Report of the U.S. Higher Education Leaders Mission To Indonesia

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USINDO






FOR RELEASE: IMMEDIATE July 26, 2010




CONTACT:

Alysson Oakley, U.S.-Indonesia Society, 202-232-1400 or aoakley@usindo.org

Sharon Witherell, Institute of International Education, 212-984-5380 or switherell@iie.org

Derek Ferrar East-West Center, 808-944-7204 or ferrard@eastwestcenter.org

Paul F. Hassen, APLU, 202-478-6073 or phassen@aplu.org
Washington, DC, July 26, 2010 – Four U.S. non-governmental organizations today call for a “comprehensive re-invigoration” of the U.S.-Indonesia relationship in higher education in 2010 through the combined efforts of the two countries’ public, private, university and NGO sectors.

The call to action is contained in the document, Report of the U.S. Higher Education Leaders Mission To Indonesia: Recommendations on U.S.-Indonesia Enhanced Cooperation In Higher Education Under The Planned “Comprehensive Partnership.” The report was issued today by the United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (A۰P۰L۰U), the Institute of International Education (IIE), and the East-West Center.

In the report, the four organizations say 2010 offers the best chance there will ever be for a major United States-Indonesia bilateral initiative on education. The organizations call for a systematic and collaborative public and private effort to:

• enhance the quality, volume, and diversity of exchanges of students, faculty, and researchers, including doubling the number of Indonesians studying in the United States, and tripling the number of Americans studying in Indonesia;

• strengthen the capacity of Indonesian institutions to improve educational performance, educate Indonesians to an international standard, and attract American students and faculty in new fields of study;

• significantly expand U.S.-Indonesian institutional partnerships, including research partnerships in areas of global significance and shared concern;

• build the capacity of American institutions to teach Americans about Indonesia, participate in study and research on Indonesia, and receive Indonesian students;

• work with Indonesia to facilitate U.S. investment in strengthening Indonesia’s education sector.

To address these goals, the report calls for the formation of a “Joint U.S.-Indonesia Council on Higher Education Partnership.” The Council will engage the energies and resources of the private sector, private and public universities, foundations, and the NGO community in each country, in cooperation with the two governments.

“To make progress on such a far-reaching program over the next several years will require the combined energies and resources of governments, universities, foundations, corporations and committed individuals in each country,” said Ambassador David Merrill, president of the U.S.-Indonesia Society (USINDO). “Our organizations look forward to playing an active role in contributing to a deep and robust U.S.-Indonesian bilateral educational partnership.”

The report was based on the findings of the July 2009 U.S. Higher Education Leaders Mission to Indonesia to explore opportunities for expanding higher education programs under the planned U.S.-Indonesia Comprehensive Partnership. The Higher Education Leader’s Mission was led by four co-chairs representing non-governmental parties involved in the U.S-Indonesia higher educational relationship: Gregory L. Geoffroy, president of Iowa State University and representative of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (A۰P۰L۰U); Allan Goodman, president and CEO of the Institute of International Education; Ambassador David Merrill, president of the United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO), and Charles E. Morrison, president of the East-West Center.

For a full copy of the press release and a list of the delegation, click here.

For a PDF of report, please click here.


The United States-Indonesia Society (www.usindo.org) is dedicated to expanding understanding of Indonesia and of the importance of the United States-Indonesia relationship. As the world's third largest democracy and the fourth most populous country, Indonesia is one of the United States' most important partners on trade and security issues. The mission of the United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO) is to expand mutual understanding in the areas of politics, economics, history, culture, and the importance of the bilateral relationship, through work with leaders in government and nongovernmental organizations, educators, the media, business, and the general public.

The Institute of International Education (www.iie.org), an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1919, is the world’s most experienced global higher education and professional exchange organization. IIE has a network of 18 offices worldwide, more than 1,000 college and university members, and more than 5,000 volunteers. IIE designs and implements programs of study and training for students, educators, young professionals and trainees from all sectors with funding from government and private sources. These programs include the Fulbright and Humphrey Fellowships and the Gilman Scholarships administered for the U.S. Department of State.

