This chapter begins by highlighting the striking features of private supplementary tutoring against a backdrop of high-stakes exams in the Confucian Heritage Cultures (CHCs). It identifies and elaborates on a Confucian habitus espoused by parents and other educational stakeholders. A conspicuous feature of formal education in Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong is a system of public exams. Tutoring service in Singapore can be obtained from a tutoring centre or a tuition agency. The Hong Kong private tutoring industry began in the 1970s and has since expanded rapidly. P. Bourdieu's notions of habitus and capital shed further light on the trend of private tutoring and its relationship with the narrow-local interpretation of "performance". Habitus reproduces the social structures through individuals "consciously reinventing or by subconsciously imitating already proven strategies as the accepted, most respectable, or even simplest course to follow".

This paper explores higher education development and policy shifts in Singapore over the last decade, within a landscape of an increasingly globalised creative economy and international cultural policy transfer. Using qualitative interviews with key players in policy and higher education institutions, the paper aims to explain the push and pull factors behind investment in creative higher education. It considers the emerging dynamics and diverse patterns, embedded in a society where higher education interactions with economic development have a long history and pragmatic rationale. While still in the early days of these investments, the paper argues that there are some global policy lessons to be learnt from the case of Singapore and the role that higher education can play in developing a creative economy, while striving to overcome issues of over-supply and innate vulnerability of creative careers.