NUS alumni group asserts that 2 out of 3 NUS Medicine students come from the top three elite schools

NUS Students United (NUSSU), an informal NUS alumni group, has asserted that two out of three National University of Singapore (NUS) Medicine students come from the top three elite schools in Singapore – Raffles Institution, Hwa Chong Institution and the Anglo-Chinese group of schools.

NUSSU made this claim in response to an article that was published yesterday (15 July) that purportedly said that “NUS Medicine’s diversity has increased with students coming in from a more diverse range of schools.”

Sharing publicly available photos from NUS Medicine’s Kids Day – in which students will wear the uniforms of the schools they used to attend before university – NUSSU wrote:

“We are amused to juxtapose this claim with publicly available pictures of NUS Medicine students’ “Kids Day”, that is the day NUS Medicine students will dress up in their old school uniforms. An implicit display of literal old school tribal affiliations.

“We sampled these 2 pictures. Out of 56 students, we can identify 18 from Raffles, 11 from Hwa Chong and 7 from the AC family of schools just based on what the pictures show they are wearing. That amounts to 32.1%, 19.6% and 12.5% respectively (total slightly more than 64%) of the sample of 56 students.”

Asserting that this could point to a “lack of proper social mixing in these elite courses between those from “non elite” and those from “elite” schools,” NUSSU said:

“When 2 out of 3 of your students come from 3 families of schools, there IS a social class classification problem. It’s not about mixing only at the point of application into university. It is about the lack of mixing in the earlier years of education.”

Read NUSSU’s post in full here: