2013年1月30日 星期三

Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education coverRethinking Undergraduate Business Education: MBA教育再思考 : 十字路口的工商管理教育/ India Cases


今年,印度商學院(Indian School of Business,簡稱ISB)做了一件五年前印度次大陸的管理學院認為不可能做到的事:印度長期存在住房供應不足問題(印度的眾多社會問題之一) ,ISB 針對該問題的解決方案進行了分析,並發表了研究報告。一直到最近,印度的管理學院都還只有一個目標:培養能夠勝任銀行和大公司管理崗位的人才。不過,這種狀況現在已經有了變化,發表上述研究報告的ISB新興市場解決方案研究中心(Centre for Emerging Markets Solutions)就是這一轉型的典範。印度的商學院正在努力培養更為全面的商界領導者,目標是讓這些人能在印度大公司裡謀得職位、或是能夠創建自己的小公司,以求在解決印度巨大社會問題的同時還能實現盈利。上述報告的題目是《保障性住房的新前沿:來自現場的註解》(New Frontiers in Affordable Housing: Notes from the Field)。該報告第一作者尼基萊什•辛哈(Nikhilesh Sinha)表示,報告提出的想法很簡單:印度住房供應缺口巨大,解決這一問題需要政府採取持續而專注的行動,而這正是當前所欠缺的。不過,私營部門有能力解決掉這個問題的一部分,即城郊工業項目周邊湧現的棚戶區和住房需求。辛哈說:“許多問題我們不會去觸及,比如(城內的)貧民窟等等,因為這些問題需要公共部門與私營部門進行更大的協同努力才能解決。但我們認為,在城郊,私營部門有能力為在工廠工作的人提供住房。”通過其對保障性住房的研究,新興市場解決方案研究中心在位於印度西部古吉拉特邦(Gujarat)汽車工業城市拉傑果德(Rajkot)的郊區幫助建設了一個包括218套住房的試點項目。在該中心的幫助下,這個試點項目從商業投資者那裡籌集了私人資本。該中心還設計了整個系統——從這些住房的外觀,到其商業模式。按照新的商業模式,這些住房被視為庫存,而不是印度地產開發商傳統上所認為的可升值資產。上述報告表示,儘管該項目的利潤幅度相對較小,但新模式產生的內部回報率(IRR)達到100%,而且還控制住了購房者的購房成本。 2010年8月該項目啟動當天,開發商就成功預售出了218套住房中的148套。XLRI 商業與人力資源學院(XLRI School of Business and Human Resources)組織行為學與戰略管理學教授馬杜卡爾•舒克拉(Madhukar Shukla)表示,這種對於社會創業精神的新關注只是在幾年前才開始在印度紮根。 XLRI 位於印度東部城市詹謝普爾(Jamshedpur)。舒克拉教授表示:“商學院通常以服務於企業為目標。如今,許多商學院正把目光投向這些目標之外,(正逐漸認識到)還存在其他的模式,能夠一面賺錢、一面產生社會效益。考慮到印度的社會需求及社會貧富差距現實,印度需要相關人才朝這個方向努力……人們已經認識到,只以營利為動機的模式無助於這個國家。”舒克拉在XLRI教授社會創業精神課程,並且正在該學院啟動一個社會風投孵化器。印度面臨的發展問題令人望而生畏:9億人營養不良;8億人每天開支低於兩美元;超過6億人使用不上廁所。單靠印度政府自己,基本上不可能解決該國堆積如山的問題。學者們表示,好消息是印度政府看來認識到了這個現實。今年晚些時候,印度大學經費委員會(University Grant Commission)將主持召開或許是該國首個由政府資助的以社會創業精神為主題的會議。
ISB 院長阿吉特•郎格內卡爾(Ajit Rangne​​kar)表示,ISB的使命之一是與企業界、政府及社會攜手解決影響社會公益的問題,而他現在發現,印度政府對ISB這個使命的接受程度遠高於以往。 ISB 在海得拉巴(Hyderabad)與旁遮普邦(Punjab)的摩哈里(Mohali)均設有分校。郎格內卡爾說:“我與政府交流得越多,就越發體會到他們認可這項研究的價值,認可支持與資助這項研究的意義,並且願意付諸行動。但出於這樣那樣的原因,我們各所大學作為一個整體的執行力距離他們的全盤願望還存在某種程度的差距。”這個問題在一定程度上在於,缺少一個能將那些致力於社會創業精神項目的學校聯合起來的架構,因此無法建立起統一的課程安排,也無法建立起能夠促進資金籌集和觀點分享的平台。有鑑於此,去年11月,ISB 與印度非政府組織“凱姆卡基金會”(Khemka Foundation)主辦了一個由來自7所學院的教師參加的論壇。這 7所學院包括,位於班加羅爾(Bangalore)的印度管理學院(India Institute of Management),位於布巴內斯瓦爾(Bhubaneswar)的澤維爾管理學院(Xavier Institute of Management),以及XLRI。這個論壇的目的在於,讓這幾所知名學院的社會創業團體建立起聯繫。作為第一步,與會的教師比對了他們的教學大綱,希望能出一本教材。目前,ISB 的新興市場研究中心(Centre for the Study of Emerging Markets)正在努力尋找辦法,以使國家能夠制定相關政策,讓企業能夠找到針對印度發展問題的市場化解決方案。該中心主要關注社會經濟學問題:中小企業融資、醫療金融、就業能力與教育,以及保障性住房。對該中心來說,印度就是它的試驗田,可以用來測試那些它希望能夠推廣到其他發展中國家的想法。該中心正致力於孵化一批企業,這些企業可得到SONG投資公司(SONG Investment Company)以投資形式提供的扶持和支撐。 SONG投資公司是一支由索羅斯經濟發展基金會(Soros Economic Development Fund)、奧米迪亞網絡(Omidyar Network)、谷歌(Google)以及ISB合作創立的股本基金。印度面臨的發展問題是巨大的。但是,像ISB、XLRI 以及著名的印度管理學院這樣的學院,正在意識到它們能夠培養既著眼於盈利、又不會對印度諸多社會問題視而不見的領導者。ISB教授、新興市場中心主任魯本•亞伯拉罕(Reuben Abraham)說:“這不是慈善性質的工作,這是能夠實現盈利的工作。(學生們)了解到這種觀點,即社會意義可與能夠做有趣的事情和實現真正盈利結合起來,(並且認識到)他們不需要為此做出妥協。”“這項事業不(僅僅)是慈善事業,這一點對學生們來說極具吸引力。”譯者/簡易
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Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education coverRethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession is published by Jossey-Bass. Authors are Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich, William M. Sullivan and Jonathan R. Dolle. The Business, Entrepreneurship and Liberal Learning (BELL) project, from which this work was drawn, was funded by Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Teagle Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Skoll Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York. For more information, visit www.carnegiehighered.org.

Carnegie Work Takes Spotlight at AAC&U Annual Meeting [In the News]


RETHINKING UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS EDUCATION: LIBERAL LEARNING FOR THE PROFESSION WINS FREDERIC W. NESS BOOK AWARD
Washington, DC—January 24, 2013—The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) announced today the winner of its Frederic W. Ness Book Award, Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession, published in 2011 by Jossey-Bass/Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The Ness award is given to a book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education, and will be formally presented to the authors, Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich, William M. Sullivan, and Jonathan R. Dolle, at AAC&U’s Annual Meeting, on January 24, 2013, in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's national study of undergraduate business education found that most undergraduate programs are too narrow, failing to challenge students to question assumptions, think creatively, or understand the place of business in larger institutional contexts. Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education examines these limitations and describes the efforts of a diverse set of institutions to address them by integrating the best elements of liberal arts learning with business curriculum to help students develop wise, ethically grounded professional judgment.
 



2012.8.4
今天在自由時報網看到政治大的IMBA (大概是Intenational MBA)廣告
內有"首次採用甄選 不用筆試"廣告詞
我個人認為其中也透露出一些"無可奈何"的味道

2011.12.2

Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads/ MBA教育再思考

這本漢譯缺索引
不過還是可以知道在末章引用Herbert A. Simon 的 一所工商學院的設計 (頁312 /英文 335)
(prize-winning 翻譯成"備受贊譽" 不好)

