Beyond the language of impact: How SMU is building the systems behind its promise
The students filed into then-provost Lily Kong’s office with their grades hanging in the balance. Their industry partner on the SMU-X project — the experiential program Singapore Management University (SMU) was then piloting — had moved the deadline forward, changed the scope halfway through and rejected the work they’d presented.
“Prof, this is just too stressful,” Kong, now president of SMU, remembers them saying. “Can you make it easier for us?”
She thoughtfully refused. “I said, ‘I won’t make it easier. That’s what you’ll face in the workplace. We’ll help you learn how to negotiate with your client, persuade them the pivot they want may not be right, or — sometimes — you just have to deliver.’”
Kong could have called the partner, reset the timeline, and still reported a course that ran well. But she’d lose the part she cared most about: whether those students left able to handle something they couldn’t handle walking in.
Professor Lily Kong, President of Singapore Management University.
Professor Lily Kong, President of Singapore Management University.
“Impact” is the catch word higher education uses for that difference, and universities have never been under more pressure to show it — to governments trimming budgets, to employers questioning what a degree is worth. Nearly every university claims it, but far fewer have worked out what the word commits them to.
SMU2030, the strategic plan SMU launched in 2025 — the year the university turned 25 — is Kong’s attempt to work it out in public. Rather than adding programs on top of old structures, the plan starts with a question about SMU itself: What is this university, in this city, uniquely placed to contribute? Answer that first, Kong argues, and a university knows what to build — and what to turn down.
An SMU-X team presents recommendations to their industry partner. The program pairs academic coursework with live projects for companies, government agencies and nonprofits.
An SMU-X team presents recommendations to their industry partner. The program pairs academic coursework with live projects for companies, government agencies and nonprofits.
What Impact Doesn’t Mean
Kong spent the early part of her presidency looking at how universities around the world were framing impact. “I didn’t think there was the clarity that the sector needed,” she says. The confusion she found runs deeper than branding.
The most common mistake she found was around timing. Kong shared an example close to home: Singapore is aging fast, and a university might respond by training seniors to use new technology. “We claim impact when we say we have trained X number of seniors,” she says. “For me, that is an output. The outcome would be device adoption rate. But the impact is the greater social connectedness for the senior population: better mental health, greater access to services.” Universities, she says, “claim impact sometimes too early in that process,” reporting the training and calling it the transformation.
SMU students with residents at an active aging center in Sengkang — one of the university's community partners.
SMU students with residents at an active aging center in Sengkang — one of the university's community partners.
The second mistake is scope. Ask most institutions to show their impact and they reach for research numbers like citations and rankings — but that only reflects a fraction of what a university does. “We’re not necessarily thinking hard enough about the impact of our educational endeavors,” Kong says. The habit persists because counting is easy: publications and citations compare cleanly across institutions and borders. A 2024 Elsevier survey of academic and funding leaders found 79 percent agreed research assessment needs a new approach, and while two-thirds called demonstrating economic impact a high priority, fewer than a third said they were prepared to do it.
Even the word itself has been stretched to cover things it isn’t. A publicly-engaged university can fill its calendar with panels, op-eds, and conferences, and never touch how a policy gets written. Employability, as most universities measure it, stops at graduation — even as careers now run 40 or 50 years past that point. “A university can be relevant without being transformative,” Kong says. “A university can be employability-focused without preparing graduates for a life well lived.”
Get the word wrong in any of these ways, Kong says, and a university can celebrate progress it hasn’t made. SMU’s answer was to pin the word down in writing.
Starting From the Inside
Plenty of universities have announced impact agendas, but the most revealing thing about SMU2030 isn’t what it promises but what it declines to take credit for. The plan sorts the university’s work into four domains — human capital development, knowledge creation, economic development, and social and community life — before declaring a four-step chain through each of them: input, output, outcome, and impact. The numbers most universities lead their annual reports with, SMU has demoted to the middle of the chain. Publications and graduates trained are closer to outputs. Employment rates and citation counts are outcomes. Impact, “the long-term, broader effect on a larger and more sustained scale,” sits at the far end.
The first thing the definition shaped was funding. Initiatives, ideas and proposals that reach Kong’s desk now face the same three questions: What is SMU uniquely placed to contribute? Who benefits? And what long-term value is being created? In research, the test led SMU to concentrate a deliberate share of its funding on three areas — how people live, how people work, and how people age — each anchored by its own university-level institute, all launched since 2024: the SMU Urban Institute, which studies how Asia's fast-growing cities stay livable; ResWORK, which studies how work forces hold up as AI reshapes work; and the Longevity Societies and Economies Institute, focused on how societies and economies adapt to longer lives and super-aged populations. All three tackle problems Singapore is living through in real time.
The harder change was promotion. Like most universities, SMU built faculty careers on publications and citations. That standard never fit everyone, in Kong’s view: some faculty do their best work in the classroom, others at carrying research into industry, and at many universities elsewhere they’re left feeling undervalued for not being the top researcher. So, SMU rewrote its promotion and tenure framework. The new one, dubbed RISE — research, impact, service, and education — treats impact as the broader purpose, underpinning the other three, and accepts policy papers and other grey literature as evidence alongside journal publications.
The overall aim is to make the far end of the chain a career path. The difficult part is proving anyone has gotten there. SMU established an Office of Impact to work with faculty and staff on documenting impact, using a case-study framework that recognizes work at stages from emerging to mature. The first cohort of cases was deliberately varied — different types of work, different pathways, different stages of development — rather than a selection of the university's most established successes. Economist Sock-Yong Phang's three decades of housing research and policy engagement, for example, show how influence accumulates over time.
