A new National University of Singapore (NUS) scheme, offering "internationally competitive" salaries and million-dollar research grants for young academic stars, has sparked a debate on whether Singapore's two leading universities prefer foreign academics and if they have embarked on these "aggressive" recruitment schemes to chase rankings.

The Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme being launched this month does not specify the salaries, but academics say if NUS intends to match the salaries paid to talented young faculty academics in the United States, then it would have to fork out as much as US$200,000 (S$273,000) a year in some fields.