新南威尔士大学将于下个月底关闭在新加坡的校区，该校区刚刚开办一个学期，此举令新大损失数百万，在海外教育市场很丢面子。

由于学生数量很少，该校区一直在勉强维持生存。在与新加坡政府进行的关于向该校区提供救助资金的会谈失败后，该大学在本周末决定关闭新南威尔士亚洲校区。÷

“这的确是一个勇敢的创举，但是由于学生人数少，无法得到资助，使得该校区无法独立生存。”大学副校长Fred Hilmer昨天这样说。他承认这项冒险一直处于危险状态，也知道没有任何一所澳大利亚的大学的海外校区是赢利的；他们一直致力于去寻找资金的解决办法，这令人感到悲哀。

世界范围内的留学教育现在价值三千亿。经济合作和发展组织指出，澳大利亚的大学有三分之一的学生是从海外招收的。

新大曾经取消了一个涉及10%的非学术性职员的繁冗的课程，不到一年之后又逐步解雇了所有临时职员，取消了文学院的一些课程，这些已经显示出该校区关闭即将来临。

新南威尔士大学将亚洲校区设计为澳大利亚大学在海外运营的一个独特的冒险，这不仅体现在它的学期规模上，也体现在它希望兼顾教学和研究上。

该校区计划在未来的20年里招收15000名学生，但本学习只招呼了150名学生，不到计划招生人数的一半，它决定关闭。

新大已经在这个项le="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; TEXT-ALIGN: center" align=center>Red faces, millions lost as uni closes campus

THE University of NSW will abandon its Singaporean campus at the end of next month just one semester after it opened its doors, losing millions and precious face in the export education market.

The university decided at the weekend to close UNSW Asia after talks with the Singaporean Government failed to produce a rescue deal for the campus, which was struggling to survive on a tiny student population.

"It was really a brave initiative, but it was really the numbers and the inability to get a support package that [made] it unviable," the university's vice-chancellor, Fred Hilmer, said yesterday. He admitted the venture had always been risky and that he did not know of any Australian universities making money in the overseas campuses they had pegged as the solution to their financial woes.

Offshore education is now worth $30 billion worldwide. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development figures show Australian universities enrol about one third of their students offshore.

The closure announcement comes a day after the university revealed it was shedding all casual staff and some subjects in its arts faculty, and less than a year after a redundancy program that involved 10 per cent of its non-academic staff.

UNSW Asia was planned as a unique venture among overseas operations of Australian universities, both in terms of its scale and that it planned to conduct research as well as teaching.

It was banking on a student population of 15,000 over the next 20 years, but it decided to close after enrolling fewer than 150 students this semester, less than half the anticipated number.

The university has already spent $17.5 million on the project, but it had guaranteed a further $140 million for the construction of a permanent campus in South Changi.

Professor Hilmer said the university had lost $15 million in not reaching its anticipated enrolment numbers, and as a result it was unable to borrow the money it needed. "I don't want to play a blame game [but] I inherited a situation," he said.

"But I know that the council and senior management took it in good faith."

Singapore has invested heavily in higher education with hopes of becoming an overseas student destination in its own right, and its national universities are cheaper than the foreign ones.

The market was always going to be difficult for an Australian university to compete in, said Carolyn Allport, the national president of the National Tertiary Education Union.

John Kaye, the NSW Greens education spokesman and a former lecturer at the University of NSW, said the failure of the campus would be a blow to the university's reputation in the international student market. "It's huge egg on their faces as a provider in South-East Asia," he said.

Simon Marginson, a professor in higher education at the University of Melbourne, said UNSW Asia was never in the university's interests because it was designed for "B" students, while the best students went to Singapore's own universities. "This was not good given that UNSW itself is a world class research university not far below National University of Singapore and at least as strong as Nanyang IT."