2008年哈佛大學商學院慶百年的討論主題之一
各著名管理學院的個案在2009年有一小段檢討

MBA教育再思考 : 十字路口的工商管理教育出版年: 2011-9頁數: 338定價: 58.00元ISBN: 9787300138251內容簡介 · · · · · ·工商管理教育的現狀解析和未來藍圖數十年來,MBA畢業生幾乎毫無懸念地可以在最優秀的企業謀到高薪工作。然而世易時移,MBA學位帶來的優越地位已經受到撼動。世界經濟在迅速轉型,學術界和企業界對商學教育的質疑甚囂塵上,全球金融危機爆發……這些因素都把工商管理教育推到了一個關鍵的十字路口。面對這些挑戰,商學院的應對措施將決定其未來的角色及其工商管理教育是否把握時代脈搏,密切聯繫實踐。在這本具有標誌性意義的書中,哈佛商學院三位學者研究了影響工商管理教育的三個趨勢:項目形式日趨多樣化;越來越多的雇主開始質疑MBA學位的價值;以及由此所導致的入學情況的變化。作者展開了廣泛的調研,訪談了數十位商學院院長和企業高管,並且詳細分析了11個頂尖MBA項目。以此為基礎,《MBA教育再思考》提出了8個目前亟待滿足的教學需求,分析指出每個需求都對應著一個機遇,商學院可以..作者簡介 · · · · · ·斯里坎特·M?·達塔爾(Srikant M. Datar) 哈佛商學院會計學教授(享有“Arthur Lowes Dickinson爵士”頭銜),在MBA項目、綜合管理項目和高級管理項目中任教,兼任資深副院長,主管高管培訓、教師招聘與培養以及科研工作。主要研究方向為管理控制和戰略執行。戴維·A·加文(David A. Garvin) 哈佛商學院工商管理教授(享有“C. Roland Christensen”頭銜),在MBA和高級管理項目中任教,負責選修課的製定,並擔任教學資源中心主任。主要研究方向為綜合管理和戰略變革。帕特里克·G·卡倫(Patrick G. Cullen) 哈佛商學院助理研究員,主要研究專業學院與相關各方的關係,尤其是商學院的發展。曾擔任AACSB助理研究副總裁。  ◆ 譯者簡介伊志宏中國人民大學商學院院長、教授。主要...目錄 · · · · · ·第1章 導論:變革中的MBA學位第Ⅰ篇 MBA教育的現狀第2章 MBA市場形勢的變化第3章 詳探課程方案第4章 憂慮重重第5章迎接全球化、領導力和整合性的挑戰第6章 教學方法和課程設計的創新第Ⅱ篇 商學院的應對策略第7章芝加哥大學布斯商學院:靈活自主,以學科為基礎第8章歐洲工商管理學院:信條——全球化第9章創造性領導力中心:以領導力開發為核心第10章哈佛商學院:綜合管理和注重實踐第11章 耶魯管理學院:整合與大變革第12章斯坦福大學商學院:個性化與大變革第13章 結語:商學院,路在何方



HBS Press Book

Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads

"Business Schools Face Test of Faith." "Is It Time to Retrain B-Schools?" As these headlines make clear, business education is at a major crossroads. For decades, MBA graduates from top-tier schools set the standard for cutting-edge business knowledge and skills. Now the business world has changed, say the authors of Rethinking the MBA, and MBA programs must change with it. Increasingly, managers and recruiters are questioning conventional business education. Their concerns? Among other things, MBA programs aren't giving students the heightened cultural awareness and global perspectives they need. Newly minted MBAs lack essential leadership skills. Creative and critical thinking demand far more attention. In this compelling and authoritative new book, the authors: Document a rising chorus of concerns about business schools gleaned from extensive interviews with deans and executives, and from a detailed analysis of current curricula and emerging trends in graduate business education Provide case studies showing how leading MBA programs have begun reinventing themselves for the better Offer concrete ideas for how business schools can surmount the challenges that come with reinvention, including securing faculty with new skills and experimenting with new pedagogies Rich with examples and thoroughly researched, Rethinking the MBA reveals why and how business schools must define a better pathway for the future.

2013年1月28日 星期一

John Hopkins 及其它

 劉振 (Liu Cheng , 字伯繩, 1911.4.12-1995.7.26) 劉振 (Liu Cheng ) 先生
2013年初陳寬仁老師來信(我補充一點).....
2013.1.29 我打電話請問品質學會的林英賢先生 他幫我從劉老師的訃聞查出其生平.  林先生在第一次電話其間還告訴我房克成先生上周在美國過世
 (此事讓我覺得自己太懶  2008年我出版台灣戴明圈時集碰到此問題......)

*****
John Hopkins 是美國最有"校友"向心力的大學之.一
2010年. 我弄The W. Edwards Deming Center for Quality, Productivity and Competitiveness Awards Samuel Palmisano, President, Chairman and CEO of the IBM Corporation, The Deming Cup 查出他也回饋John Hopkins 大學. (此段憑記憶)
*****己亥雜詩  其一
著書何似觀心賢,不奈巵言夜湧泉。
百卷書成南渡歲,先生續集再編年。
hc說:「或許該寫:《品質史卮言。Lean Six Sigma篇》
(【卮言】 注音一式 ㄓ |ㄢˊ解釋 :無頭無尾、支離破碎的言辭。莊子˙天下:以卮言為曼衍,以重言為真,以寓言為廣。後亦作為對自己作品的謙詞。教育部國語辭典) 」--Quality Times No.152, June 8, 2007;品質時報 第152期:2007年6月8日(週五 )

2013年1月25日 星期五

中國大學生難向藍領工作「低頭」Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks to Factory Jobs

Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks to Factory Jobs

GUANGZHOU — Millions of Chinese graduate from college every year, but they struggle to find jobs in an economy that is still dominated by blue-collar industries.

