But it had to choose. Now indisputably leading the field in terms of new-graduate pay, NTU received 35,000 applications for its 5,850 places this year, exceeding the 34,000 trying for one of the National University of Singapore's 6,600 places.

At the Singapore Management University, where there were 12,900 applications for its 1,485 places, 39 per cent of its A-level applicants had ABB results, or better - yet the best candidates, rightly or wrongly, generally rank NTU and NUS ahead of SMU.

Against this backdrop, the lament of one reader of this newspaper sounds credible. He wrote to The Straits Times about how the Big Three had rejected his daughter, who had ABE grades and a C in General Paper.

Besides those unsuccessful youngsters with creditable A-levels, there are also Singaporeans who top their polytechnic classes but find it well nigh impossible to get into local universities. And then there might be some who take the International Baccalaureate route who cannot make it to the Big Three either.

Their parents should not have to mortgage their houses in their old age - as the reader mentioned above, a retiree, said he was now compelled to do - just to send their children to university overseas.

What is to be done? The sudden death of UNSWAsia has put paid to the idea of a full-fledged, for-profit university meant primarily for undergraduates. A market project, it was mainly meant to make money from foreign students. Any viable solution for Singaporeans probably has to be public or non-profit.

There is still a lot to be said for funding, within budgetary constraints, of another public university. No one should contest the fact that more schooling is always better and that education is a public good. At the very least, it could be a non-profit set-up that raises its funding from tuition and fees, with the government matching, say, dollar-for-dollar or something like that. Or it could raise funds through conventional philanthropy and other means.

Such a school must be different and distinctive. It should be sold and be seen as a school of second chances without being one of lower quality. Assuming the youngsters who failed to make it into the Big Three did not flourish as well in the post-primary school system as the 23 per cent of each cohort who are admitted, it stands to reason that they are also less likely to do as well in the conventional universities, had they been admitted. This is because the Big Three are basically still cast along the same rigid disciplinary and pedagogical lines as our junior colleges.

This suggests that a different type of school that promotes student learning in a new way might bring out the best in slower starters. But how to do things differently? One model is a group of 'colleges that change lives'. This moniker comes from the title of a 1996 book by Mr Loren Pope, a former New York Times education editor, who travelled incognito to many colleges to see which were doing things differently.

He found a small group of undergraduate institutions in the US - some private stand-alones and some within larger universities - that had broken the mould when it came to structuring quality programmes for their students.

Among the 40 he found was New College of Florida, founded in 1960 and now an independent member of the State University of Florida system. Ranked top among public colleges in the US this year by US News and World Report and judged by The Princeton Review as giving the best value in public higher education in 2007, it has produced 20 Fulbright fellows in the past decade. Last year, The Wall Street Journal ranked it the second-best public school for sending its graduates to the best law, medical and other post-graduate schools.

This school dispenses with the credit-hour system as a measure of the amount of learning. Instead, the emphasis is on independent study: Each term, the student develops a contract with a professor about what he will study within specific disciplines. To graduate, he completes seven contracts and three independent study projects, plus a lengthy and original thesis.

New College also abstains from letter grades and grade point averages to gauge the quality of learning. Instead, along with satisfactory/ unsatisfactory/incomplete designations, 'narrative evaluations' are used, which consist of several paragraphs of text written by the instructor as a detailed critique of the student's individual performance and course work quality at the end of the semester.

The idea is that evaluations should be really informative and useful as feedback and, with no reward or punishment (there being no anxiety about the 'grade' at the end of the semester), there is no tension between student and teacher - or adverse competition among students. There are no multiple-choice tests and no need to pull all-nighters to cram for exams. Some 17 US schools, including the University of California at Santa Cruz, now use some form of narrative evaluation.

With under 1,000 students, the average student-to-faculty ratio at New College is about 10 to 1, which makes for small, intense classes. With so much close interaction and a discussion-based pedagogical approach, the alternative academic culture of engagement fosters learning for its own sake and allows students to develop a genuine interest in the subject matter.

All New College programmes, processes and structures enable students to assume responsibility for their own education, explore deeply those areas in which they are interested, and come to appreciate their own progress based on a demonstrated mastery of subject matter rather than credits and grades.

At New College, academic excellence, scholarship and research are valued above all else. At other innovative schools, the focus may be different. For example, Antioch College in Ohio emphasises social justice and social action, while Clark University in Massachusetts emphasises 'actively working through real problems, issues and questions, mastering modes of inquiry, and acquiring the knowledge base required to ask and to answer important questions'.

Will graduates of such programmes be as employable as those from NTU, say?

A large survey this year showed that 56 per cent of US employers preferred workers who went to undergraduate programmes that build well- rounded knowledge and skills; two-thirds of employers strongly disagreed that programmes should focus 'primarily on providing knowledge and skills in a specific field'.

With a premium on creativity and innovation in the post- industrial economy, employers said they wanted to see undergraduate programmes emphasise broad learning, transferable higher-level intellectual skills such as critical thinking and analytical reasoning, written and oral communication skills and the ability to apply knowledge to unscripted complex problems in the real world.

Maybe we can build a fourth university of second chances with innovative programmes to produce graduates with all these qualities, and more.

Actually, it may already have become a necessity and it could even attract those who excel academically by conventional standards: Another ST reader wrote in about his son with four As - in mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology, as well as distinctions in two S papers and a B4 in GP - who could not get into the pharmacy course at NUS.

If this is our brave new world, we had better come up with a quick solution for young citizens with unquestionably legitimate educational aspirations.

andyho@sph.com

REALITY BITES

With a premium on creativity and innovation in the post-industrial economy, employers...want to see undergraduate programmes emphasise broad learning...and the ability to apply knowledge to unscripted complex problems in the real world.