East-West Center (www.EastWestCenter.org) is an education and research organization established by the U.S. Congress in 1960 to strengthen relations and understanding among the peoples and nations of Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center contributes to a peaceful, prosperous, and just Asia Pacific community by serving as a vigorous hub for cooperative research, education, and dialogue on critical issues of common concern to the Asia Pacific region and the United States. Funding for the Center comes from the U.S. government, with additional support provided by private agencies, individuals, foundations, corporations, and the governments of the region.

Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (www.aplu.org) is an association of public research universities, land-grant institutions, and state university systems, founding in 1887. A۰P۰L۰U member campuses enroll more than 3.5 million undergraduate and 1.1 million graduate students, employ more than 645,000 faculty members, and conduct nearly two-thirds of all academic research, totaling more than $34 billion annually. As the nation’s oldest higher education association, A۰P۰L۰U is dedicated to excellence in learning, discovery and engagement.

A New Start for U.S. and Indonesian Higher Education?

Obama Begins Rebuilding Academic Ties to Indonesia

Oscar Siagian, redux, for The Chronicle

Students between classes at the State U. of Jakarta.

By Karin Fischer

President Obama has postponed travel to Indonesia, his childhood home, three times since taking office, the latest visit sidelined in June by the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But a "comprehensive partnership" to deepen relations between the two countries is steaming ahead, one that has as a critical tenet the expansion of higher-education ties. At the recent G-20 summit meeting in Toronto, Mr. Obama announced that the United States would spend $165-million over the next five years on programs to help strengthen higher education in Indonesia through educational exchanges and university partnerships. The two countries will also hold a higher-education summit next summer.

American officials say that improving educational opportunity is crucial to the economic growth and political stability of a key ally. "We can't change the rainfall," says Cameron R. Hume, the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, referring to the climate challenge facing the archipelago. "But we can change people. We can improve opportunity for a generation of young people."

Although Indonesia's government has in recent years sharply increased the amount it spends on education, even amending the country's Constitution to require that at least 20 percent of the federal budget be allocated in that area, the outlay simply isn't sufficient to meet the demands of a country of 240 million people and growing, international-education experts say. As a consequence, Indonesia's college-going rate, 17 percent, lags behind that of its Southeast Asian neighbors, like Malaysia and Thailand, and far behind that of developed countries, like South Korea and the United States.

"It's not enough if we go it alone," says Boediono, the Indonesian vice president. "We don't have enough capacity."

The two governments hope to increase the number of Indonesians studying at American colleges and to link higher-education institutions in both countries.

Ilza Mayuni, a lecturer in education at the State U. of Jakarta, traveled to Ohio State U. last fall on a research grant from the Indonesian government.

Oscar Siagian, redux, for The Chronicle

Ilza Mayuni, a lecturer in education at the State U. of Jakarta, traveled to Ohio State U. last fall on a research grant from the Indonesian government.

Cameron Hume, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia: "We can improve opportunity for a generation of young people."

Oscar Siagian, redux, for The Chronicle

Cameron Hume, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia: "We can improve opportunity for a generation of young people."

But such work is demanding: Infrastructure constraints could hinder many Indonesian universities from getting involved in partnerships in the first place. And few American institutions have long-term experience in Indonesia, in part because the U.S. State Department warned against traveling to the country for much of the last decade after a string of terrorist bombings.

"It's a harder sell," says Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit organization involved in international exchanges, "when 60 percent of Americans can't even find Indonesia on a map."

But Mr. Goodman, who has led two recent delegations of U.S. college leaders to Indonesia, argues that the country has much to offer American academics and students, as a unique laboratory to study issues as varied as politics (it's the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy) and seismology (the island nation is hit by some three earthquakes a day). What's more, bringing Indonesian students to American institutions could broaden U.S. knowledge of the world's fourth-most-populous country.

"Just like we care about India and China, we should care about Indonesia," Mr. Goodman says. "The future depends on a lot more Indonesians understanding the United States and a lot more Americans understanding Indonesia."

Playing Catch-Up

In the 60 years since Indonesia became an independent nation, it has been "playing catch-up," says Terance W. Bigalke, director of education programs at the East-West Center, an education and research organization focused on the Asia- Pacific region.