中國大學生難向藍領工作「低頭」


中國廣州——這座人口1500萬的珠江河畔城市是一個製造業腹地的中心,從T恤衫、鞋類,到汽車零部件、平板電腦和太陽能電池板,這裡的工廠生產各類產品。許多工廠正陷入用工荒,儘管它們提供兩位數的年度加薪和更好的福利。
王增松(音譯)迫切地想找到一份穩定的工作。他在一個稻田農場上長大,三年前從一個社區學院畢業後,多數時間處於失業狀態。25歲的王增松只做過幾個月的低薪工作,他當過購物廣場的保安,也做過餐館服務員,最近的一份工作是辦公樓里的保安。
但是他不會考慮申請工廠的全職工作,因為身為大學生的王增松認為,那樣的工作對他來說太低級。相反,他每天都在尋找一份辦公室的工作,即便這樣的工作起薪只有工廠工作的三分之一。
“我從沒有考慮過,也永遠不會考慮到工廠工作。一個又一個小時坐在那裡做着重複的工作,有什麼意思?”王增松問道。
在中國,數百萬名像王增松這樣近年從高校畢業的人都有同樣的想法。結果是一種異常現象:工廠工作無人問津,而許多受過教育的年輕人處於失業或半失業狀態。一項對城鎮居民開展的調查顯示,在20出頭的人中,那些有高等教育文憑的人失業的可能性,是小學教育水平人群的四倍。
中國官員敏銳地意識到這個問題。
“這是一種結構性失調。一方面,工廠招不到技術工人,另一方面,大學培養出來的學生又不想要這些現有的工作,”中國高等教育學會副秘書長葉之紅說。
過去十年里,中國的教育飛速擴張,每年從高校畢業的學生人數增長四倍,培養出數百萬名工程師和科學家。最優秀的人才能夠在想要進一步提高全球競爭力的中國企業找到理想職位。
但是,中國培養的高校畢業生中,每年也有數百萬人一方面幾乎拿不出任何謀生技能,另一方面堅信自己理應得到報酬不錯的辦公室工作。
問題在一定程度上似乎是就業面較窄的專業大量出現。經過三年的學習,王增松拿到“辦公室和展位設計”專業的大專文憑。同時,商業和經濟專業在中國大學裡越來越熱門,而工程等專業受到冷落,這加劇了無意在工廠第一線工作的大學畢業生“人滿為患”的狀況。
葉之紅表示,“這和銀行業也有關係——銀行提供高薪工作,因此家長們都想讓自己的孩子進銀行。”
教育程度較高、但沒有穩定工作的中國年輕人,對社會穩定構成潛在的長期威脅。他們把大量時間花在上網、和朋友聚會,以及抱怨辦公室工作的短缺上,他們相信辦公室工作才是與自己的專業對口的。
中國現在的大學生人數是1989年春天天安門事件發生時的11倍,而中國經濟在創造白領就業崗位方面一直十分緩慢。年輕一代對政治活動的興趣降低,儘管如果越來越多的畢業生找不到滿意的工作,這一局面可能改變。
中國總理溫家寶去年3月表示,前一年的大學畢業生中,只有78%的人找到了工作。但是,即使這個數據也可能高估了受過教育的年輕人的就業率。
政府的數據不僅包括那些得到長期職位的人,還包括自由職業者、臨時工、研究生、已經簽訂了勞動合同但還沒有開始工作的人,以及全國各地國有控股公司受命為應屆畢業生創造的大量“無事忙”職位。
去年春天,中國人力資源和社會保障部部長尹蔚民在一次講話中表示,“把解決高校畢業生的就業問題作為工作重點。”
挑剔的大學畢業生 
王增松是家裡四個孩子中最小的一個。他出生於1987年末,當時“獨生子女政策”還沒有開始在農村地區執行。他的兄弟姐妹教育程度較低,他們也不願 接受高薪的工廠工作。王增松的哥哥在高中畢業後用一年時間拿到了一個移動手機設備專業的文憑,他開了一家行李箱包店。王增松的兩個姐姐都沒有上高中。現在 一個在一家服裝店當售貨員,另一個嫁給一個工廠工人,成了家庭主婦和全職母親。
密歇根大學中國研究中心(Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan)主任、中國勞工問題專家瑪麗·E·加拉格爾(Mary E. Gallagher)表示,對工廠工作的厭惡在今天的中國十分常見。
“學生們還沒有適應大眾教育這個概念,當他們進入大學時,他們習慣將自己看成精英群體的一部分,”加拉格爾表示。
中國有着數千年的儒家傳統,按照這種傳統,受過教育的人不應當干體力活。但是中國經濟仍主要創造藍領就業崗位。中國47%的經濟產出來自於製造業、採礦業以及建築業(達到這些行業在美國所佔比重的兩倍),而服務業相對不發達。
大學畢業生供過於求,也在壓低計算機科學等熱門專業畢業生所能得到的薪水。一名高管稱,在2000年的深圳,計算機科學專業的應屆畢業生在頂級公司 普遍能拿到725美元(約合4500元人民幣)的月薪,這差不多是當時一個沒有高中學歷的藍領工人的10倍。由於中國存在關於薪水的爭議,該高管要求匿 名。
但現在,計算機科學專業的應屆畢業生人數如此充足,以至於在深圳他們的月薪降到了550美元,不到一個藍領工人的兩倍。而且這還沒有考慮過去10年的通脹。根據官方數據,深圳的消費價格上漲了29%,而許多經濟學家表示,這低估了消費價格的實際漲幅。
如果王增松願意去工廠工作,考慮到他對室內設計的興趣,他可能會去宏遠傢具公司工作,該家庭桑拿浴房製造商位於廣州的另一邊,離王增松的住處有45分鐘車程。
現在這家工廠給新入職的員工提供每月2500元人民幣的底薪,加班有額外的薪酬。之前六人合住的寢室已被兩人公寓取代。工人們不再需要把部分薪水交給工頭。相反,對於每一個留職的藍領工人,廠方現在每月給工頭8美元到16美元的獎金。然而,該廠還是很難招到工人。
該公司的單位勞動力成本——工資加上福利待遇——年度升幅達到30%或以上,高於全國範圍21%的農民工工資漲幅,儘管近期有跡象表明,隨着中國經 濟整體減速,工資增速最近可能有所放緩。而且它還遠高於政府的要求,即在2015年之前每年將最低工資上調13%,大致相當於通脹的三倍。
由於宏遠傢具公司位於廣州發展較慢的一個地區,其薪資水平的增長尤為迅速。在五年前工資水平開始飆升之前,該公司為沒有工作經驗的新員工提供90美 元至120美元的月薪。宏遠的副總經理倪冰冰說,當時,工人們在最初六個月每月要從薪水中拿出13美元到40美元交給工頭,作為一種非正式學徒關係的一部 分。
倪冰冰介紹說,很多大學畢業生申請到該公司工作,但是他們還沒有迫切到會接受藍領工作。和中國許多工廠相比,這家桑拿浴房生產廠通風較好,但沒有空 調。大量電動工具工作時產生的鋸屑形成薄霧,覆蓋在所有表面上——這不是大學畢業生能穿着正式襯衫去工作,然後晚上直接去一家飯店或夜店的地方。
靠父母補貼
獨生子女政策帶來一種不尋常的社會現象,許多大學畢業生是其父母和祖父母唯一的孩子,長輩們在孩子長大成人後繼續照顧他們。
“父母和祖父母會給他們錢,有六個人供養他們,”倪冰冰說。“他們說,我為什麼要工作?我待在家裡每月都能拿到2000元,我為什麼要每天擠公交 車,去掙每月2500元的工資?”在過去三年的大部分時間裡,沒有工作的王增松就是這樣過來的。儘管父母有一些怨言,但他們還是會給他匯款,幫助他維持基 本的生活。
他租了一個面積不大但卻整潔的一居室,包括一間大約10英尺(約合3米)長的卧室,地面鋪着粉色的瓷磚,有一張矮床和一個床頭櫃,柜上擺放着筆記本 電腦。牆壁上已經被堵上的洞說明,以前的房客曾經安裝空調應對廣州的炎熱氣候,但王增松只用風扇應付。邊上的小房間有10英尺(約合3米)長,3英尺(約 合0.9米)寬,有一個小廚房、淋浴裝置和馬桶。
這所房子的租金為每個月64美元。每月吃飯、網吧上網及偶爾的約會要花費80美元,固定線路互聯網服務每月需要8美元,每月的水電費為8美元,一個月的所有花費為160美元。
除了負擔這些開支,王增松的父母還償還了他在三年大專期間欠朋友的錢,當時每年的學費為1270美元,外加320美元的生活費。
他的母親從沒上過學,而他的父親上了幾年小學後就輟學了,直到不久以前,這種情況在中國農村地區很普遍。現在,他的父母已經60多歲了,他們在拿到一些補償後不得不交出稻田,因為當地政府要在他們居住的土地上重新開發。他父親在建築工地上干一些零活,掙錢供養兒子。
並不讓人意外的是,父母力勸王增松接受一份工廠工作。“干這種工作每個月可以掙4000元,但我不會去。”王增松說。“干這種工作,手是髒的,全身上下都髒兮兮的。不適合我。”
他曾短暫工作過。在失業將近一年後,他在幾個月前找到一份寫字樓保安的工作。每個月的工資只有320美元,但他已經考慮在下個月春節過後辭職,再次 專心尋找專業對口的辦公室工作。在他的專業領域,初級職位每月只有240美元的工資,但工作乾淨、安全,還有晉陞希望。他說,如果有市政單位願意聘用他, 那就更好了。
王增松說,“最好能去政府工作;這樣你會有就業保障,還有退休金。”
王增松認為自己有女朋友非常幸運。她設法向朋友推銷安利(Amway)化妝品,但賣的最好的一個月才賺了160美元,而且經常一個月什麼都賺不到。她每月花1200元人民幣(合190美元)租房子,也要靠父母補貼,她父親銷售建築材料,母親是一個保姆。
“我女朋友說,‘你現在掙的錢肯定不足以成家,要結婚的話,你每月至少要掙1萬元,2.6萬元更好,’所以我現在壓力非常大,”王增松說,“現在女人都這樣,她們要車,要房,還要各種家用電器,當然,我答應女朋友的所有要求。”
雖然企業日趨為藍領工人提供很多白領直到最近都不敢想的福利待遇,但是像王增松這樣的年輕大學畢業生不願去工廠工作。
總部位於香港的聯業制衣有限公司(TAL Group)是一家生產高檔襯衫的大型製造商。該公司不僅在其位於中國東南部的龐大襯衫廠車間裝上空調(這是很多美國公司尚未做到的事情),還開設一間圖書館,配置50台可以上網的台式電腦,供員工們下班後使用。
獨生子女政策和大學擴招政策相結合,才剛剛開始影響中國的核心工廠勞動力人群:18至21歲不上大學的年輕人。即使高校入學人數保持不變,從2010年至2020年,這個人群的數量也會驟降29%。
技術培訓走下坡路 
過去10年間,中國各地開設了數十萬家工廠,它們竭力尋找能夠操作複雜設備的工人,更不用說能夠修理設備的高手了。然而接受職業教育的學生人數陷入停滯,如今只相當於攻讀高等學位的學生人數的大約一半。
中國教育部副部長魯昕在去年6月的一次會議上表示,一方面,有些工作和職位招不到技術工人,另一方面,一些人才找不到工作;答案在於技術、職業教育和培訓。
中國的中等職業學校和培訓項目都是冷門,因為人們認為接受這種教育沒有前途,幾乎沒有機會升入四年制本科大學。此類學校還受到歧視:人們認為有農村背景的學生才會到此類學校讀書,較為富裕、教育程度較高的城鎮學生很少選擇此類學校。
許多像王增松這樣的年輕人,出身農村的大學畢業生考慮接受工廠工作是很難的。他正在琢磨別的謀生方法,但學習職業技能不在其內。其中一個設想是,從農村的批發商那裡購買兔子,然後在廣州的大街上擺攤,將這些動物當作寵物或者食品出售。
在被告知,這可能意味着他要與年齡較大、沒有文化、願意為了一點小錢而擺攤的農村進城人員競爭時,他聳了聳肩,再次表示自己討厭去工廠工作。
“我不是怕工作艱苦,而是因為這種工作沒有地位,”他說。“人受的教育越多,就越不願意去工廠工作。”
翻譯:任芯序、谷菁璐



Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks to Factory Jobs


GUANGZHOU, China — This city of 15 million on the Pearl River is the hub of a manufacturing region where factories make everything from T-shirts and shoes to auto parts, tablet computers and solar panels. Many factories are desperate for workers, despite offering double-digit annual pay increases and improved benefits.
But he will not consider applying for a full-time factory job because Mr. Wang, as a college graduate, thinks that is beneath him. Instead, he searches every day for an office job, which would initially pay as little as a third of factory wages.
“I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the point of sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?” he asked.
Millions of recent college graduates in China like Mr. Wang are asking the same question. A result is an anomaly: Jobs go begging in factories while many educated young workers are unemployed or underemployed. A national survey of urban residents, released this winter by a Chinese university, showed that among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education.
It is a problem that Chinese officials are acutely aware of.
“There is a structural mismatch — on the one hand, the factories cannot find skilled labor, and, on the other hand, the universities produce students who do not want the jobs available,” said Ye Zhihong, a deputy secretary general of China’s Education Ministry.
China’s swift expansion in education over the last decade, including a quadrupling of the number of college graduates each year, has created millions of engineers and scientists. The best can have their pick of jobs at Chinese companies that are aiming to become even more competitive globally.
But China is also churning out millions of graduates with few marketable skills, coupled with a conviction that they are entitled to office jobs with respectable salaries.
Part of the problem seems to be a proliferation of fairly narrow majors — Mr. Wang has a three-year associate degree in the design of offices and trade show booths. At the same time, business and economics majors are rapidly gaining favor on Chinese campuses at the expense of majors like engineering, contributing to the glut of graduates with little interest in soiling their hands on factory floors.
“This also has to do with the banking sector — they offer high-paying jobs, so their parents want their children to go in this direction,” Ms. Ye said.
Mr. Wang and other young, educated Chinese without steady jobs pose a potential long-term challenge to social stability. They spend long hours surfing the Internet, getting together with friends and complaining about the shortage of office jobs for which they believe they were trained.
China now has 11 times as many college students as it did at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989, and an economy that has been very slow to produce white-collar jobs. The younger generation has shown less interest in political activism, although that could change if the growing numbers of graduates cannot find satisfying work.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao acknowledged last March that only 78 percent of the previous year’s college graduates had found jobs. But even that figure may overstate employment for the young and educated.
The government includes not just people in long-term jobs but also freelancers, temporary workers, graduate students and people who have signed job contracts but not started work yet, as well as many people in make-work jobs that state-controlled companies across China have been ordered to create for new graduates.
Yin Weimin, the minister of human resources and social security, said in a speech last spring that “the major emphasis will be on solving the employment problem among college graduates.”
Picky College Graduates
Mr. Wang is the youngest of four children. He was born in late 1987, as the “one child policy” was barely beginning to be enforced in rural areas. His less-educated siblings have also been leery of taking well-paid factory jobs. A brother, who got a one-year degree in mobile phone equipment after high school, opened a luggage shop. Neither of his sisters attended high school. One is a saleswoman in a clothing store, and the other is a homemaker and mother who married a factory worker.
An aversion to factory labor is common in China today, said Mary E. Gallagher, the director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan and a specialist in Chinese labor issues.
“Students themselves have not adjusted to the concept of mass education, so students are accustomed to seeing themselves as becoming part of an elite when they enter college,” she said.
China has a millenniums-old Confucian tradition in which educated people do not engage in manual labor. But its economy still largely produces blue-collar jobs. Manufacturing, mining and construction represent 47 percent of China’s economic output, twice their share in the United States, and the service sector is far less developed.
The glut of college graduates is eroding wages even for those with more marketable majors, like computer science. In 2000, the prevailing wage at top companies for fresh graduates with computer science degrees was about $725 a month in Shenzhen, roughly 10 times the wage then of a blue-collar worker who had not finished high school, said an executive who insisted on anonymity because of controversy in China over wages.
But today, new computer science graduates are so plentiful that their pay in Shenzhen has fallen to just $550 a month, less than double the wage of a blue-collar worker. And that is without adjusting for inflation over the last decade. Consumer prices have risen 29 percent in Shenzhen, according to official data that many economists say understates the true increase in consumer prices.
If Mr. Wang were willing to take a factory job, his interest in indoor design might take him to Hongyuan Furniture, a manufacturer of home saunas a 45-minute drive south across Guangzhou from his home.
The factory now offers newcomers 2,500 renminbi a month, about $395, before overtime. Six-person dorm rooms have been replaced with two-person apartments. Workers no longer have to hand over part of their wages to the foreman. Instead, the factory now pays a bonus to foremen of $8 to $16 for each month that a new blue-collar employee stays on the job. Yet the factory still struggles to find workers.
The company’s labor costs per worker — wages plus benefits — have been rising 30 percent or more each year. That is faster than the national pace of 21 percent for migrant workers, although there have been signs that pace may have slowed recently with a broader deceleration in the Chinese economy. And it is considerably faster than the 13 percent annual increase in minimum wages — roughly three times inflation — that the government has mandated through 2015.
Wages at Hongyuan Furniture are rising particularly fast because it is in an area of Guangzhou that was slower to develop. Before wages began surging five years ago, the company paid $90 to $120 a month to new workers without experience. Workers then were also expected to pay $13 to $40 of their monthly pay for the first six months to their foreman in a sort of informal apprenticeship, said Ni Bingbing, the company’s vice general manager.
Plenty of college graduates apply for jobs at the company, but they are not desperate enough to accept blue-collar tasks, Ms. Ni said. The sauna factory has better ventilation than many Chinese factories, but it is not air-conditioned. The many power tools kick up a fine mist of sawdust that coats every surface — not the sort of place where a college graduate can go to work in a dress shirt and then head straight to a restaurant or nightclub in the evening.
Subsidized by Parents
One unusual social dynamic created by the one-child policy is that many college graduates are only children with parents and grandparents who continue to nurture them into adulthood.
“Their parents, their grandparents give them money; they have six people to support them,” Ms. Ni said. “They say, Why do I need to work? I can stay home and get 2,000 renminbi a month, why should I get on a bus every day to earn 2,500 a month?” That is how Mr. Wang has managed to get by for most of the last three years without a job. Despite some grumbling, his parents send him money to help support his modest lifestyle.
He rents a small but tidy studio apartment. It consists of a bedroom with a pink tile floor roughly 10 feet on a side, holding a low bed and a bedside table with a laptop on it. A plugged hole in the wall shows that a previous occupant had an air-conditioner to cope with Guangzhou’s heat, but Mr. Wang makes do with a fan. An adjacent room, about 10 feet long and just three feet wide, holds a tiny kitchen, shower and toilet.
The apartment costs $64 a month. Food, Internet cafe visits and the occasional date cost him $80 a month; fixed-line Internet service costs $8 a month; and electricity and water bills together are another $8 a month, for a total of $160 a month.
In addition to covering these expenses, Mr. Wang’s parents also paid back the money he borrowed from friends to pay for his three-year degree, which cost $1,270 a year in tuition and another $320 a year in living costs.
As was common in rural China until very recently, his mother never went to school while his father attended elementary school for several years before dropping out. Now in their 60s, his parents had to give up their rice farm when the local government redeveloped the land it was on; Mr. Wang’s father does odd jobs as a construction worker to help support his son.
Not surprisingly, they have urged Mr. Wang to take one of the many factory jobs available. “You can get paid 4,000 renminbi [$635] a month for taking such work, but I wouldn’t do it,” Mr. Wang said. “Your hands are dirty, you’re all dirty. It’s not for me.”
He has worked brief stints. After a nearly yearlong stretch out of work, he took a job several months ago as an office building security guard. It pays just $320 a month — but he already is thinking of quitting after Chinese New Year celebrations next month, and dedicating himself full time once again to the search for an office job that would allow him to use his degree. Entry-level positions in his field pay only $240 a month, but the work is clean and safe and there is the prospect of promotion. Even better would be to find a municipal agency willing to hire him, he said.
“The best is a government job; you have job security and a retirement fund,” Mr. Wang said.
Mr. Wang counts himself fortunate to have a girlfriend. She has tried to sell Amway cosmetics to her friends, but in her best month only earned $160, and often earns nothing at all in a month. Her apartment costs 1,200 renminbi, about $190, a month, and she is also subsidized by her parents — her father is a salesman for construction materials while her mother is a nanny.
“My girlfriend says, ‘What you’re earning now is definitely not enough for marriage, you need at least 10,000 renminbi a month, 26,000 would be good,’ so I’m under extreme stress right now,” Mr. Wang said. “All the women are like that now — they want the car, they want the apartment, they want the appliances — of course, I always say yes to my girlfriend.”
Young college graduates like Mr. Wang do not want factory jobs even though companies increasingly offer blue-collar workers the kinds of benefits that many white-collar workers could not aspire to until recently.
TAL Group, a large manufacturer of high-end shirts headquartered in Hong Kong, not only air-conditions its sprawling shirt factory in southeastern China, something many American factories still do not do, but it has even opened a library with 50 Internet-connected desktop computers for employees to use after work.
The combination of the one-child policy and rising rates of college education is only starting to hit the core of China’s factory work force: 18- to 21-year-olds not in college. Their numbers are on track to plunge by 29 percent from 2010 to 2020 even if enrollments in higher education hold steady.
Decline of Technical Training
As hundreds of thousands of factories have opened across the country over the last decade, they have struggled to find workers who can operate their complicated equipment, much less fix it. Yet the number of those receiving vocational training has stagnated to the point that they are now outnumbered roughly two to one by students pursuing more academic courses of study.
“We have jobs and positions for which skilled workers cannot be found, and on the other hand, we have talented people who cannot find jobs; technical and vocational education and training is the answer,” said Lu Xin, the vice minister of education, at a conference last June.
China’s vocational secondary schools and training programs are unpopular because they are seen as dead-ends, with virtually no chance of moving on to a four-year university. They also suffer from a stigma: they are seen as schools for people from peasant backgrounds, and are seldom chosen by more affluent and better-educated students from towns and cities.
Many youths from rural areas who graduate from college, like Mr. Wang, are also hostile to factory jobs. He is toying with other ideas to earn a living, but learning vocational skills is not one of them. One idea is to buy rabbits from wholesalers in the countryside, set out a mat along a Guangzhou street and sell the animals as pets or food.
When told that this might involve competing with older, uneducated rural migrants willing to work for almost nothing as sidewalk vendors, he shrugged and reiterated his hostility to factory labor.
“I’m not afraid of hard work; it’s the lack of status,” he said. “The more educated people are, the less they want to work in a factory.”

2013年1月23日 星期三

The University’s Dilemma (Tim Laseter)

http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00147?pg=all


The University’s Dilemma

In the face of disruptive change, higher education needs a new, more innovative business model.

