to prevent segregation). The government will pay you between $11k and $13k ($8600 to $10k USD) for each child, and an additional $4000 to $15k ($3100 to $11.7k USD) in government-matched saving accounts for the child. The birth rate is still pretty low; it remains unclear what is the counterfactual birth rate. Most of my friends say that they do not want kids because they were extremely stressed as kids and their parents were stressed too, and that seems like a bad life. You could argue that low birth rate is an unintended consequence of the stressful education system.
There’s no silver bullet, only tradeoffs. Singapore went all the way on academic sorting: citizens are far more pliable, the government is more competent, fiscal and monetary policies make sense. But it lacks the dynamism of America, the highest valued startups are located elsewhere, and the government frets over the fertility rate.
The cost of their services are typically lower than in the West too, but this is likely due to some combination of lax immigration policy and educational sorting.