Few Indonesians at that time held college degrees, and the country's efforts to improve its educational offerings have largely failed to keep pace with its swelling population, he says. The government borrowed heavily from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and other sources in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to finance investments in educational programs, school and college construction, and teacher training. But issues of educational quality and access remain among the biggest impediments to further democratization and economic expansion, argues Mr. Bigalke, a specialist in Indonesian history. "It's a major obstacle," he says.

Today, Indonesia is home to half of all higher-education institutions in Southeast Asia, many of them private colleges started to meet rapidly growing demand. Outside of a handful of top-tier national and provincial institutions, though, most would not meet Western standards. No Indonesian university is included in Shanghai Jiao Tong University's ranking of the world's top 500 research institutions. A mere 8,000 Indonesians hold doctoral degrees.

Educational advancement was also slowed by a confluence of events beginning in the late 1990s, including the Asian financial crisis and severe political instability. Many universities and aid organizations pulled out of Indonesia. Those that stayed recall a period of upheaval. David K. Linnan, a law professor at the University of South Carolina whose work has focused on financial-market reform, says that before leaving his office at the downtown Jakarta campus of the University of Indonesia he would "check the political Web sites for protest news, the way you would check talk radio for the traffic report."

In the past several years, however, the situation has calmed. The State Department travel ban was lifted in 2008. A more-stable Indonesian government has refocused on education as central to economic advancement, committing to education-financing requirements, calling for higher standards for teachers and professors, and pressing for universal education through the ninth grade.

But Totok Suprayitno, the educational attaché at the Indonesian embassy in Washington, says increased government spending can only begin to put a dent in Indonesia's educational needs. Fully supported, teacher salaries and training alone, he says, could eat up most of the nation's annual education budget, leaving little for facilities, research, and scholarships.

To illustrate the problem, Mr. Suprayitno grabs a sheet of paper and sketches a misshapen pyramid, bulbous at the bottom and quickly narrowing, a mere sliver at its tip. That, he says, is his country's educational-attainment picture, with the poorest Indonesians disproportionately crowded at the bottom.

"We are moving slowly. We are not stagnating," Mr. Suprayitno says. But, he adds, Indonesia could move far faster with partners to help it improve quality and expand access.

Cultivating Capacity

A focus on Indonesia's homegrown capacity undergirds the effort announced by Mr. Obama and his counterpart, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian president.

The two countries want to support collaborations that center on improving curriculum, research, teacher quality, and assessment capabilities at Indonesian universities, says Alina Romanowski, deputy assistant secretary of state for academic programs at the department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Already, there are a number of partnerships in place that nurture Indonesian talent. Georgia State University, for example, between 2001 and 2003 offered a master's degree in economic policy to two groups of 55 Indonesian civil servants and university lecturers, handpicked from the ranks of the federal Ministry of Finance, provincial governments, and higher-education institutions.

In the partnership's current, second iteration, Georgia State, through the international-studies program at its Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, has worked with Gadjah Mada University, a top-ranked institution in Yogyakarta, on Java, to develop a dual-degree program to better prepare fiscal-policy experts in the finance ministry. The first group of 20 students has already started at Gadjah Mada, says Paul Benson, assistant director of the international-studies program, and will arrive in Atlanta next fall.

One year of the course is supported by the Indonesian government, the other through a $3-million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Jorge Martinez-Vazquez, the international-studies program's director, says the dual degree was created because of a "vacuum in human capital in the ranks" of finance-ministry personnel. "It's kind of a virtuous cycle building onto itself," Mr. Martinez-Vazquez says, noting that graduates of the previous program have gone back to teach at Indonesian universities or to play increasingly important roles in government there.

Ohio State University, meanwhile, is working to establish a dual-degree program of its own in teacher education, in conjunction with Indiana University at Bloomington, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and 12 Indonesian partner institutions. Improving teacher quality has been a major push by the Indonesian government—all of the country's 2.7-million teachers now must be certified, while a new law requires that faculty members who teach undergraduates have at least a master's degree and that those who teach at the master's level hold doctorates.

"You have to work from the ground up to build capacity," says Sue Dechow, director of research support and international development at Ohio State's College of Education and Human Ecology. She points out that when she first began working in Indonesia 23 years ago, just three of the 31 teacher-training institutions with which she collaborated had graduate programs.

