LUKE LU (Nanyang Technological University) analyses conversations among top-performing students from Raffles Institution, using linguistic ethnography to understand their aspirations, attitudes towards state scholarships, and their sense of identity in relation to Singapore and their peers. Lu’s book on this subject has just been released.
In public discourse, a common caricature of the modern transnational elite almost invariably conjures someone who is a hyper-mobile, deterritorialised global nomad. This is the privileged cosmopolitan who glides seamlessly through airport business lounges, holds multiple visas, accumulates degrees from Ivy League or Oxbridge institutions, and floats comfortably unmoored from any single nation-state. In the words of Zygmunt Bauman, these high-flyers are often portrayed as individuals who “harbour no appetite for the burdens of long-term communal obligations”. They are, as the educational sociologists Jane Kenway and Aaron Koh once described, a kind of modern “nobility without a state”.
On paper, the students I taught for half a decade at Raffles Institution – Singapore’s oldest, and arguably most prestigious secondary school – would seem to fit this bill perfectly. Consider Ming, a student who first arrived in Singapore when she was 15 years old. Born and raised in an urban metropolis in China, Ming was scouted on a Singapore government scholarship that covered every expense: tuition, boarding, living stipends, and flights. By 19, she had mastered English, sailed through rigorous national examinations with top honours, and was weighing admission offers from top-ranked universities in the UK and US. By 25, armed with a postgraduate degree in finance, she was working as a financial analyst on Wall Street. Her passport remained Chinese, but her lived reality spanned Shenzhen, Singapore, London, and New York. She seemed to embody the frictionless neoliberal ideal as an agile economic agent equipped with the global currency of top academic credentials.
Yet, Ming’s story, like those of her Singaporean and immigrant peers, contains a certain dissonance. Far from being footloose cosmopolitans gliding effortlessly above local constraints, these young high-flyers are intensely, and often anxiously, bound to the territorial, political, and cultural machinery of the nation-state. In my new book, Language and Identity among elite students: Grounded High Flyers in Singapore, I examine how these top-performing students talk about their trajectories, scholarships, their peers, and use of language; and in so doing, uncover the hidden fissures, racial contradictions, and cultural anxieties that underpin modern Singapore.
Meritocracy as measurement of self-worth
One aspect to understanding Singapore is through its devotion to the ideology of meritocracy. For a tiny island state that gained sudden independence in 1965, economic survival became the supreme national imperative under the leadership of the People’s Action Party (PAP). The state erected an efficient, hyper-competitive education system designed to identify, sort, and refine human capital.
At the symbolic and structural pinnacle of this sorting machine stands Raffles Institution. It is a national institution that has educated prime ministers, Supreme Court judges, and the senior ranks of the civil service. Admission is ostensibly open to anyone purely on academic performance, determined at age twelve by a high-stakes national assessment called the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE).
As my ethnographic research reveals, this relentless meritocratic framing creates an institutional ethos in Raffles where academic brilliance is taken for granted as an innate individual attribute. The school’s corridors are lined with plaques commemorating scholarship winners and portraits of cabinet ministers, highlighting the biographies of an illustrious list of alumni who were all once students roaming the same classrooms.
Such hothousing normalises a singular, rigid vision of success. In my interviews with graduates from Raffles, whether Singaporean-born or immigrant, there was a striking consensus regarding their post-secondary aspirations. One either attended a top-tier university in the UK or the US (preferably the Russell Group or the Ivy League), or one remained in Singapore to read Medicine or Law. Any other trajectory, such as enrolling in a humanities programme or pursuing mechanical engineering locally, was treated as an unsatisfactory fallback.
When students failed to attain this conventional trajectory, they felt an unprovoked compulsion to justify their choices. They would spontaneously explain that they embarked on such a track because of “financial constraints” or because it was something of their own “choice”, quickly appending their stellar exam grades to prove they were not “academic rejects”.