The launch of SMU's Longevity Societies and Economies Institute, at the 2026 World Ageing Festival — one of three research institutes anchoring SMU's focus on how people live, work and age.
The launch of SMU's Longevity Societies and Economies Institute, at the 2026 World Ageing Festival — one of three research institutes anchoring SMU's focus on how people live, work and age.
Scaling the Unscalable
The same discipline shapes how SMU teaches. If the university has a signature, it is experiential learning woven directly into the curriculum rather than bolted onto it. SMU-X pairs a course the university would teach anyway with a live project for a company, government agency, or nonprofit. A conventional internship is still required to graduate; SMU-X layers on top of it, not instead. What began in 2015 as a pilot of 58 students in two courses has grown to more than 53,100 enrollments across nearly 200 courses, with more than 1,300 partner organizations willing to hand real work to undergraduates.
The Work-Study elective partnered with SingHealth goes further still: it trains students for healthcare management careers from inside the hospital system, in a course SingHealth’s own C-suite helped design and still helps teach. “The interweaving of academic learning and experiential learning,” Kong says, “is far tighter than in a traditional internship.”
But neither program was supposed to work at this size. An external panel reviewing the early SMU-X pilot told the university: “That’s a great pedagogy, but you’d never be able to deliver this at scale.” Kong calls the verdict a wake-up call — not to retreat, but to invest further. “Something has to give, or some resources have to be put in.” SMU created a dedicated SMU-X office whose staff find partners, negotiate with them, and scope projects an undergraduate can be graded on.
Other universities have asked to copy the model, and Kong shares it freely. Some have come back to report, “We’ve really tried, and we just can’t scale it.” Geography explains part of that — SMU sits in downtown Singapore, a corporate crossroads for Southeast Asia, while a university in a small college town may lack the big industry players SMU has in close proximity. But the larger missing piece is commitment, which is harder to see on a site visit. A dedicated office is a budget line any university could copy. What doesn’t appear in the budget: faculty carrying heavier coordination, partners agreeing to co-teach, and students accepting real deadlines for real clients. “I don’t take for granted the effort that my colleagues and our students have put in,” she says.
SMU's downtown campus places it at the center of Singapore's business district — a proximity to industry that has made SMU-X's scale possible.
SMU's downtown campus places it at the center of Singapore's business district — a proximity to industry that has made SMU-X's scale possible.
Impact Through a Lifelong Lens
Of SMU2030’s four domains, social and community life is the one universities most often shortchange — not for lack of care, but for lack of time. Measuring impact takes decades, not the four years most students spend on campus, and the argument for taking the long view keeps getting stronger: graduate employment rates in Singapore have been falling for three years straight.
Kong’s response is to treat graduation as a milestone rather than a finish line. She talks about building a “sixty-year university” — one that stays useful across a working life, not just the years it charges tuition for. “It’s not just alumni who come back periodically to enjoy an event,” she says, “but for whom the university continues to be relevant and helpful as they pivot through life stages and career changes.”
SMU has started building it. Eighteen months ago it became the first of Singapore’s public universities to open career coaching and job-transition support to all alumni, permanently, and SMU Academy, the university’s continuing-education arm, now serves 36,000 learners a year — more than triple the undergraduate population.
Measuring longer is half the shift. The other half is measuring wider. “What’s hardest to measure is the easiest to neglect,” Kong says, and what gets neglected is everything outside the cognitive: empathy, resilience, self-awareness. “We all mouth the words that these are important qualities for the employment market. But what are we intentionally and systematically doing to build those qualities?” At SMU, the answer is built into the curriculum: community service and overseas exposure are graduation requirements, each followed by structured reflection reviewed with professional staff. The co-curricular transcript that captures it is organized by growth area — leadership, communication, cross-cultural understanding, self-awareness — rather than by activity, so the record shows how a student changed, not what they attended.
The early evidence suggests the effect carries beyond the requirement itself. Students routinely exceed their required service hours, and groups keep returning to the same communities after graduation, with younger students inheriting projects their seniors started — less a measure of what SMU did for its students than of what its graduates are doing for everyone else. “That is much more meaningful than the hours clocked,” Kong says.
Alumni at an SMU career networking event. SMU became the first of Singapore's public universities to open career coaching and job-transition support to all alumni permanently.
Alumni at an SMU career networking event. SMU became the first of Singapore's public universities to open career coaching and job-transition support to all alumni permanently.
What Travels (and What Doesn’t)
Kong knows of one university that announced it was reviewing its faculty appraisal system to focus more on impact. “But all it did was add impact all over the document,” she says, “without actually breaking that down and developing the systems, structures and incentives.” Nothing about how professors were measured changed — a mistake she expects to see repeated, and the reason she resists holding SMU up as a model.
“All universities are shaped by their context,” Kong says. “What has worked for us may work very well for another university, but may work terribly for a third university.” What transfers, in her telling, isn’t the programs — it’s the order of operations: decide what your university is for, then rebuild the systems and incentives until they agree with the answer.
By her own account, that work is far from done. “We’re on a journey, and we are early in the journey.” The students who filed into her office wanting an easier course walked out with something no graduate survey would detect — and no one, including Kong, will know for decades what it was worth. Whether a university impacted anyone is a harder question than whether it graduated them — harder to answer, harder to measure. But for Kong, it’s the only honest one.
Prof Kong at the SMU Open House, insisting the harder question is always whether a university transformed the student, not just whether it graduated them.
Prof Kong at the SMU Open House, insisting the harder question is always whether a university transformed the student, not just whether it graduated them.
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