Letter from London
Competition, challenge and response
It is hard to believe that the end of the academic year is already here and cheerful students and staff are packing for the long summer break. Those likely to be feeling less cheerful are final year students now confronted with the reality of surviving in the tough world beyond the walls of academia.
The passage from student life to workplace realities has always been difficult. This year it’s particularly rough because research into the graduate labour market has shown that a university degree is not necessarily the passport to a well-paid job. When the department of education and skills was trying to justify the introduction of £3,000 (Rs.2.46 lakh) a year standard tuition fee for all students (to be implemented in September 2006), it used the argument that graduates could expect to earn roughly £400,000 more in their lifetime than those dropping out after school. Now this figure has been reduced to only £140,000 — reflective of a huge closing of the graduates-non-graduates gap.
Research studies conducted by the University of Swansea suggest there has been a fall in the relative wages of recent graduates. Secondly that rates of return on investment in degrees are declining. There are a number of reasons for this declining rate of return, but surely the principal reason must be the huge rise in the number of university enrollments during the 1990s, leading to the supply of graduates exceeding demand. Unsurprisingly the study also indicated that the degree subject chosen impacts rates of return and that graduates from the popular arts and humanities streams are worst hit. Meanwhile the skills shortage in scientific and mathematical disciplines is growing with universities struggling to attract students into what are perceived as much harder study programmes.
Universities also have other matters to worry about, including the subject of student recruitment. Not to supply the British economy with better equipped graduates, but to supplement their income with higher fees from foreign students. The top-up fee argument is now over, but institutions continue to seek students from the farthest corners of the world. China and India are seen as particularly rich sources of students. However British universities are now looking over their shoulders at America’s generously funded universities which seem a more attractive proposition for foreign students.
At a recent conference, attended by a number of leading British vice-chancellors and academics, the mood about the future was far from complacent. The consensus was that the fund-raising expertise of American institutions such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale can’t possibly be matched by any British university. One vice-chancellor said the funding gap was creating a “brain drain with a prevailing wind blowing academics westward”. Vis-à -vis China in particular, British academics expressed dismay about the growing number of graduate students sent to the UK to study for Ph Ds, who on their return use their knowledge to compete with European and American universities for global research contracts.
Although the conference didn’t reach any conclusions about how European universities could respond to these challenges, it served to reveal many of the difficulties ahead. Incrementally, the business of education is becoming as competitive as any other business in the rapidly globalising world.
Japan
New Eton in the East
Deeply entranced by stories of boarding-school life in the Harry Potter books, Japan has announced the opening of its first Eton-style school, scheduled for April next year. A consortium of powerful businesses headed by Toyota is building their version of the famous English public school on the banks of the Pacific Ocean, not far from the city of Nagoya. The plan is to produce a generation of graduates free from the hidebound thinking that its promoters believe cripples Japanese society and business.
The 500-capacity Kaiyo Academy will provide boarding school education for boys only, aged 13-18. It plans to adopt many aspects of Eton college, combining the middle and high school curriculums and its house system.
Famous for producing leaders of industry, politics and the military, Eton charges around £22,000 (Rs.18.04 lakh) a year to school young men in character development as well as academic performance. Given Japan’s exam-centred education system, its version of Eton will represent an entirely different approach and one that its founders hope will help Japan out of its social and economic difficulties.
Comments Shoichiro Toyoda, honorary chairman of Toyota, who helped to germinate the idea of a Japanese Eton: “I have long thought that we need an education institution that can develop human resources with creative talents.”
A briefing session for the new school held in Tokyo, attended by the present head of Eton, Tony Little, attracted more than 1,200 parents of would-be pupils. Little said he found a genuine concern about the lack of leadership. “The question is whether a British solution would be the answer; but I’m interested to see what they make of the boarding environment.”
France
AUP spreads its wings
The American University of Paris (AUP), the oldest US institution of higher education in Europe, is to launch its first Masters programmes and is planning a big increase in student enrollment. “We’re still a small university, but with all the developments taking place in Europe — the introduction of the Bologna Process and the opening-up of French institutions — the university landscape is changing. We aim to become a university of the avant-garde, the best English-language university in continental Europe,” says Gerardo della Paolera, who became the AUP’s first non-US president in 2002.