This defensive posturing tells us something crucial about Singapore’s meritocracy. It is not merely a mechanism for social mobility, but also an unforgiving measurement of self-worth. Thus, transnational mobility is not sought by these top-performing students simply out of wanderlust or intellectual curiosity. For many, it is an institutionalised and normalised pathway. A pervasive ethos of ability defines success so narrowly that not attaining the specific educational trajectory leads to a sense of inadequacy and mediocrity.
Lee Hsien Loong meeting Singaporean students in Cambridge in 2024. Higher education at elite universities, usually thought of as a liberating and cosmopolitanising experience, has been used by the Singapore state to rejuvenate its ranks. [Picture: Lee Hsien Loong Instagram]
State scholarships and cosmopolitan nationalism
In Western educational discourse, heading abroad for university is frequently imagined as an exercise in personal independence and cosmopolitan exploration. In Singapore, however, the state has masterfully co-opted this outward mobility, folding it directly into the apparatus of domestic governance.
Through an elaborate system administered by agencies such as the Public Service Commission (PSC), the Singapore government awards full overseas scholarships to the nation’s top academic performers. These awards carry enormous symbolic prestige, and are the primary pipeline for grooming future permanent secretaries, military generals, and members of parliament. Half the current national cabinet consists of former government scholars. Significantly, these scholarships come with a legally binding contractual “bond”. In exchange for four years of tuition and living expenses at Harvard or Cambridge, the recipient must sign away the next six years of their working life to serve in the Singapore civil service or military.
When I spoke with Singaporean scholars preparing to depart for universities in the UK and US, I expected to find some resentment toward this bureaucratic obligation. Standard migration theories might predict that highly skilled, twenty-year-old cosmopolitans would chafe against having their global career options legally curtailed. Instead, I encountered a sense of complacency.
Scholars described their upcoming mandatory return to Singapore not as an onerous sacrifice, but in strikingly understated terms of “comfort” and “stability”. As one student, Gabriel, admitted to me, he chose a government scholarship because he preferred a guaranteed career and a “stable routine”. Another informant, Seng, who hesitated to leave Singapore because he was “very homely” and did not want to step out of his comfort zone, readily embraced the scholarship because it secured his future upon return.
This phenomenon points to what educational researchers call “cosmopolitan nationalism”. The Singapore state has successfully engineered a system where students are encouraged to develop a globalist outlook by attending international symposia, participating in overseas immersion programmes, and earning foreign degrees. This is precisely so that these cosmopolitan competencies can be repatriated to serve national interests. Transnational movement is deliberately subordinated to the local political economy. The high-flying Singaporean scholar is neither rootless nor anti-statist. They are profoundly en-territorialised, safely cocooned within a state-sanctioned elite trajectory that guarantees prestige and sociopolitical reward back home.
The raciolinguistic trap for “foreign talent”
If Singapore’s strategy to retain talented citizens revolves around contractual bonds, its strategy for demographic survival relies heavily on international recruitment. Facing one of the lowest total fertility rates in the world, the Singapore government has pursued an aggressive “foreign talent” policy. This strategy includes actively scouting top math and science students from neighboring Asian countries at ages as young as 15.
In addition to this, Singapore operates under a strict, state-managed framework of multiracialism, categorising its population into three racial groups of Chinese, Malay, and Indian. To prevent immigration from altering this delicate racial balance, the government has historically calibrated its immigrant intake so that ethnic Chinese immigrants form the overwhelming majority of new arrivals.
The state’s working assumption has long been straightforward. Recruiting top-performing ethnic Chinese students from mainland China should be doubly beneficial since they bolster the country’s economic competitiveness, while smoothly assimilating into Singapore’s Chinese-majority cultural landscape.
My ethnographic fieldwork reveals that this bureaucratic assumption is fundamentally flawed. On the ground, traits of “Chineseness” do not foster instant solidarity. Instead, they often become sites of sharp social friction and acute alienation.