Other American colleges are seeking to start or expand partnerships with Indonesian institutions. The University of South Carolina, for example, has submitted proposals to USAID for projects on climate-change research and to train the Indonesian judiciary. Highline Community College wants to adapt a professional-development program it created for Egyptian college administrators for leaders of Indonesian polytechnics.

Northern Illinois University hopes to take a joint engineering program with Hasanuddin University, in South Sulawesi, and offer it by Webcast to other institutions.

But the number of institutions able to develop such projects is likely to be limited. Northern ­Illinois—which has offered Indonesian languages for 40 years and whose faculty members wrote one of the first textbooks on Indonesia—has the experience to form substantive partnerships in Indonesia that few other American colleges can replicate, concedes James T. Collins, director of the university's Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

"Because we have had this longstanding commitment, we can go more places," Mr. Collins says. "We don't have to first catch a potential partner's eye."

And Mr. Hume, the American ambassador, notes that many Indonesian universities simply lack the research culture of their U.S. counterparts. That can hinder research collaborations.

Upping Exchanges

For Ilza Mayuni, a lecturer at the State University of Jakarta, the opportunity to spend four months last fall doing research at Ohio State was one of the key benefits of a "recharging" grant from the Indonesian government. Ms. Mayuni, whose work focuses on teacher preparation, used the time to immerse herself in Ohio State's library, engage with American colleagues one on one, and observe new teaching methods at Columbus-area elementary schools. She plans to write a book on teacher education.

"I feel really lucky," Ms. Mayuni says, adding that, because of the experience, "I think I will teach differently."

The Indonesian government has recently begun to offer small stipends for overseas study to midcareer faculty members like Ms. Mayuni as well as short-term "sandwich" grants to doctoral students to do research abroad.

The American government is likewise ramping up its exchange programs focusing on Indonesia. For one, it is greatly increasing the number of Indonesian students served through a scholarship program that provides foreign students practical training at American community colleges, from about 10 students a year to 50.

The State Department is also expanding the Fulbright Program in Indonesia, including financing a new program focused specifically on encouraging scholarship in critical areas in science and technology. The Indonesian Fulbright program will become one of the largest in the world, Ms. Romanowski says.

Officials from both countries say enhancing student and faculty exchanges will be a critical piece of the bilateral higher-education strategy. Such partnerships "build bridges," Ms. Romanowski says, imagining the linkages that could grow out of a graduate-student exchange. "Who knows what will happen 25 years from now when they are publishing articles together or doing research together?"

Indeed, many experts point to the American education received by earlier generations of Indonesians—some 40 percent of current government ministers studied in the United States—as one reason for the ties between the two countries.

Over the past decade, however, the number of Indonesian students attending college in the United States has dropped precipitously; just 7,500 students from that country studied in the United States during the 2008-9 academic year, down from 13,280 in 1997-8, according to the Institute of International Education. (The partnership hopes to double those numbers within five years.)

The drop-off can be attributed in part to the financial crisis, which sapped the bank accounts of middle-class Indonesians, and in part to concerns after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that Indonesian students would not be able to get visas to study in the United States. Mr. Hume says the embassy in Jakarta has worked to allay worries that the United States is "a hostile place for a child named Muhammad." Student-visa approval rates, he points out, are 86 percent.

Geoff Moody, director of international recruitment at Green River Community College, in Washington state, says American colleges should understand that the decline in Indonesian enrollments "doesn't necessarily have to do with something we're doing wrong. It has to do with what other countries and schools are doing right."

Countries like Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore, Mr. Moody points out, have eaten into the American market in Indonesia, offering destinations that are closer to home and frequently cheaper. Those countries are also more aggressive about recruiting students, he says.

His institution, which draws about 10 percent of its international student body from Indonesia, has managed to maintain its enrollment levels through attentive recruitment and by offering value to cost-conscious Indonesian parents—almost all of Green River's Indonesian students transfer to well-regarded four-year colleges.

Still, with little available scholarship money, only a select few Indonesians can afford Green River's $16,950 annual price tag.

