When David Siahaan pursued an engineering degree in central Java, the learning culture frustrated him. His professors told him not to ask tricky questions or “overthink” things. “Follow the curriculum, graduate…and get hired by government,” he was told. “That’s the good life.”

The experience depressed Siahaan so much that he took medications. Classmates were unsympathetic. “This is how it is,” they told him. “Just accept it [or] you don’t have any future.”

Ten years on, the now 30-year-old Indonesian’s second shot at a degree is proving stressful. But it is “joyful” rather than depressing. The academics are willing to take unexpected questions and engage with alternative viewpoints. “It’s very challenging, but it’s healthy,” Siahaan said.

He is part of the first cohort of a pilot master’s programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The Executive Master of Science in Management () is designed for middle-aged and older students, and – unusually for top business schools – does not impose undergraduate prerequisites.

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Instead, students must pass “gateway” courses in financial accounting and business analytics to qualify for entry. These “really boring” subjects are the “nitty-gritty of business education”, said the programme’s architect, NUS business dean Andrew Rose.

“Most people find marketing and organisational behaviour strategy relatively easy,” Rose said. “The quantitative courses…are more difficult [but] absolutely necessary. Financial accounting [is] the language of business. If you can’t read a balance sheet you can’t do business.”

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For those who get through, the gateway courses constitute the first four of the programme’s 40 units, studied part-time over the next two years. Classes are online except for the first and last weeks. Participants must achieve grade point averages of at least 3.2 out of 5.0, or risk expulsion.

The programme contains the same content, taught with the “same rigour”, as NUS’ master’s in management whose students are typically bachelor’s graduates with little work experience. Rose had to fight internal resistance to get the Emim approved. “I’d say, ‘I remember very little from my undergraduate degree. Tell me what you remember from your undergraduate degree and whether it would qualify you for a master’s now.’ Then people would start to understand.”

He said Asians often inherited businesses from their parents. “They turn out to be good at it, but they have no business education. They’ve never engaged in a marketing plan. They know nothing about digital marketing [or] human relations.”

While Siahaan gained little from his aborted attempt at undergraduate studies, he amassed plenty of business experience over the ensuing decade. His first venture, a recirculating aquaculture system for breeding catfish – a popular foodstuff in Indonesia – “went pretty well” until Covid disrupted demand. By that stage he had launched a software house with a friend, but that business also struck trouble when the friend proved unable to meet deadlines.

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The experience convinced Siahaan to join his family’s business, which trains and certifies human resources practitioners. “I realised that I didn’t have sufficient knowledge about human resources management,” he explained. “It is much harder to manage a human being rather than manage a machine.”

The Emim also targets civil servants who have been “pensioned out” and mothers whose offspring have moved out of home. “These are people who have been doing something in a serious way, like raising kids or fighting fires,” Rose said. “They can easily work for another 15 or 20 years, but they have no business skills. [They] would be valuable members of the labour force if they had just the very basics.”

He said many countries’ fertility rates were plummeting while life expectancy was rising at about two-and-a-half years per decade. “We’re living longer and longer,” he said. “Making a big investment in…human capital in your middle age makes way more sense, because the investment has far more years to pay off.

“Singapore, like many other countries, pays lots of lip service to lifelong learning. They focus on trying to get middle-aged people into bachelor’s programmes, which are four times as long and just completely unnecessary and inappropriate in my view. Nobody’s interested in a bachelor’s degree when they’re in their 40s.”

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The Emim has started modestly with cohort of 23 students, mostly Singaporeans. Many are in their 30s and most have prior degrees. The programme is an “experiment” that may fall flat, Rose admitted.

“It’s an idea that I’ve been playing with for years,” he said. “If this is a successful thing, I think it could be really transformational for a large group of people who just can’t get those skills otherwise.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com