Why did my polytechnic diploma disappear?

In 1973, when the mobile phone was not yet a thing and computers were still rare and blocky curiosities, Mr Lee Voon Phaw decided to study to become an electrical engineer at Ngee Ann Technical College, the predecessor of Ngee Ann Polytechnic.

Today, his diploma programme no longer exists, a relic of an earlier time in Singapore’s industrial development, when engineers were kings of the job market.

Mr Lee, now 70, is one of seven polytechnic graduates The Straits Times spoke to who went through polytechnic diploma programmes that have since been discontinued.

These courses – spanning applied drama, informatics, digital media design, outdoor and adventure learning, and more – trained Singapore’s first wave of theatre educators, semiconductor makers and IT workers.

Each programme’s rise and fall trace the path of an industry, from the birth, peak and decline of Singapore’s video game sector to how white-collar work has gradually displaced blue-collar jobs in Singapore.

When Mr Lee and his wife, Ms Connie Lim, also 70, started pursuing their diplomas, their school was not yet a polytechnic. In 1973, they were the new kids on the block at Ngee Ann Technical College, which was renamed Ngee Ann Polytechnic in 1982.

Mr Lee’s diploma in electrical and electronic engineering was later reconstituted into a more specialised programme in 1981. In contrast, Ms Lim’s business studies programme, which started accepting students in 1969, has the rare distinction of being one of the country’s longest-running diploma programmes.

How did they pick their courses? “Back in 1973, the most important consideration was bread and butter. We did not consider our own interests,” says Mr Lee, who attended secondary school in Sarawak. “Engineering meant good opportunities, so I did engineering. The arts were not an option.”

The salary differentials of his era enforced such thinking.

Ms Lim recalls that electrical engineering graduates could expect starting wages as much as double or triple those of business graduates, which perhaps explains why engineering occupied a central space in parental expectations for their children's careers for decades.

“You think highly of this institution because not many people get in,” says Mr Lee, a Borneo-born Malaysian Chinese who moved to Singapore to study at Ngee Ann College.

“At the time, there were only five higher learning institutes: two universities, two polytechnics and one Institute of Technical Education (ITE). To get into any one of them was a dream for us.”

Ms Lim says: “Getting into university was very tough." Only the top 5 per cent of students could get into local universities in those days, she adds – and only the moneyed upper classes could afford to send their kids abroad.

These pressures also meant that school life was very different from how it is today.

Ms Lim recalls often queueing up at 8am to get into the campus library, lest it run out of seats, and leaving only past 8pm. Her friendships were forged in the fires of a curriculum with a far greater emphasis on book learning and high-pressure examinations.

Flunking out was not unusual. The couple recall around a fifth of their cohort dropping out each semester.

The student body was also very different. Ms Lim, who came from Nanhua Secondary School, at the time a girls’ school, says it was a culture shock to come to a mixed-gender environment with different nationalities from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds.

And the industries they were training to become part of were still in their infancy.

Mr Lee recalls choosing to specialise in electrical engineering over electronics engineering in his third year, as it seemed the more sensible choice.

Electrical engineering focuses on power distribution such as generators and transmission lines, while electronics engineering focuses on lower-power circuits like computers and chips.

"I thought electrical engineering would be better for getting a job."

Walking through the Ngee Ann campus today, the couple marvel at air-conditioned classrooms, swimming pools and sports complexes, luxuries unimaginable in their time. But the greatest change, they say, is how working life has evolved.

After graduating, Ms Lim climbed the ranks from bookkeeper to accounts manager to finance director in a multinational consumer goods firm. She spent 24 years at her last company before retiring.

Mr Lee, too, spent 40 years going from factory engineer to Asia-Pacific vice-president of Danish multinational engineering firm Danfoss, where he spent over two decades.

He recalls the tight labour market where companies would stipulate a one-year termination clause in their contracts. “If I resigned, I had to give a year’s notice. You were tied down. At the time, stability was there. Companies were scared you’d run away,” he says.