By one, and only one, measure, the institutions of higher education around the world are remarkably successful: They reach far more people today than ever before. About a third of Americans over the age of 18 have attained a bachelor’s degree or higher — up from less than 20 percent 30 years ago. In the rest of the world, far more people than in the past are seeking higher education, especially in emerging economies, where immense numbers of young people yearn for professional careers. By all other measures, however, the 4,500 institutions currently serving more than 21 million students in the U.S., and the 6,500 other institutions around the world, collectively deserve failing grades.
First, they fail to help students fulfill their goals. Even in the U.S., which has 60 percent of the top-ranked universities in the world, the overall metrics on successful matriculation are dismal. Less than two-thirds of students enrolled in a four-year institution attain the targeted degree. Of students entering a community college, less than half graduate or transfer to a four-year school within six years. Although not every aspirant will be destined for success in higher education, these statistics suggest a systemic institutional problem.
Second, the cost of a college or university degree is out of control. Despite their questionable performance, tuition at four-year universities has tripled in constant dollars over the past 30 years — a faster rate of increase than much-maligned healthcare — and total U.S. student debt now stands at more than US$1 trillion. Worse still, one out of two recent college graduates is unemployed or working in a job that does not require a degree.
Third, institutions of higher education fail to meet the needs of another critical constituency: employers. Even as the U.S. unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, employment forecasts predict a shortage of educated, medium- to high-skilled employees in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (known collectively as STEM). There are simply not enough mathematically capable young people in the pipeline. Despite the prospect of millions of unfilled jobs, many institutions continue to allocate their scarce resources to the softer fields — the humanities and social sciences — while underfunding the investment in science education that would enable and encourage students to pursue these high-demand positions.
In the business world, such poor performance typically leads to industry restructuring fueled by new entrants, as well as innovation by a subset of incumbents. Those moving too slowly or in the wrong direction don’t survive. Higher education might seem immune from such dynamics. And it probably would be immune if it weren’t for one factor: the technological disruption of the Internet and online learning.
For years, experts have predicted that online learning would change the basic operating model of higher education. Now, this transformation finally seems poised to happen. Nascent competitors appear eager to disrupt the existing, complacent enterprise structure of universities. Students seem similarly eager for change; according to the Sloan Consortium, in the U.S., more than 6 million students took at least one online course during the fall of 2011; that’s more than 30 percent of all higher education students. In one recent experiment, Stanford University attracted the interest of 356,000 people from 190 countries by offering three free online computer science courses. Forty-three thousand people received a certificate of completion of at least one course.
The distribution of free videotaped lectures by renowned professors spreads knowledge for social good; however, it falls far short of solving the fundamental problems of effectiveness, cost, and relevance in higher education. Fortunately, university leaders are beginning to recognize that they could soon face the kind of disruptive competition already familiar to those in the corporate world.
Clayton Christensen and Henry J. Eyring have articulated a view of this potential disruption in The Innovative University (Jossey-Bass, 2011). “Until the relatively recent emergence of the Internet and online learning, the higher education industry enjoyed an anomalously long run of disruption-free growth,” they write. “The demand for the prestige the elite schools confer far exceeds the supply, allowing them to cover rising costs with tuition increases and fundraising campaigns.”
Although those few elite institutions may be buffered from disruptive forces, the vast majority of institutions of higher education face disintermediation in their existing relationships among employers and students. Pressure from new entrants as well as the leaders among existing players could squeeze out weaker institutions, repeating the pattern of so many other industries.
To navigate through these forces, universities need to follow the example of their business counterparts and fundamentally rethink what they do. They need to foster new capabilities, reconsider their means of attracting revenues, and allocate costs more closely to their value proposition. In short, using the language of strategy, it’s time for a new business model.


Know Your Potential Rivals

Sun Tzu, one of the earliest writers on the art of strategy, implored his readers, “Know your enemies and know yourself.” Faced with a competitive threat, businesses seek to benchmark their rival (and potential rival) innovators, not just in their own industry but across industries. Like most businesses over the past decade, higher education should focus on the disruptive implications of Internet-enabled innovation.
The most obvious place to start would be the for-profit, online universities — such as Phoenix, DeVry, and Kaplan — which currently serve 9 percent of all college and graduate students. But, as with the early Internet businesses of the 1990s, more may be learned by their failures than their successes. Graduation rates are a dismal 14 percent, and loan defaults run rampant as graduates fail to find employment. None of the online universities seem to have developed any breakthrough technology for delivering education; they have simply avoided the capital investment in facilities while extending their reach to a larger target market. That’s a classic “virtual model.” Although profitable for some investors and executives, these institutions seem to have exploited a niche but have not truly innovated.
There are also sources of innovation within universities themselves. Some neurologists, cognitive psychologists, and education researchers have just recently begun to collaborate in a multidisciplinary field dubbed “mind, brain, and education.” They are employing increasingly sophisticated equipment to examine the neurobiological responses within the brain and applying those insights to the classroom. For example, a cross-disciplinary research team from the University of Bristol, including faculty of the Graduate School of Education, the Department of Computer Science, and the Department of Experimental Psychology, examined the role of dopamine release in response to uncertain rewards in a computer-based learning activity.
But just as with businesses that ignore innovative ideas that bubble up from within, these innovations often fail to interest the broader organization. In his presidential address to the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society conference in 2009, Kurt Fischer of Harvard University acknowledged the prevalent skepticism about building a bridge between research scientists and education practitioners. But he countered by highlighting the integration of scientists, doctors, and nurses in major teaching hospitals. He also invoked the private-sector example: “Almost every major modern business grounds itself solidly in research that is shaped by practical questions about how products function and how they can be used effectively in context. What happened to education?”
One innovative company, Carnegie Learning Inc., has demonstrated the practical value of this integration in computer-aided learning. Founded in 1998 by cognitive psychologists Steven Ritter and John Anderson, the company continuously tests and refines its products — such as its MATHia software, developed for primary school students and teachers — in response to constant feedback from field experience and new research on such areas as intrinsic motivation and academic alienation. MATHia monitors student performance to adjust problems dynamically to the appropriate degree of difficulty and also customizes word problems to reflect student interests, even including names of friends. Although it is focused on primary education, Carnegie Learning’s successful science-based approach offers an excellent model for multidisciplinary efforts targeting adult learners in higher education.
Another model tied to the traditional higher education players, Coursera, was founded in 2011 by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller with funding from venture capitalists John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Scott Sandell of New Enterprise Associates. Positioned as social entrepreneurship, Coursera grabs headlines by building tools to broadcast existing content through free video lectures in partnerships with top-ranked universities such as Princeton and the University of Virginia. Intent on efficiently managing massive course enrollment, the company seeks to develop new tools, such as software that prioritizes student questions for interactive sessions with thousands of participants and for organizing peer-reviewed grading. Research in primary education has shown that blind grading, peer grading, and self-grading correlate strongly with teacher assessments, and can enhance learning. (Disclosure: The Darden School of Business, where I am on the faculty, is offering its own Coursera Massive Open Online Course, called “Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses,” beginning January 28, 2013, as part of a University of Virginia initiative. I am not directly involved in this course. As of September 2012, more than 23,000 people had registered for it.)
Farther afield, the software company TopCoder Inc. is challenging the fundamental need for an advanced degree by explicitly measuring ability, not pedigree. When Jack Hughes founded it in 2000, the company set out to tackle the business challenge of recruiting and assessing programming talent. Rather than relying on education credentials, TopCoder runs coding competitions to identify top talent on the basis of demonstrated proficiency. These Web-based challenges are often sponsored by technology leaders, such as Google and Sun Microsystems, and attract participants from around the world; the site maintains more than 400,000 individual profiles. The ratings inform companies seeking to crowdsource software components in a reverse auction or hold “bug races” to eliminate errors in programs. The TopCoder model offers a new spin on certification and fulfills workers’ growing desire for flexible working arrangements rather than 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. cubicle-based jobs.
Although not an obvious place to find innovative business models, evangelical megachurches offer lessons on scaling up technology while maintaining an immersive experience. For example, North Point Ministries in Atlanta serves an average of 30,000 congregants each week through a network of five campuses, and its collection of podcasts, newsletters, and streaming videos are accessed a million times per month. Each facility seats from 1,000 to 5,000 attendees; the church employs theater-style screens broadcasting from high-definition cameras originally designed for NASA. The multi-campus network supports this immersive experience through three levels of engagement using a house as the metaphor: The “foyer” hosts Sunday morning sermons (with production values worthy of a premium rock concert); the “living room” holds smaller, more active periodic events; and the “kitchen” is the place for weekly study groups of eight to 12 people led by lay members of the church. Those who remember how the televangelists of the 1970s and ’80s leveraged cable television will recognize the need to watch this model closely.
Online gaming offers another technology model worth exploring. Massive multiplayer role-playing games — such as the immensely popular World of Warcraft — create a world in which participants can collaborate to tackle complex challenges. The original Warcraft game, first released in 1994, has spawned three additional releases; the latest version supports more than 9 million subscribers. More than 200 servers around the world host “realms” with up to 1,500 simultaneous users controlling avatars who individually or collectively pursue quests and battle for dominance against competing factions. The game was not designed for educational purposes, but some believe it could play more of a university-like role. The popular science fiction novel Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (Crown, 2011) portrays an energy-drained future world in which most of the population spends time plugged into “OASIS,” a massive multiplayer environment accessed with goggles and gloves by the poor — or fully immersive clothing and equipment by the wealthy. In this dystopia, set in 2044, the masses attend virtual schools that were built by simply replicating software code and recruiting teachers to connect and lecture remotely — using technology that mostly already exists.