AUP introduced two Masters programmes this spring — an M.Sc in finance and, in partnership with the Institut Catholique de Paris, a bilingual MA in international relations focused on conflict resolution and civil society. Masters programmes in international communications, public policy and regionally focused international relations are in the pipeline, with the first due to start in 2006.
The varsity aims to increase student numbers from 900 to more than 1,500 on programmes that follow the US system in combining multidisciplinary general, elective and specialist studies. Classes are small — about 20 students — and courses involve much student interactivity, group work and student-teacher contact. All this is unlike French university life, where lecture halls are crowded with hundreds of students and theoretical, narrowly focused courses are the norm.
AUP, which opened in 1962, has enrolled students of 93 nationalities — 38 percent are from the US, 37 percent from Europe, including 12 percent from France. It operates on six sites in Paris near the Eiffel Tower and the Siene on an annual budget of €18 million (Rs.93.6 crore).
Drawbacks, say students, are annual fees of €20,000 (Rs.10.4 lakh) — though social and merit grants are available — and local unawareness about their qualifications. “If you’re after a job, the American diploma is not known in Europe like those of Paris universities or engineering schools,” says Ralph Hamamji, a Syrian studying finance and computer science. “It’s hard looking for work in France or Europe — but I would do my studies here again.”
Zimbabwe
Swelling intelligentsia exodus
The Zimbabwe government is considering conscripting graduates into the civil service to stem a brain drain that has stripped the country of skills since political instability and economic collapse began five years ago. And the national youth service programme, widely criticised for creating brutal pro-government ‘green bomber’ paramilitary forces, is to be compulsory for all students in schools and higher education.
Some 3.4 million Zimbabweans — more than a quarter of the population — have left in recent years, an advisory board to the Central Bank in Harare estimated last year. Most are living abroad illegally — including 800,000 in Britain.
In 2003, a study of the escalating brain drain found that most of the almost 500,000 expatriate Zimbabweans who were contacted had undergraduate degrees and one in five held Masters degrees. A large proportion of those who had left Zimbabwe were doctors, teachers and nurses.
Many professionals had left, the study added, because they felt that working in Zimbabwe had become “synonymous with supporting the current government and not the people”. A shrinking economy had also “forced some professors, lecturers, medical doctors and scientists to operate minibuses, taxicabs or beer parlours. It is a form of internal brain drain to have many architects, accountants and pharmacists underemployed”.
President Robert Mugabe is examining a plan to bond graduates in fields hit by skills shortages to government institutions to stop them leaving the country for better jobs elsewhere. The state-controlled newspaper, The Sunday Mail, comments: “The government will soon compel professionals trained using state resources in universities, polytechnics and colleges to work in the civil service for some time before they can be allowed to join the private sector or legally work in other countries.”
Health, law and engineering graduates are most likely to be affected. Zimbabwe, faced with a HIV/ Aids pandemic and other health issues, has an acute shortage of doctors.
Germany
Rising demand for private school education
Parents in Germany are pursuing private education with a vengeance as they seek alternatives to state schools, which have been dogged by bureaucracy and mediocre performances in recent international maths and literacy tests. Around 600,000 pupils or 6 percent of German school children, currently attend private schools, a third more than 12 years ago. And demand far exceeds supply. “Surveys show around 20 percent of parents would go private if places were available,” says Berhnard Marohn, a spokesman for Germany’s Association of Private Schools.
Money is no problem since private schools are inexpensive by international standards, costing as little as £80 (Rs.6,560) per month for schools ending at 1 p.m, going up to £180 (Rs.14,760) in boarding schools. “All schools, even private ones, receive state subsidies,” says Marohn, adding that many private schools are church-run and financed through the diocese as well as receiving funds from foundations and private donors. The advantage, says Marohn, is that they can allocate their funds as they see fit.
However, Marianne Demmer, a spokeswoman on school policy for GEW, Germany’s main teachers union, is sceptical. “Private schools are 80 percent financed by the state,” she says, “and subject to financial pressure.” Church-run schools have problems as well, she says, as many churches are in trouble because people are leaving congregations to avoid paying mandatory church taxes.
Nonetheless, many parents prefer private to state schools which are linked to widely varying regional education policies and subject to restrictions and cutbacks imposed by local authorities. “Parents like the individual attention given to children in private schools,” says Wilfried Steinert, chairman of the Federal Parents Council which speaks on behalf of parents on education issues.