“In 1976, the economy had a lot of investment. There were a lot of opportunities,” he adds. “You could get a job without much difficulty because of our practical learning from polytechnic. It’s a completely different environment from what we have now.”

The annual unemployment rate for Singapore residents aged under 30 was 5.4 per cent in 2024.

The dilemma Mr Lee faced – electrical or electronic – became markedly different two decades later.

By 1992, when Ghim Moh Secondary School graduate Larry Liow enrolled in Singapore Polytechnic, consumer electronics like dial-up modems and game consoles had become increasingly commonplace, and the semiconductor industry was booming.

His course, which led to a diploma in electronics and communications engineering, ceased accepting students by 1994, and was rebranded to electronics, computer and communication engineering that same year.

“Thirty years ago, we didn’t have mobile phones. We had only pagers,” recalls Mr Liow, who is now 53. “When I was young, I was playing with remote-controlled cars. Nowadays, kids probably play with drones or mobile phones.”

What sparked his interest were the many job vacancies in the classifieds pages of The Straits Times. “Back then, we didn’t have job portals. If we bought The Straits Times, especially on the weekend, you could see a whole stack of jobs related to semiconductors. That triggered me to take up this diploma.”

It wound up being a prescient move, as semiconductors have grown in importance since the 1990s, becoming an essential part of everyday electronics and, now, artificial intelligence.

The industry-driven nature of the polytechnic curriculum was a key strength in this regard. Mr Liow recalls how a module that gave students hands-on experience with using semiconductor testing equipment led to him securing a job at his current company, Advantest, a Japanese manufacturer of semiconductor test equipment where he has been working since 1995.

“Today, students get the same experience I had 30 years ago,” he says, noting that his company is one of many which sponsor laboratories and equipment at local polytechnics, to later recruit talent from these schools.

“They get access to the latest test equipment. When they do all the practical lessons, it’s very much what the industry is doing today. It won’t be their first time seeing equipment when they start working.”

This symbiotic relationship is core to how the polytechnic system functions, he adds, noting that curricula are often designed with feedback from industry partners and lecturers who are themselves former industry practitioners.

By the 1990s, engineers could no longer lay claim to being lords of the starting salary among polytechnic graduates. They were facing competition from a rising number of information technology-focused courses.

Indian national Ajish Morris, 48, was part of the first batch of students at Nanyang Polytechnic’s diploma programme in engineering informatics in 1997, a course that blended engineering with IT. His decision to move to Singapore for the course came after spotting a newspaper advertisement for it in Kerala.

Mr Morris wound up working in project and IT management in the airline industry for nearly two decades, in a career spanning Singapore Airlines, Jetstar and Scoot. He is now a senior strategy manager at payment processing firm Worldpay.

Back then, however, he spent his first six months as a student at the then-fledgling Nanyang Polytechnic’s satellite Jurong campus, as its main premises in Ang Mo Kio were still being constructed.

Unlike the two polytechnics that had come before it, Nanyang’s campus, established in 1992 as Singapore’s fourth polytechnic, consisted of fully integrated and connecting blocks – a design that would be taken one step further by Republic Polytechnic with its fully indoor campus in 2007.

“Things were changing in the engineering sector. There were more applications of IT coming in, pretty much like how we see AI everywhere now. In 1997, everything was about programming, chips and so on,” he says.

“The industry, the authorities, the education ministry, they all thought that this was going to be the next big thing – and they were right.”

The 1990s onwards saw a growing number of hybrid courses where IT was taught alongside coursework in engineering, business or the built environment. Nanyang Polytechnic was carving out a niche in just this area.

“Eventually, the whole of engineering became an IT discipline. Today, it’s no longer possible to split engineering from engineering informatics,” Mr Morris notes. He suspects this is why his course is no longer taught today.

“Being from the first batch, I always felt like they didn’t know what they were doing. Because they were trying something new, they didn’t know how this animal was going to shape working life,” he says.

