dear blueberry, my cousin is in his last year in
ntu and he also got accepted into
ntu's phd, a cond offer. he has no work experience at all.
it is well known that in many top schools in singapore, hong kong, macao, japan, etc, that the locals don't want to do phds. because it is not a career that leads to money, working and doing a masters leads to more money, as you pointed out. you lose out on income and work experience as well when u do a phd.
you will find that the phd students in many top schools, take
nus,
ntu or whatever, are mostly mainland chinese students, with very few locals.
one just needs a bachelor degree (normally second upper at least), good gre scores, and to demonstrate research ability to get in.
take a look here for
nus's current phd students:
M&O - Our Students - PhD & MSc Students
mostly chinese students from 'good universities' in china. only 4/25 are singaporeans. these chinese folks will get their phd and bugger off to the usa or china to work as an assist prof earning 6k usd in the us or 8 or 10k rmb (around 1-2k sgd) in china. very few of them can make it in the usa, most will bugger off back to china and lead a good life there.
very few singaporeans do a phd. most do a masters and then enjoy their 10k a month salary in a bank or mnc.