Know Yourself

These examples of disruptive applications of technology represent a threat or an opportunity, depending on how institutions of higher education react. An ordinary, second-tier college cannot compete if Stanford finds a way to cost-effectively monetize a 100-fold increase in its student population reached online. It isn’t clear whether Stanford seeks to do so, but someone almost certainly will — and institutions of higher learning must plan for that day.
Before taking action, universities and colleges need to take stock in their own positioning: “Know yourself,” as Sun Tzu advised. Using the language of business strategy, institutions must understand their “value propositions” from a set of four distinct benefits.
Selection. For employers, the admissions process of a top-ranked university generates tremendous value by culling applicants to create a select pool of potential employees. At top business schools, the recruiting process begins before matriculation starts; recruiters track the progress of those who have been accepted. In other high-demand fields and for the right undergraduate majors (such as finance, economics, and some engineering fields), hiring decisions can occur well before graduation. The value generated through the admissions process directly correlates to a university’s “brand value.”
Knowledge. The creation of new understanding and capabilities, for society as a whole (and perhaps for faculty egos), resides at the center of the mission of leading universities. Although imparting that knowledge to students may take a backseat, it offers a potentially critical value for employers. At a leading liberal arts college, an admissions director captured the essence of the philosophy: “Wetrain you for nothing…but we educate you for anything.” A financially stretched parent may bristle at the thought of paying $200,000 for that four-year education; however, in a fast-changing world, the ability to build on foundational knowledge and adapt can be a highly prized asset — if you can afford it.
Certification. Many university leaders balk at the idea of providing training in technical and problem-solving skills, but it should be a critical part of their value proposition. In many of the STEM disciplines, employers seek technical skill certification. A few short tests in a typical job interview process cannot validate the breadth and depth of technical skills typically sought.
Immersion. First-generation college students may not realize the worth of this factor, and it may seem less tangibly valuable than the fast track to employment that can come with selection or certification. But immersion can yield the most lasting and meaningful benefits.
The college experience offers an opportunity for creating rich connections among like-minded peers pursuing stimulating activities independent of the pursuit of higher grade-point averages and a job upon graduation. Parents who blossomed during their own college years often maintain deep loyalty to their undergraduate institution and may willingly place a high value on immersion despite its less-measurable return on investment.
Together, these four benefits provide a basic way to think about the value proposition for higher education. Different institutions compete along different dimensions. Community colleges highlight certification; many large state universities with top-ranked basketball and football programs emphasize immersion. Secluded liberal arts colleges offer a different form of immersion built on long-term networking value. Research universities often stress knowledge, whereas the Ivy League schools achieve excellence in selection. Few schools do well on all four dimensions.
In the emerging disruptive environment, all universities should start with an explicit articulation of the customer value proposition and design a path forward that leverages technology to deliver it. Simply put: Which of these four benefits should you emphasize, and which should you put aside? And how can you leverage the Internet to deliver that value proposition more widely and cost-effectively?
As the early days of the Internet demonstrated, attracting eyeballs is easier than monetizing them. Coursera seems bent on proving that axiom again, citing the societal benefits of spreading knowledge in emerging markets rather than addressing the current crisis in higher education. But can it create those benefits? A $10 fee for a computer class of 100,000 students would generate a windfall and postpone cost-cutting decisions at leading universities that have the reputation to attract such a following. Integrating activities that validate the accrued knowledge of those students through TopCoder-style competitions would increase the value of the courses.
Another path might be to leverage partnerships to create satellite campuses — not just internationally as many leading universities have done, but with second-tier or community colleges. Following the lead of the megachurches, this model would multiply the reach of “rock star” professors with local facilitators. Such a model would require partnerships with a broader reach, but it parallels the current model of professor lectures augmented by research assistants that is common in introductory courses on most campuses. Conceivably, this model could be delivered largely online, linking the center with the satellites through high-quality videoconferencing such as Cisco’s TelePresence.
Such paths would leverage the talent at top universities and defray the costs of their highly immersive offering, but what about second-tier schools? Aggressive players might leverage their physical assets and access to a local population but cut out all research as well as much of their faculty and administrative support. Others might specialize more narrowly in the needs of local businesses in fields requiring hands-on training. But attempting to be all things to all people will not be sustainable. The once-feared shortage of college professors may quickly become a glut — tenure or no tenure.

Forward to the Basics

Modern universities emerged in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. as monastic schools in Europe, focusing on disseminating knowledge rather than creating it. The disruptions of the Internet may return education to those roots. Today, many academics invest their efforts in relatively narrow research, writing papers read only by other academics, with relatively little time spent teaching and training students. In some fields — such as the STEM disciplines — research advancements continue to fuel economic growth and societal prosperity. But in others, the research simply offers alternative perspectives on long-standing, foundational knowledge such as the writings of Aristotle. In light of declining performance and growing costs, institutions of higher education must invest their precious resources more consciously. They need not all follow a STEM-based model, but they will need a clearer, more explicit rationale for what they deliver, beyond “We teach what our faculty think is important,” or they may not survive.
Although the specific path forward for institutions of higher education may not be obvious, humanity can take pride in the legacy of value of its colleges and universities, which have been a primary mainspring of progressive knowledge and value for at least 1,500 years. Indeed, the source of their current disruption — the Internet — would not exist without them; it began as a way to exchange data among military and academic research computers. Institutions of higher education have the ability to solve the crisis they currently face, but resolve presents the greatest impediment. Will your alma mater or local source of new graduates leverage the disruptive technology of the Internet by applying the principles of business strategy…or will it be disintermediated by new entrants offering a better value proposition? 
Reprint No. 00147

AUTHOR PROFILE:

  • Tim Laseter serves as a professor of practice at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He is the author or coauthor of four books, including The Portable MBA (Wiley, 2010) and Internet Retail Operations: Integrating Theory and Practice for Managers (Taylor & Francis Group, 2012). Formerly a partner with Booz & Company, he has more than 25 years of business strategy experience.

Credit Hour 的誕生與副作用



Looking at the Credit Hour [In the News]


THE CURIOUS BIRTH AND HARMFUL LEGACY OF THE CREDIT HOUR
Time-based units were never intended to be a measure of student learning. In the early 1900s, Andrew Carnegie, troubled that professors made too little to save for retirement, created a free pension system, administered by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In order for colleges to participate in the program, they had to adopt a standard unit for admissions, which was based on a system used at the high-school level that measured time spent on a subject. But colleges didn't stop there. Carnegie's pension system spurred them to convert their course offerings into time-based units to determine faculty workload thresholds to qualify for the free pensions. And so the credit hour, which has become the fundamental building block of courses and degree programs in higher education, was born. Unfortunately, it has also become the primary proxy for learning. The Carnegie Foundation did not intend for this to happen. It made that quite clear in its 1906 annual report, when it specified that in the counting of units, "the fundamental criterion was the amount of time spent on a subject, not the results attained." Just last month, over 100 years later, Carnegie not only reiterated this point, but announced an effort to rethink its unit completely: "The Carnegie Foundation now believes it is time to consider how a revised unit, based on competency rather than time, could improve teaching and learning in high schools, colleges, and universities." The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.