This meant a chaotic curriculum learning a slew of programming concepts from C to C++ to Java, without knowing how it might be used in the workplace.

In the end, Mr Morris recalls most graduates from his course opting for jobs in IT rather than engineering – a reflection of Singapore’s changing economic landscape and the shift from blue-collar work in dusty workshops and factories to white-collar jobs in air-conditioned offices.

In 1980, just 11.5 per cent of Singapore’s 1,068,932 workers were professional, technical, administrative and managerial workers, while 38.9 per cent were production and related workers, such as transport equipment operators and labourers.

By 1990, the former figure had risen to 26.9 per cent, while the latter had fallen to just 28 per cent.

In 2024, the year from which the latest figures are available, 63.7 per cent of Singapore’s employed residents are professional, technical, administrative and managerial workers, while just 12.4 per cent are plant and machine operators or cleaners and labourers.

“You have a glamorous lifestyle in mind, picking IT over engineering,” Mr Morris says. “There was nobody who couldn’t get an IT job back then. There were too many openings and we just didn't have enough graduates.”

This made for a vastly different working environment from today’s highly competitive rat race, he adds.

As he entered the workforce, Mr Morris recalls that training and induction programmes were commonplace, and it was fine to enter an industry completely green, both due to the shortage of talent and the uncertainty over how technology would reshape the workforce.

As tech became increasingly embedded in everyday life, the 1990s and 2000s saw a redefinition of what polytechnics were training students to do, with a new wave of programmes focused on Singapore’s emerging creative and media industries.

Mr Alvin Hoo, 46, was one of the pioneer batch of 40 students to study at Nanyang Polytechnic’s diploma in digital media design in 1996. He was so ahead of his time that the industry for his chosen career had not yet materialised.

In the early years, its curriculum was taught by instructors from Sheridan College, a Canada-based polytechnic whose graduates have become key figures at animation giants Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar and DreamWorks.

“At that point, we were kind of special because we were the batch that were trained by Disney animators,” he recalls.

He has fond memories of working on the MS-DOS, an early predecessor to the Windows computer, even travelling to France to represent Nanyang Polytechnic at a games showcase at age 19. But his immediate post-graduation years from 1999 to 2003 were grim.

Without video game companies in Singapore, Mr Hoo wound up working in an edutainment firm developing simulations for the Singapore military until 2003.

That year, he was recruited by the Economic Development Board (EDB) as part of a cohort of Singaporeans sent abroad to work with foreign gaming companies. Mr Hoo spent a year and a half working in Yokohama with Japanese video game firm Koei Tecmo.

After that, he returned to Singapore to establish Koei Tecmo’s Singapore outpost, working there for the next decade. His video game development credits include Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce, Nobunaga’s Ambition 10 and Romance Of The Three Kingdoms 12.

The attachment and training programme was part of a job creation strategy employed by EDB to bring in foreign gaming and visual effects studios, which it did – such as Ubisoft, Lucasfilm and Koei Tecmo – during the 2000s.

In 2008, Nanyang Polytechnic’s digital media design programme took in its last cohort of students before it rebranded as digital game art and design from 2009 to 2022.

Today, just two of Nanyang Polytechnic’s courses teach game design and animation: the diploma in animation, games and visual effects, and the diploma in game development and technology. Mr Hoo currently teaches both programmes.

While the 2000s saw the rise of Singapore’s burgeoning video game industry, the late 2010s and early 2020s ushered in a period of decline, amid the high-profile closures of the Singapore branches of visual effects studio Double Negative in 2016 and Lucasfilm in 2023.

At its peak, before 2020, Nanyang Polytechnic had 13 distinct courses focused on subsets of animation, visual effects and media design. Most of these courses have since been merged or renamed. Mr Hoo acknowledges that such streamlining is necessary, as too many graduates would otherwise become over-specialised in roles that no longer exist in the job market.

For much of the history of polytechnics, the student body was male-dominated. In 1993, there were 23,264 male students across all the polytechnics, compared with just 15,534 female students, a 1:0.66 ratio that has closed in recent years.