In secondary schools and university halls of residence, local Singaporean students consistently differentiated themselves from mainland Chinese scholars, whom they colloquially labeled “PRCs”. Chinese scholars were frequently stereotyped as hyper-focused on their studies, socially insular, and culturally unsophisticated. This anti-immigrant distancing was replicated by other immigrant groups. Vietnamese students on scholarships, recruited under ASEAN schemes, took great pains to distance themselves from Chinese scholars, aligning themselves instead with local Singaporean friendship circles.
Even more sobering was how the Chinese scholars themselves responded. Rather than identifying with their homeland or forming a united front, earlier-arrived Chinese students (recruited at age fifteen under the “SM1” scheme) actively distinguished themselves from newer arrivals recruited at university level (the “SM2” and “SM3” cohorts). An SM1 informant, Chang, confessed that she felt caught in a painful cultural no-man’s-land:
“When we go to a class, you can see the PRC students sit in front, then the Singaporean students sit behind… If you join the China side, they will like, you come here at 15 years old, then your accent doesn’t really sound right, and your mindset is totally local. Then the locals will say you are Chinese. So it’s like you get rejected by both of them.”
Another Chinese scholar, Yang, recounted how she and her boyfriend would intentionally switch from Mandarin to English whenever they entered a public lift, fearful that speaking Mandarin would prompt local bystanders to judge them as unassimilated mainlanders.
Far from experiencing frictionless integration, academically brilliant Chinese immigrants in Singapore navigate an intense raciolinguistic hierarchy. The state assumes that racial similarity produces cultural harmony. In reality, modern Singaporean identity is defined in sharp distinction to mainland Chinese norms. To become “local” in Singapore is not about identifying as ethnically Chinese. It requires performing a very specific, English-dominant cultural style.
Students from a Hong Kong primary school on a Singapore study tour. Singapore’s schools and universities are a magnet for families in the region. [Photo: Ying Wa Primary School]
The Singlish paradox: How a stigmatised vernacular became elite capital
This brings us to the contested role of Singlish. Often also labeled Colloquial Singapore English by linguists, Singlish is an English-based contact language heavily infused with syntactic structures, vocabulary, and discourse particles from Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay, and Tamil. For decades, the Singapore government has framed it as a corrupted patois that damages Singapore’s international economic competitiveness and makes citizens unintelligible to foreign investors.
Given this state rhetoric, one might assume that students at Raffles Institution, destined for Oxbridge and the administrative service, would shun Singlish entirely in favour of immaculate Standard English. In practice, the exact opposite occurs.
Among the students I studied, Singlish is not an embarrassing habit to be eradicated. It is a prized, highly exclusive form of social currency. Almost every informant I interviewed claimed to use Singlish habitually with their peers. This is while demonstrating mastery of Standard English, regularly achieving top grades in General Paper.
Crucially, immigrant students who fail to acquire Singlish were systematically locked out of informal peer networks. Singlish is the gatekeeper of local belonging. Furthermore, these students made sharp class distinctions about which kind of Singlish was acceptable. Informants openly looked down upon what they termed “cheena English” – a basilectal, heavily accented form of Singlish laden with Hokkien and Mandarin vocabulary, typically associated with lower-income, less-educated Singaporeans.
In Bourdieu’s terms, elite students secure a “profit of distinction” by possessing both codes. While the working-class citizen may speak Singlish predominantly because they have limited access to Standard English, and the newly arrived foreign scholar speaks Standard English but lacks Singlish, the elite student commands both. In doing so, they turn a state-stigmatised vernacular into an exclusive badge of high-status local belonging.
Elite students as a microcosm of Singapore
Conversations with these students therefore reveal a meritocratic mores, behind which harbour deep anxieties of failure. They demonstrate the limits of raciolinguistic engineering, where internal differentiations and hierarchies exist even amongst elites. In offering us a glimpse into what it takes to be and become an elite student in Singapore, they also provide an unvarnished reflection of the ideologies and practices that pervade Singapore society.
– LUKE LU is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Nanyang Technological University. Read more about him and his book, including how to get a 30% discount, here.