2013年1月19日 星期六

Islamic success story at German universities

A Muslim reading the Koran
Photo: Rainer Jensen dpa/lbn

Religion

Islamic success story at German universities

New Islamic theology courses at German universities are proving highly popular, even abroad. The courses were announced only three years ago, but they are already changing the German religious landscape.
Islamic theology is finding its place in German universities at a pace which is surprising many. German academics even speak of Germany acting as a magnet for talent from other European countries.
"There's never been such a process before at European universities," says Reinhard Schulze, who teaches Islam at the University of Berne in Switzerland.
Lecturers at German universities, speaking at a meeting of experts with the German parliamentary education committee, said they were convinced that there would be a rapid increase in the teaching of Islam.
'A matter of justice'
Katajan Amirpur of the University of Hamburg said that setting up new theology courses had been "a matter of justice." Mathias Rohe from the University of Erlangen felt that establishing the courses at universities had provided a "very big boost." Bülent Ucar, a specialist in the teaching of Islam from Osnabrück, took the opportunity to thank the politicians at federal and state level for their commitment over the past years.
The signing ceremony In Bremen, the state has signed an accord with the Muslim community
There was an unusual level of optimism and an unusual amount of praise for politicians, but there are still problems which are mainly due to the way in which religion is organized in Germany. Unlike with the Christian churches and the Jewish community, there is no formal arrangement for dealing with the Muslim community.
Only recently, the two city states of Hamburg and Bremen took a first step. But even there, the Muslim associations don't have the status of "Corporations in Public Law," without which they find themselves not entitled to cooperation with the state and financial support.
The need for academic training has been felt for a long time. The federal government estimates that 2,200 teachers will be needed for the planned development of Muslim religious education in schools. And there are over 1,000 imams in Germany, many of whom have never had any academic training, and who would provide a ready market for further education.
Centers of Muslim theology
The German Council of Science and Humanities provided the initial impulse for the establishment of Muslim theology as a university subject in 2010. The council, which is the most important advisory body for the government in the academic field, examined theology at universities for three years, and only after much discussion did Islam emerge as an issue.
Prominent figures cut the tape at the center
Photo: Franziska Kraufmann dpa/lsw
The center at Tübingen was formally opened exactly a year ago
"Initially, Islamic studies and Islamic theology weren't an issue at all," remembers Schulze, who was part of the council’s working group. "That was the logical conclusion of a productive examination of the field of academic theology in Germany."
In the end, the federal education minister, Annette Schavan, set up four centers of Islamic theology in Münster/Osnabrück, Tübingen, Frankfurt/Giessen and Nürnberg/Erlangen which all came into operation in 2010 and 2011.
Language problems
There are plenty of challenges in many different areas. One is the confrontation with what the academics call "lay theologians" - fundamentalist preachers or believers.
Katajan Amirpur has set up an "Academy of World Religions" in Hamburg, which is intended to bring Muslims into academic exchange with Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and others. Several other experts spoke about the need to get the various branches of Islam to talk to each other. And Rohe, who has been active in the field for some time, talked about the difficulty of finding suitable candidates for the many new professorships.
That's a problem which has now been solved at all the four centers. Rohe pointed to other teething problems, but he saw every reason to be optimistic. Another issue, though, was inadequate skill in both the German and Arabic languages.
A girl in a headscarf takes part in a school class
Photo: Bernd Thissen Teachers are needed for Islamic religious education in schools
As well as the professors and the politicians, the committee also heard from a student in his first semester. Enes Erdogan described the new course as "a dream come true." The move from a tough inner-city part of Berlin to the university in Osnabrück was "the first time in my life that I had moved house" - a fact that illustrated what a major break in his life the course had been. At home in Berlin he had "had to put up with a lot" as a result of the lack of knowledge about religion: "People give religion a very high status, but they don't know much about it," he said. It was a matter of identity.
Erdogan doesn't yet know who will finance a future job for him, but he thinks it quite possible that he will work in the field.
'Very exciting'
Thomas Rachel, junior minister in the education department, followed the discussion closely and told Deutsche Welle afterwards that it had shown that the development was a "historic" one, comparable with the rise of protestant Christian theology after the Reformation 500 years ago. Muslim theology would be firmly established in German universities, and thus also in German society.
Rachel said it was "very exciting" that the decision in favor of Islamic theology at universities had led to it quickly becoming very popular among students from abroad. Schulze reported that Swiss, French and British students were specifically seeking out courses in Germany. And some of his colleagues said they had even seen interest from students in Muslim countries in Asia.

台灣學界弊端: 「共利結構」,假發票報帳案/大學賣學位/將學生獎助金移作他用





〔記者蔡孟尚、廖雪茹、黃美珠/竹縣報導〕新竹縣驚爆縣議員涉索配合款回扣弊案,昨天成為教育圈焦點議題,有人透露,部分議員從校長甄選開始即培養「共利結構」,也有人為缺錢難為的校長抱屈。
新竹縣每位議員每年約有一百五十萬元小型工程款及兩百五十萬元活動費可資運用,各機關學校無不積極爭取。教育界人士表示,校長為學校爭取經費、充實設備,原是美事一樁,但採購程序發生弊端,讓新竹縣教育界蒙羞。
甄選過程 議員勢力介入
教育界人士透露,部分議員鎖定聽話的學校給予補助,有的甚至從校長甄選就開始培養共利結構,彼此關係匪淺,甚至還有類似兄弟會的組織。校長甄選均由縣市政府辦理,議員勢力難免介入。
據 了解,學校若有充實軟硬體設備的需求,通常會向教育處或民代提計畫爭取經費,但有老師透露,有議員會主動打電話給選區內的學校校長、總務人員,詢問有無需 要添購指定的教學設備,他可以補助經費,收據則交由他核銷即可;校長或總務有的可能明白其涵義,有的可能不懂,但覺得對學校有利,便予以配合,於是成了共 犯結構,而這種情況早已是資深老師皆知的公開秘密。
缺錢修繕 校長處境為難
不過,也有人為校長們的難為抱屈,一名不願具名的校長說,新竹縣是貧窮縣市,近八成教育經費都用在人事。以今年來說,六千萬元左右的設備費,若平均分攤給全縣一百一十三所公立中小學,每校不過五十三萬多元;但光是修個漏水或加裝洗手台等工程,就要花費二、三十萬元。
而前天被檢調約談後請回的竹縣二重國小校長黃國寶、五峰國小校長朱義德則表示,學校以議員建議款採購均依採購法辦理,價格及廠商都參考共同供應契約,如果有問題,不會出在行政作業部分;至於其他部分有無問題,就不得而知。
而以百萬元交保的縣議員鄭美琴強調,「我沒有拿回扣」,去年一月她補助竹北國中「英語教室」案,校方向哪家廠商採購、如何採購等,「我不知道,也沒有干涉。」







(中央社記者許秩維台北11日電)台師大今天說,已請教評會調查光電所助理教授邱南福是否將學生獎助金移作他用,如查屬實,可處不續聘、停聘或解聘等處分。

蘋果日報今天報導,台灣師範大學光電科技研究所多名學生指控光電所助理教授邱南福聘學生當研究助理,卻要學生領到的國科會獎助金全數繳回做「班費」,用學 生血汗錢買研究室物品、設備,連加油、辦簽證、去高檔料理店用餐也由學生買單,學生擔任研究助理一年應領新台幣3萬6000元,但邱只給3000元。

台灣師範大學副校長鄭志富表示,校方對新進教師都有舉辦研習,針對研究計畫經費核銷程序和規定加強宣導,同時也向全校教師一再重申要遵守法令,依法執行研究計畫。

鄭志富表示,已請所教評會調查,如調查屬實,會向老師追討經費,並依相關規定嚴懲,經三級教評會審查後,可依情節輕重處以不續聘、停聘、解聘等處分;學生部分,則會補回應領的獎助金,學生如有調整指導教授的需求,也會請光電所協助,以保障學生權益。1020111----AppleTimes
大學賣學位 詐千萬
荒唐,大學教授A錢賣學位!私立台灣首府大學和興國管理學院5名教授,利用學校推廣教育中心招收弱勢身分學員,再偽造學員名冊,讓學員取得學籍成為進修部 學生,向教育部申請學雜費補助,4年來共詐領1250萬元,並讓30多名學員拿到學士學位。台南檢調傳喚5人到案,昨依詐欺及偽造文書罪分別以10萬至 100萬元交保,並將追查學校校長等教職人員是否涉案。

招不到學生 把推廣班當金雞母
大學太多加上少子化,一些辦學差的私立大學招不到學生,弊端不斷。教育界熟知內幕人士指出,推廣教育班變成一些私校的金雞母,還有私校甚至「買空賣空」騙補助款,台灣首府大學詐領補助款案只是冰山一角。
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大學教授用假發票報帳遭起訴,民進黨前主席蔡英文表示,教授若是每天忙著報帳,還有時間研究嗎?應從制度面整體建構、檢討,不能扣上國家大帽;她也呼籲應給予研究足夠的自由度,若科以刑責,恐會有很大爭議。

至於教授報假帳是否算貪汙也引起爭論,蔡英文表示,如果社會觀念不改,老是把學者當成公務人員,那就難脫貪污的陰影;社會一面要鼓勵研發的人,卻又給予很大的束縛,台灣研發的能力就釋放不出來。
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廉政署去年偵辦中研院蕭姓主任涉嫌以不實發票核銷國科會補助款案時,查出廠商與多名教授合作,衍生多起案件。

廉政署在去年偵辦中央研究院蕭姓主任涉嫌以不實發票核銷國科會補助款案,查出帳務資料中,有大學教授、副教授向元霖企業取得假發票核銷研究經費,並用於購買非研究相關使用商品。

廉政署當時報請檢方另行分案,並與調查局分工,由調查局負責詐領補助款案,廉政署負責其他貪瀆案件,由轄區檢方指揮偵辦。

台北地檢署查出,代購的元霖企業原從事文具事業,為拓展業務派員到學校與教授建立友好關係,除取得採購訂單並代購各項產品外,並涉嫌開立不實發票,協助教授核銷研究補助款,教授及廠商均涉犯偽造文書及違反商業會計法。

經循線追查後發現,核銷款項中出現包括健身腳踏車、護膚乳液、3C商品、百貨公司及超商禮券,商品琳瑯滿目,疑似將補助款挪為私用,因為這些產品與研究計畫和範圍根本無關。

辦案人員指出,因每位教授涉案情節不一,有的是「公款公用」,有的是「公款私用」,甚至有證據顯示,研究助理涉嫌私吞補助經費,但教授卻全然不知情況。

檢方現已將包含教授在內共22名教職人員和2名廠商共24人列為被告,檢調指出,目前以台大涉案人數最多,不排除尚有其他大學教授與元霖企業合作,因全案牽連甚廣,將持續擴大偵辦。1020107

