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By Jane Ng
THE Management Development Institute of Singapore (MDIS) will sink $80 million into a new block of hostel rooms and additional classrooms.
To be ready by the end of next year, the 15-storey building will be funded entirely by the private school's cash reserves.
It is the first part of a three-phase development over five years that will enable MDIS to double its enrolment to 25,000 students, 40 per cent of whom are expected to be foreigners, when completed.
The second phase will involve a $20 million six- storey administrative wing, while the third will see some low-rise buildings at its Stirling Road campus torn down to make way for two taller ones, each six to eight stories high, with up to 100 classrooms.
To be completed five years from now, the final phase will cost $100 million.
MDIS president Eric Kuan said there is no time like the present to invest for the future.
He said the school has been putting aside cash for some time now and is in a healthy financial position to expand.
'We think long term. This is a good time to invest and prepare for infrastructure before we take in students,' he said, adding that enrolment is continuing to grow despite the economic downturn.
The new building will have a cafeteria, a 495- seat lecture theatre and classrooms on the first to fifth floors. The sixth to 15th floors will house 782 air-conditioned hostel rooms - enough for 1,620 students - in various configurations.
The students now live in off-campus hostels.
Priority for the new hostel rooms will be given to first-year foreign students, and fees will range from $400 to $800.
If the school's secretary-general, Dr R. Theyvendran, has his way, the new hostel will not be the last. Expecting demand to rise, he said MDIS hopes to acquire more land for another hostel nearby.
Dr Theyvendran, who has been spearheading a push to instill moral values in MDIS students, sees having hostels as central to this drive, making it easier for the school to keep tabs on its students.
Though the school checks its off-site hostels each week to ensure that students are behaving, this is less than ideal, said Dr Theyvendran.
'Currently, our students are all over the place. Whatever we are trying to enforce here, like values, get distorted along the way when they go back to their hostels,' he said.
MDIS is the second private school to have a large-scale hostel facility for its students.
Last September, the Singapore Institute of Management opened a hostel along Ulu Pandan Road for 428 students.
Foreign students like Miss Amornrat Mekha- Aphirak, 25, a Thai third-year marketing student, said: 'When we're new to a country, it's always more convenient to live nearer the school and have friends from the same school to mix with so that we can help each other.'
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