Ms Phyllis Tan represents this change. When she enrolled in her diploma in applied drama and psychology at Singapore Polytechnic in 2014, there were 39,407 female students to 44,893 male ones.

After a brief stint in junior college, she knew she wanted something more aligned with her interest in theatre, cultivated since her secondary school years.

The applied drama programme had drawn many instructors from local theatre groups she had rubbed shoulders with as a teen working in local productions.

“Since the time I matriculated until now, I don't think there is any other course in Singapore that has specifically focused on applied drama,” she says. Unlike mainstream theatre, applied drama uses performance as a means of community engagement through interactive workshops or role-playing.

“We were working with very vulnerable communities,” says Ms Tan, now 27, who recalls working with sex workers, juvenile delinquents and teen mothers as part of her school projects and internships.

“We provide a platform to empower them. We re-enact scenes, we give them alternatives,” she says. “Let's say you're in this situation, what can a bystander do for you? What can people in your shoes do? We talk about it in a very open manner.”

The applied drama programme ceased accepting new students in 2021, after which it – along with many other media- and design-oriented courses – was consolidated into a more general media, arts and design programme at Singapore Polytechnic.

Such streamlining is the name of the game across the polytechnics, which have increasingly implemented common curricula across diploma programmes (which students must take in their first years) since the late 2010s while consolidating diplomas.

Ms Tan believes that this evolution stemmed from the programme’s lack of clear graduate outcomes.

“Let's say you study accountancy. It’s clear you become an accountant,” she says. “For us, the industries we could go into were very vague. We would tell one another that this was a generic diploma and you'd need to upgrade yourself further, likely with a degree.”

Ms Tan went on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in psychology at NTU, and says that most of her peers pursued further studies as well. She now works as an emcee, drama educator and radio host.

Still, she looks back fondly on her time in polytechnic. “The ability to engage and connect, make people feel comfortable, that's something we learnt. That's one thing I'm definitely still using as a host.”

Likewise, the building diploma that Dr Eugene Seah signed up for at Singapore Polytechnic is no more. That programme ceased taking in new students in 1993, and he was among the last batch of students to graduate in 1995.

Looking back, he believes there has been something lost to the march of time.

Dr Seah, 50, comes from three generations of quantity surveyors. His late grandfather Seah Mong Hee was the world’s first Asian chartered quantity surveyor, receiving his qualification from the London Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Quantity surveyors act as cost consultants in construction.

Having visited construction sites from as young as eight years old, when Shaw Lido cinema and MRT stations were being built, Dr Seah, an old boy of St Andrew’s Secondary School, says he was destined to become the third generation of quantity surveyors.

He recalls: “I remember telling myself to keep an open mind. I went to a JC open house for one day and thought, oh, no way. They still had to wear school uniforms!”

Dr Seah is not alone in experiencing such stigma. Six of the seven polytechnic graduates who spoke to ST recalled discouragement or doubt from parents over their decision to take the polytechnic route rather than go to junior college.

As a student in 1993, this was the era of overhead projectors and doing maths by hand on whiteboards. PowerPoint presentations were still a novel concept. For quantity surveyors, this meant using drafting tables instead of computers.

Construction today is a different world, says Dr Seah, and so is learning to become part of that industry.

“I think it’s very unhealthy now, how we bid for fees,” he adds. As jobs go to the lowest bidder, wages in building and construction have not kept pace with the salary growth in other sectors. “Our starting salary is not as good as those of architects, accountants or lawyers.”

There is also a culture of overwork among quantity surveyors, who often act as the last line of oversight on projects and work punishingly long hours.

While construction has long been one of Singapore’s key sectors, the make-up of its labour force has changed drastically over time. The majority of workers are now foreigners, with quantity surveyors often coming from Malaysia and the Philippines, Dr Seah notes.

This means the polytechnic lecturers who once taught aspiring quantity surveyors now teach similar topics to those studying facilities management.