Kenya
Make the Link campaign ambassador
Sitting in a cramped classroom surrounded by pupils a tenth of his age, Kimami Nganga Maruge knows that there is much to learn from difference. At 85 he is the world’s oldest primary pupil. Now he has lent his support to The Times Education Supplement’s Make the Link campaign, encouraging British schools to link with primaries and secondaries overseas.
“Every day I attend school feels like I am in heaven,” says Maruge, a pupil at Kapenduywa primary in the Rift Valley province of Kenya. “If God could make me live to 300, I could finish my education. People in Britain could learn a lot from our culture and the games we play. I wish to know how pupils in England are taught, what books they use, even what pens and paper they use. People should learn from each other’s differences.”
The TES campaign is backed by a £21,000 (Rs.17.22 lakh) awards scheme to reward schools and colleges that use overseas links to promote global citizenship, enrich the curriculum and enhance school life for both schools. Maruge decided to speak about the importance of such campaigns after Action Aid, the development agency, drew his attention to the 100 million children who are missing out on primary education.
He grew up in colonial Kenya but did not go to school because his parents could not afford the fees. His schooling finally began in January 2004, when free primary education was introduced in Kenya. He enrolled in Kapenduywa with two of his 30 grandchildren. “I try to be a model for younger pupils,” he says. “If I sit quietly, they sit quietly too.” Comments Jane Obinchu, headteacher of Kapenduywa primary: “Some of our pupils walk 45 km to and from school every day. In Kenya, people who aren’t educated can’t get a job and end up sleeping rough. If children in Britain are told how handicapped you are without an education, they may be more interested in learning.”
Iraq
English resurgence in Kurdistan
Iraqi kurds will learn English in primary schools from age five next year as part of a curriculum overhaul being introduced one academic year at a time. Northern Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government became independent, in effect after its 1991 uprising. Most Iraqi Kurds under 25 have been educated in Kurdish and no longer speak Arabic.
Kurdistan is now reintegrating into a “voluntary union” with federal Iraq, a process given new impetus by the recent election of Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as president of Iraq. The decision to teach English from an early age reflects the interests of a region rapidly emerging from years of isolation.
With a booming regional economy, many exiled families are returning. The Kurdistan Development Corporation in London is recruiting English teachers to work in three “returned diaspora” English-medium secondary schools for those keen to build on the English they learned abroad. Kamal Dray, of the English Language Teachers Association of Kurdistan (ELTAK) has negotiated scholarships for teacher-trainers with UK universities as part of the region’s curriculum reform.
Exeter University is expected to take the lead in UK partnerships with Kurdistan’s ministry of education. Sheffield University is also offering scholarships and London University’s institute of education is in talks about sending two teacher-trainers for a planned Kurdish teacher-training centre.
Kurdish teachers have complained about being kept out of the loop of UK initiatives for Iraq. ELTAK was hastily set up last summer by a team of Kurdish teachers who were in the UK for an intensive course in teaching English as a foreign language.
Communication has improved since. After a successful British Council visit to Kurdistan this February, the first consignment of textbooks donated under a British Council scheme is due to arrive in the border city of Dohuk, and free academic internet journal subscriptions will go online in Kurdistan shortly. The British Council expects to set up shop in Erbil, the region’s capital this summer.
China
Quality improvement warning to varsities
The Chinese education ministry has issued ‘yellow card’ warnings to 60 universities and colleges this year, more than double the usual annual tally. A university which receives a yellow card must restrict enrollment and increase spending on teaching facilities within guidelines laid down by the ministry. The names of the 60 institutes were published along with the country’s official list of 1,778 fully qualified higher education institutions. Chinese universities or colleges that did not appear on the list were deemed to have had received a red card and were therefore not qualified to provide higher education, senior education official Ji Ping announced.
China began issuing red and yellow cards in the late 1980s. Since then, the enthusiastic promotion of higher education in the country has led to an explosion in student numbers. By 2004, Chinese campuses were home to more than 13 million students — six times the number in 1991.
During this period says Ji, the quality of Chinese universities continued to improve. Although the evaluation standard was raised twice, the number of schools receiving yellow cards remained at an average of between 20 and 30 each year. Ji stresses that the sudden rise in the number of yellow cards issued does not reflect any kind of crisis in Chinese universities. “In the past, the evaluation standard included factors such as teaching staff, infrastructure, teaching facilities and library. The evaluation this year put more focus on teachers’ academic degrees. As a result, the number of unqualified schools rose to 60,” says Ji.
