10 Best Southeast Asian Colleges

The South-Eastern part of the Asian continent is divided into Mainland South-East Asia and Maritime South-East Asia, where countries such as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar forms the Mainland part and Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India, Indonesia, East Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, East Timor, Brunei, Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands covers the Maritime South-East Asian part. These regions on Asian sub-continent are rich in arts, music and writing where originally Indians taught their native inhabitants about writing as a form of Brahmic writing on the split palm leaf or commonly called as ‘Lontar’ and is known as the ‘Balinese script,’ which could be found in these regions of South-East Asian part of the world. As education evolved and reached its height, higher education in Southeast Asian countries resembled European methods and reshaped to distance learning and academic mobility programmes as a part of modern educational approach.

Now, let us dig deep into the education system of the Southeast Asian countries by taking the world’s largest island country, Indonesia, as an example. In Indonesia, it can be seen that the private institutions have onetime registration fees and the government provides scholarship support to students opting for private universities. The foreign universities in Indonesian are also required to cooperate with local universities for their daily function. The public universities like Sumatera Utara, Universitas Indonesia, Gadjah Mada University, Bandung Institute of Technology and private institutions like Universitas Krsiten Krida Wacana (UKRIDA) provide education to the foreign students. While the Malaysian higher education system has a different approach as most of the colleges offer “Twinning” programme, where a student can start its degree in a particular college and complete it in any other institution and the Malaysian education system attracts 5,000 talents annually, which they call “Brain Gain”. As globalization is leading the world towards both competition and collaboration in the higher education, it has also affected Southeast Asia.

The harmonisation of higher education in the Southeast Asian countries examines the emerging trend of somewhat reconstruction and simplification of higher education and it is successfully moving towards its goal. So acknowledging the successful initiation of educational gratification, in this edition we at The Higher Education Review present to you, “10 Best Southeast Asian Colleges - 2018”. The colleges that feature in this issue are chosen after thorough research by our team of expert panel with the vision of guiding you towards an enhanced and enriched career from where only success envies you. We hope our efforts will help the larger community of students to make accurate decisions about their study locations.