The biggest change to the polytechnic system came in 2002, when Republic Polytechnic was established as the country’s fifth and youngest polytechnic, with a markedly different approach to learning.

From the get-go, the school sought to differentiate itself from its peers by introducing “problem-based learning”.

Mr Sasi Kumar, who enrolled in Republic Polytechnic in 2007, recalls this premise being very contentious, even though it appealed to him as a hands-on learner.

Now 36, he was part of the first batch of students in the diploma programme in outdoor and adventure learning in 2007, which was later rebranded to an outdoor education programme in 2025.

“When you came into class, they gave you a problem and you had to solve it. It was exciting because it was like a new learning journey. It felt like a game, where the entire day, you were out there researching.

“When I was in school before, we did research, but we had no connection to it. You were just doing research to support your claims, but here, it became more of how you really wanted to solve that problem.”

Mr Kumar recalls much frustration over the existence of “model answers” that students’ work was then judged against. “There were days when we would joke: ‘Why can’t they just give that to us?’” he recalls. “But it meant we weren’t just learning from frameworks any more. We were also learning from real-world approaches.”

This problem-based learning approach drew much public criticism, as well as concern from students on whether it would make them less eligible for university entry.

But, in Mr Kumar’s view, what has vindicated the approach is how the other polytechnics have since embraced aspects of problem-based learning. These days, Republic Polytechnic is not the only school handing out problem statements.

While the other polytechnics have historically had a different focus, with Singapore Polytechnic and Ngee Ann Polytechnic being hubs for engineers, and Nanyang Polytechnic having a stronger tech focus, Republic Polytechnic’s initial course offerings focused on plugging manpower gaps in Singapore’s healthcare, tourism and food and beverage sectors. It did so by offering programmes on nursing, hospitality management and culinary operations.

The idea of a polytechnic in Singapore, first raised in 1951 when the country was still a colony, has always been rooted in training the manpower necessary for the nation’s industrial needs – with the state and local industry playing a big role in shaping what that means.

The 1980s’ shift towards higher-value jobs meant that polytechnics began introducing courses on biotechnology, information technology and healthcare. The 2000s saw the rise of courses made to address specific manpower gaps in sustainability, tourism and other emerging sectors.

Polytechnic leaders tell ST that a key part of how the schools keep abreast of industry trends is through engaging with local companies as part of students’ internships and final-year projects.

Mr Soh Lai Seng, senior director of Republic Polytechnic, says that more than 10 per cent of his school’s academic staff also work in their respective industries each year to gain “first-hand insights into any industry developments and practices”. He adds that the school has launched diplomas, such as its diploma in supply chain management, in anticipation of specific manpower needs.

By Mr Kumar’s time, the stigma towards polytechnic education had receded, with many opting for this pathway as a longer route to university rather than an endpoint to their studies.

During 2024’s post-secondary joint admissions exercise, a majority of the 19,200 candidates went to polytechnics (52 per cent), while 39 per cent went to junior colleges and the Millennia Institute.

Nearly half (49 per cent) of those taking the polytechnic route were also eligible for junior college, which marks an increase from 40 per cent in 2014.

“I would be a lot more mature for my degree programme, and I would have some level of work experience,” says Mr Kumar.

That final-year internship paid off because he wound up securing a job at corporate training group Focus Adventure for over a decade while pursuing a part-time degree in business administration.

For couple Mr Lee Voon Phaw and Ms Connie Lim, who fell in love while they were in polytechnic, the changing image of vocational education in Singapore society has been fascinating to see.

Both their daughters went to junior college. And for their grandkids, the oldest of whom is aged 10, Mr Lee says: “Many bright students go to polytechnic. If they choose that, we will support them.”

With each subsequent decade since the couple were in school, parental expectations have shifted. The idea that polytechnic is the consolation prize for those who could not make the cut for junior college has faded.

“We won’t predetermine where our grandchildren will go,” adds Mr Lee. “They’ll find their own way and we’ll support them.”