The evaluation, he says, is conducive to reform and improvement in universities and colleges. “It also complies with the current situation in China, where people’s demand for education is great, yet education is still making unbalanced progress.”
The list of qualified universities is a crucial reference document for Chinese students, who apply for universities before taking university entrance exams in June. Eight million students will write entrance examinations this year, representing an increase of one million over 2004.
Tunisia
Anomie and unemployment epidemic
A few kilometres from the Tunisian seaside resort of Monastir, there lies a world unknown to tourists. Sahel, a flat coastal strip that runs from Sousse to Mahdia, has always been a centre of power in Tunisia. President Habib Bourguiba (1903-2000) came from there, as does the present leader, President Zine Ben Ali.
Unemployment is not as high as it is elsewhere in Tunisia: 7.4 percent, according to official statistics, as compared with 14 percent nationwide. But despite appearances, life in Sahel under Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime is as problematic as it is anywhere else in the country.
Hassine Dimassi, an economics professor at Sousse University, believes that Tunisians, and in particular young Tunisians, are becoming less and less interested in politics. “They’ve completely given up the notion of collective struggle. That marks a radical change from the preceding generation. Students face up to their problems individually. They rely on pulling themselves up by their own bootlaces.”
In Sahel, as in the rest of the country, there is a plethora of unemployed university graduates. They dream of being able to leave Tunisia, but have no illusions about it. “I did everything I could to emigrate to France, but last month my application for a visa was turned down,” sighs a man with a Master’s degree in chemistry who has been reduced to selling souvenirs.
Generally speaking, young people are aware that their parents work their fingers to the bone to enable their children to get a proper education. But the middle classes, who form Tunisia’s backbone, are dwindling. “State-owned companies are gradually being sold off to the private sector, where employees are given fixed-term contracts and get half their previous pay,” Prof. Dimassi explains. “Everything that tended to create a middle class is crumbling away.”
When Tunisians overcome their apprehensions and speak their mind, they lambast the regime, the constant police surveillance, Ben Ali’s all-powerful party, the Democratic Constitutional Rally, the alleged high jinks of the Ben Ali “royal family” and the “lying” Tunisian press. Only Bourguiba finds favour. “With the benefit of hindsight,” the people say wistfully, “we can see that he had an ideal.”
“The regime here has fought Islamism, but not ignorance,” says Lotfi Hajji, president of the Union of Tunisian Journalists. “With the connivance of the western countries it has gagged the Islamist movement Ennadha without leaving any area where people can express themselves. As a result, any extremists we now have are a thousand times more dangerous than the Ennadha Islamists of the 90s.”
Australia
Monash’s European struggle
Australia’s only European study centre in the Tuscan town of Prato, has been forced to open an English-language school to try to meet some of the running costs.
Monash University set up the study centre in a four-storey palace in the middle of Prato, 20 minutes by train from Florence. Although the first floor of the Palazzo Vaj was offered to Monash in 2001 for a “non-commercial rent”, it has been operating at a loss, so the English school was established to create extra income.
Monash historian Bill Kent spent a decade trying to persuade the university to back the study centre idea. He is an expert in the cultural and social history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. Prof. Kent negotiated a deal with the Wool Guild in Prato, which owns the palace, and convinced David Robinson, who was the vice-chancellor, that the palace was an ideal location for Monash to open a centre in Europe. Robinson, who was forced to step down in 2002 after being accused of serial plagiarism, had planned to have a Monash campus on every continent. He succeeded in establishing campuses in Malaysia and South Africa and opening a centre at King’s College London.
Prof. Kent argued that Prato was close to the European University Institute at Fiesole as well as other centres run by European and North American universities. But it was only after he obtained the financial backing of Rino Grollo, an Italian-born Melbourne businessman, and the promise of a warm welcome from the Prato Commune, that the university agreed to the project.
Among the objections Kent had to overcome was the cost of establishing and maintaining the centre. The Grollo grant helped at first but even four years after it opened, the centre was not covering its operating costs. This led to the English-language school being opened.
The study centre attracts increasing numbers of visitors from around the world, including academics from Europe, North America and Australia. Monash academics and students regularly use the centre and the university has rooms where academics with study leave can work for upto six months.