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In April, a university-bound young man blogged about how he is likely to turn down a scholarship from a Singapore statutory board.
His reason? One of the officers who took him on a tour of the agency's premises was an 'extremely ugly female'.
He launched into describing his unfortunate victim's looks, relishing in his opinions about her face, the shape of her head and her teeth.
'I guess it would be more than compelling to reject the scholarship because of such a scary potential colleague in future,' he declared.
His entry was picked up by popular blog aggregator Tomorrow.sg and infuriated many who read it.
Such callousness would have been bad enough coming from anyone. But the youth's remarks left many outraged not only because he was a product of a top junior college, but especially because he was a student from China and apparently on course to receiving a Singapore government scholarship to university.
It set off a bout of foreigner-bashing online, resurfacing familiar complaints about foreign students who not only take up places in Singapore universities but also receive scholarships and bursaries.
Some angry readers wrote to the statutory board concerned to draw its attention to the blog.
Shop manager R. Anand, 46, who read the blog, could not help agreeing with some of the respondents that the Government was giving too many university places to foreigners and at a subsidised rate at that. The father of two worries that when it is time for his older son to go to university, he will not get a place.
'Right now, one in five places goes to foreigners. That's too high, considering that more Singaporeans now want to go to university and a local university is all they can afford,' he said.
Bar set higher
The issue of Singapore university places for foreigners has surfaced repeatedly in recent years, given the surge in applications to the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Management University (SMU).
Applications from local students rose from 53,853 last year to 58,606 this year.
The three universities have a total of 14,700 places, and up to a fifth - 2,940 - will go to foreign applicants. This year saw 22,140 applications from foreign students, a slight dip from last year.
The Singaporeans' beef is this: Why are so many places being given to foreigners when there are not enough for local students?
Despite the Government's move to raise fees for foreign students this year - they will pay 50 per cent more than local students, compared to just 10 per cent more previously - it still rankles with many parents that foreigners pay only about 50 per cent of the full cost of their university education here.
The rest is subsidised by the Singapore Government. The fees paid by local students are subsidised by more than 70 per cent.
Parents who have sent their children to universities overseas point out that foreign student fees - which average $9,540 at NUS and NTU and $13,700 for most courses at SMU - are a bargain compared to what foreign students have to pay in countries such as Britain and Australia.
Australia, for example, charges foreigners the full cost of their university education - between $20,000 and $30,000 a year.
The Government has placed a cap on foreigners enrolling in Singapore universities, limiting them to 20 per cent of the total intake.
In practice, the universities say they admit fewer foreign students to courses which see strong demand from Singaporeans.
Courses that are less popular with local students get more foreigners. That explains why, if you step into the lecture halls for less popular engineering or computing courses, you will see a sea of foreign faces. They can form up to half of those faculties.
In total, there are about 10,000 foreigners enrolled as undergraduates at the three universities.
The universities and the Education Ministry maintain that foreign students are good for Singapore's universities - they spur local students on and add a diversity of views and cultures to the university experience.
What is less known is that the admission bar is set higher for foreigners.
Last year, only 18 per cent of the 22,900 foreign applicants were offered a place, whereas 51 per cent of local applicants were successful. Eventually, under 3,000 foreigners took up the offer.
NUS' vice-provost (education) Tan Thiam Soon said that when accepting foreign students with international A-level qualifications, he demands no less than four As.
He recalled how a Brunei mother demanded to know why her son's perfect score of three As was not good enough for NUS. He had to reply that he could not accept her son because there were several other foreign students with four As.
He said that NUS takes to heart the Education Ministry's policy to draw talent, not just students.
'We look for foreign talent who will contribute to NUS and Singapore,' he said.
In fact, all three universities study the list of prize-winners at international competitionsand go all out to woo them.
Admissions officials also make their rounds of top-ranking high schools in countries such as India, China and Vietnam to introduce their institutions and get within the 'students' radar'.
Some of these schools have turned down the requests to visit, saying plainly that their students would not be interested in Singapore because they are being wooed by the likes of universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
Still, the universities have managed to get through the door and woo a few of these promising young people over the years.
Among the talents that NUS has managed to draw are Tu Ngoc Ly Lan, 20, a Vietnamese gold medallist at an international chemistry olympiad who was persuaded to study science here, and Wang Yi Chao, 19, a China national who has won medals at international mathematics and physics olympiads, and is now studying electrical engineering.
'If you have an 18-year-old who beat everyone else in the world in physics, wouldn't you rather he comes to Singapore?' asks Prof Tan.
His remarks echo what Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said a few years ago. Acknowledging that opening our doors to foreign students would mean more competition for Singaporeans, Mr Lee said keeping out such talent would be more detrimental in the long run.
'Suppose we did not have them here...has the competition really disappeared or has the talent just gone to another country, where they will compete more strongly against us?' he asked at a student forum.
University dons point out that even a country like the United States, with a large talent pool of citizens, recognises that foreign students are critical to it remaining a technological powerhouse.
According to a 2004 study by economist Keith Maskus at the University of Colorado, for every 100 international students who receive science or engineering PhDs from American universities, the US gains 62 future patent applications.
While there have been no studies tracking the careers of foreign students here, university officials who head entrepreneurship programmes here say it is more often the foreign students who are raring to start businesses.
At NUS, half of the students who apply for an overseas college programme that nurtures entrepreneurs are foreign students.
Quite a few have returned to launch start-ups. Among them is tenCube, founded by three NUS graduates and already showing promise of taking off.
Imported stress?
But what about the average foreign student - does he or she really raise the bar for everyone else?
The universities say they do not have official figures to compare the academic performance of foreign students to local students, but dons say that, typically, the foreigners outshine locals.
It is evident in the classrooms. Foreign students, who are away from home, have fewer distractions and are hungry to seize the opportunities here. They are likely to have done more than the required reading and are often the first with the answers.
But this of course leads to local students complaining about imported stress and competition.
NTU student Raymond Lim, 24, admits he is annoyed by the way the foreigners in his class are always on top of their work.
But he also admits that they have pushed him to work harder.
'I want to graduate with good grades as well, so I buckled down to work,' he said.
'When I was revising, I approached a China student whom we call a 'genius maths machine' and he was kind enough to help.'
But not everyone comes round to rationalising their initial resentment, and this is evident in the outpourings by local undergraduates in the blogosphere.
They complain that foreign students mix only among themselves and hog study halls and library books.
Foreigners interviewed insist that they are simply here to get a quality education and hopefully make friends in cosmopolitan Singapore.
Some admit that they chose to study here because Singapore is cheaper than the US or Britain. Their parents also preferred Singapore as it is closer to home and culturally familiar.
Seven of the dozen interviewed said they have had their share of unpleasant brushes with locals.
A China national at NTU said: 'When I try and answer a question in class, I always hear my classmates giggling at the back.'
Of those interviewed, half said unpleasant experiences make it unlikely that they will stay in Singapore beyond the three-year bond period. The other half expected to stay on because, as one of them put it: 'Singapore is full of opportunities.'
In fact, more are likely to remain in Singapore well after completing their bond.
The Education Ministry says two out of three foreign students stay on to work in Singapore for 10 years or more.
SMU business graduate Kaushal Dugar, 25, is likely to be among those who stay.
Mr Dugar, who is from Siliguri in northern India, is now working in one of the Big Four auditing firms here.
He said that besides his career, he has made good friends and is about to start a charity to make school textbooks available to poor children overseas.
He thinks he is on his way to becoming 'Singaporeanised' as well.
'I try very hard not to slip into Singlish, but the 'lahs' are creeping in,' he said.
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