2013年1月18日 星期五

TED/ ABOUT K-12, ABOUT HIGHER ED


Some of the News Fit to Print
TED TEAMS WITH PBS TO TALK EDUCATION
On April 16, PBS will air the very first televised TED event, TED Talks Education. The event, which will be filmed in New York on April 4, will bring together an hour of speakers and performers with a deep-rooted passion for education. The first three speakers booked: Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone, plus TED favorites Bill Gates and Sir Ken Robinson — and watch for more announcements in coming weeks of dynamic teachers, speakers and performers to take the stage. With fresh thinking and bold ideas, the speakers onstage will discuss how we can curb the high school dropout crisis. TED Talks Education will be broadcast nationally in the U.S. and will be produced by WNET in conjunction with TED.  The program is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s American Graduate Program. It promises to be an exciting, thought-provoking hour of television.
ABOUT K-12
PROBING THE SCIENCE OF VALUE-ADDED EVALUATION
Author and educator R. Barker Bausell writes in Education Week: Value-added teacher evaluation has been extensively criticized and strongly defended, but less frequently examined from a dispassionate scientific perspective. Among the value-added movement's most fervent advocates is a respected scientific school of thought that believes reliable causal conclusions can be teased out of huge data sets by economists or statisticians using sophisticated statistical models that control for extraneous factors. Another scientific school of thought, especially prevalent in medical research, holds that the most reliable method for arriving at defensible causal conclusions involves conducting randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, in which (a) individuals are premeasured on an outcome, (b) randomly assigned to receive different treatments, and (c) measured again to ascertain if changes in the outcome differed based upon the treatments received. The purpose of this brief essay is not to argue the pros and cons of the two approaches, but to frame value-added teacher evaluation from the latter.
HOW MATH GOT ITS GROOVE BACK
Carrie Lewis and Kelly Steele's fifth grade students slide and spin across the classroom floor, doing the hustle, the robot and the running man. While it may look at first glance like goofing off, these students are actually dancing for a higher cause...math. Lewis, a STEM specialist for Virginia's Lynchburg city schools, and Steele, who teaches gifted education in Bedford county, Virginia, are both math enthusiasts eager to instill in their students a love of the subject. And dancing, they hoped, might be just the thing to help tackle a common fifth-grade learning deficit -- number patterns.  The piece and video are on the PBS NewsHour website.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
‘NON-COGNITIVE’ MEASURES: THE NEXT FRONTIER IN ADMISSIONS
Over the last decade, a handful of colleges have designed "noncognitive" assessments to measure attributes—like leadership and the ability to meet goals—that content-based tests do not. Succeeding in college often requires initiative and persistence, or what some researchers call "grit." Noncognitive measures are an attempt to gauge such qualities. If the SAT asks what a student has learned, these assessments try to get at how she learned it. Long an afterthought in academe, alternative indicators of student potential have captured the interest of instructors, testing companies, and enrollment chiefs. As science unspools the secrets of how we learn, it inspires new approaches to assessment. The way most colleges have long evaluated applicants reflects beliefs about what counts most. If those beliefs evolve, it follows, so, too, should the admissions process. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
NOWHERE TO TURN
If colleges and universities thought they could ride out the current revenue challenges by becoming more like some other institution, Moody's Investors Service has a bit of bad news for them: The grass isn't greener on anybody else's quad. Not even Harvard University's. In a report released Wednesday, the ratings agency outlines how every traditional revenue stream for colleges and universities is facing some sort of pressure, a finding Moody's uses as grounds for giving the whole sector a negative outlook. The agency has been pessimistic about much of the sector since its annual outlook in 2009 after the economic downturn began, but Wednesday's report contains a downward shift in how analysts view even market leaders, the elite institutions with high demand and brand recognition. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
UC REGENTS PLEDGE TO EXPAND ONLINE EDUCATION
SAN FRANCISCO — University of California leaders pledged Wednesday to sharply expand online education over the next few years, possibly aiming to have UC students take about 10% of all their classes online — averaging four courses toward their degree. UC administrators also floated the idea of establishing a fully online academy that might allow students to earn the equivalent of a community college degree before transferring to a University of California campus. The article is in the L.A. Times.


ABOUT K-12
NEW YORK: NO DEAL ON TEACHER EVALUATIONS
The Bloomberg administration and New York City’s teachers’ union said Thursday that they had failed to reach a deal on a new system for evaluating 75,000 public school teachers, putting the city into immediate danger of losing out on up to $450 million in state and federal money and raising the possibility of cuts to staff and programs. The article is in The New York Times.
COMMON ASSESSMENTS HOLD PROMISE, FACE CHALLENGES, STUDY FINDS
Tests now being designed for the Common Core standards are likely to gauge deeper levels of learning and have a major impact on instruction, according to a new study. The report concludes that the assessments hold promise for improving teacher practice and student learning. But the authors caution that the test-making projects face key financial, technical, and political challenges that could affect their success. The post is from Education Week’s Curriculum Matters blog.
SEATTLE HIGH SCHOOL'S TEACHERS TOSS DISTRICT’S TEST
An entire school of teachers in Seattle is refusing to give students a standardized test that's required by the district. The teachers say the test is useless and wastes valuable instructional time. Meanwhile, individual teacher protests of standardized tests are popping up nationwide, and the Seattle case may make bigger waves. The piece is from NPR’s All Things Considered.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
MEASURING THE SUCCESS OF ONLINE EDUCATION
One of the dirty secrets about MOOCs — massive open online courses — is that they are not very effective, at least if you measure effectiveness in terms of completion rates. If as few as 20 percent of students finishing an online course is considered a wild success and 10 percent and lower is standard, then it would appear that MOOCs are still more of a hobby than a viable alternative to traditional classroom education. The post is from The New York Times’ Bits blog.
WHAT IS MERIT?
LOS ANGELES -- After a morning here in which admissions leaders and legal experts discussed strategies for colleges to look beyond the grades and test scores of applicants, Art Coleman said that it was time to acknowledge the "proverbial elephant in the room." That's the issue of merit. Coleman is a lawyer who has worked with numerous colleges and higher education groups to craft admissions policies that promote diversity and can also survive legal challenges. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
NEW PRESSURE ON COLLEGES TO DISCLOSE GRADS’ EARNINGS
Efforts to disclose the earnings potential of degrees in specific majors from colleges and universities are picking up steam, promising to bring competitive pressure to bear on institutions by steering students away from programs with lower market value and colleges whose graduates fare poorly. Wage information has been made available in several states and a bill in Congress would require every college to disclose such data. The article is from the Hechinger Report.

posted Jan 18, 2013 10:19 am

Carnegie Knowledge Network Brief Featured [In the News]


A FEW POINTS ABOUT THE INSTABILITY OF VALUE-ADDED ESTIMATES
Mathew Di Carlo writes for the Shanker blog: One of the most frequent criticisms of value-added and other growth models is that they are “unstable” (or, more accurately, modestly stable). For instance, a teacher who is rated highly in one year might very well score toward the middle of the distribution – or even lower – in the next year (see here, here and here, or this accessible review). Some of this year-to-year variation is “real.” A teacher might get better over the course of a year, or might have a personal problem that impedes their job performance. In addition, there could be changes in educational circumstances that are not captured by the models – e.g., a change in school leadership, new instructional policies, etc. However, a great deal of the the recorded variation is actually due to sampling error, or idiosyncrasies in student testing performance. In other words, there is a lot of “purely statistical” imprecision in any given year, and so the scores don’t always “match up” so well between years. As a result, value-added critics, including many teachers, argue that it’s not only unfair to use such error-prone measures for any decisions, but that it’s also bad policy, since we might reward or punish teachers based on estimates that could be completely different the next year.
Note: the “accessible review” refers to Susanna Loeb’s and Christopher Candelaria’s piece posted on the Carnegie Knowledge Network website.



ABOUT HIGHER ED
CSU WILL EXPERIMENT WITH OFFERING CREDIT FOR MOOCs
California universities are turning to low-cost online course options for students. San Jose State University announced a pilot project with Udacity, a for-profit provider of the massive open online courses, to jointly create three introductory math classes. The courses will be free online, but students can pay a reduced rate to earn credit. The California State University project began when Governor Jerry Brown contacted Udacity's founder. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
ACE TO STUDY ‘DISRUPTIVE’ POTENTIAL POSED BY MOOCs
The American Council on Education (ACE) is studying MOOCs, with a research project that will look at the demographics of students who take Udacity courses and attempt to identify “effective pedagogies and practices that can help students succeed when enrolled in MOOCs,” the council said in a written statement. It is also working with college leaders to consider the “disruptive” potential posed by MOOCs. “As the postsecondary landscape continues to evolve, assessing where MOOCs may fit into that landscape for credit purposes is an important part of the national completion agenda,” said Cathy A. Sandeen, vice president of ACE’s Center for Education Attainment and Innovation, in a written statement. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
WHAT ABOUT COMMUNITY COLLEGES?
Author and educator Rob Jenkins writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Recently, we were treated to dire predictions regarding "The End of the University as We Know It," as Nathan Harden put it in The American Interest. Largely missing from the discussion of catastrophic changes facing academe is any mention of how community colleges might fare. Harden argues that residential campuses will basically cease to exist over the next few decades—except, perhaps, at elite universities—replaced by MOOCs and other technology-driven forms of mass learning. But he says very little about two-year colleges, except to suggest, briefly, that they, too, could "outsource many of their courses via MOOCs."
ABOUT K-12
GLOBAL ACHIEVEMENT STUDY CASTS U.S. SCORES IN BETTER LIGHT
U.S. student achievement looks more favorable on the global stage when comparisons take into account the especially large share of American adolescents who come from disadvantaged social backgrounds, concludes a new study. The gap, for instance, between U.S. students and those from top-scoring nations on one global assessment would be cut in half in reading and by at least one-third in math. The post is from Education Week’s Curriculum Matters blog.