Signaling Readiness

But if the number of Indonesians studying in the United States has bottomed out, the number of Americans studying in Indonesia is woefully low, just 75 in 2007-8. By contrast, 13,165 students from the United States enrolled in Chinese colleges the same year.

There's broad consensus that any partnership must work in both directions, bringing Indonesian students and scholars to the United States and sending Americans to the island nation. Indonesia is an ideal place to conduct research on some of the world's most pressing issues, Ms. Romanowski notes, such as climate change and food security.

At a recent networking event for international-education administrators from U.S. colleges and foreign embassy personnel, in Washington, Indonesian officials signaled their readiness to collaborate with American institutions. They chatted up visitors and invited every educator who passed by their table to fill out a multiquestion survey about the types of partnerships they sought.

"The message we're getting is that they're ready to work together," said Rachel Herman, director of the English-language center and intensive English program at the University of Central Missouri. "We're ready, too."

Educated and Fearing the Future in China - Room for Debate Blog

Image by torres21 via Flickr

March 7, 2010, 7:00 pm

Educated and Fearing the Future in China

By THE EDITORS

Reuters/China Daily College graduates at a job fair in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in 2009.

As China’s economy recovers, employers are competing to hire low-skilled workers, but many of China’s best and brightest, its college graduates, are facing a long stretch of unemployment.

In 1999, the government began a push to expand college education — once considered a golden ticket — to produce more professionals to meet the demands of globalization. This year, more than 6.3 million graduates will enter the job market, up from one million in 1999. But the number of high-skilled, high-paying jobs has not kept pace.

What might be done to correct the mismatch between expectations and reality? How is this problem altering Chinese attitudes about upward mobility? If college graduates are not reaping economic rewards, how will the next generation view the value of education?

• C. Cindy Fan, associate dean of social sciences, U.C.L.A.
• Yasheng Huang, professor of political economy, M.I.T.
• Daniel A. Bell, professor of political philosophy, Tsinghua University
• Albert Park, economist, University of Oxford
• Loren Brandt, economist, University of Toronto

Materialism and Social Unrest

C. Cindy Fan is associate dean of social sciences and professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of “China on the Move” and numerous articles.

Like prostitution, stocks, private cars, beauty pageants, and McDonald’s, “unemployment,” thanks to collectivization, was practically absent from Chinese life for the three decades after 1949.

The Chinese economy, no longer centrally planned, has not put enough people back to work.

Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms paved the way for the collapse of inefficient state-owned enterprises, shattering the “iron rice bowl” of millions of workers and creating the first wave of unemployment in post-Mao China.

Unemployment among college graduates is a hot-button issue in China. A large number of young people have little other than materialism and consumerism to believe in — a general description of Chinese society today since socialist ideology lost its grip. Not having a job is a perfect recipe for social unrest.

Read more…

Today, China’s official unemployment rate is about 4.3 percent, but it is a gross underestimate because of underemployment among both rural and urban Chinese — they may have a job but their skills are underutilized and they are underpaid.

What explains this situation? No doubt, the global economic crisis has contributed to job loss, but China is considered one of the first economies to recover from the recession.

Another explanation widely cited in the media is the government-directed increase in university enrollment since the late 1990s. But even with that expansion, less than 8 percent of the Chinese population are college-educated compared with more than one in four in the U.S. That suggests there is much room for growth in higher education, especially if the country is to live up to the expectation of “China’s century.”

Instead, three explanations may account for the relatively high unemployment among college graduates. First, geography matters. Young people from smaller places and rural areas, upon obtaining a university degree, are likely eager to go to or stay in big cities. This effect is crowding the labor market in cities like Beijing and Shanghai and hurting the economy of small cities and towns.

Second, globalization matters. By rough estimates, one quarter of the Chinese who have studied overseas have returned. Nicknamed “sea turtles” (haigui), these returnees are highly competitive and can easily push the domestic college graduates down the job hierarchy.

Finally, China’s economy continues to be dominated by the industrial sector, which accounts for about 49 percent of the gross domestic product. While services — the most likely sector for college graduates — account for about 40 percent of the G.D.P., high-skilled, professional jobs are still relatively few compared with low-end service jobs like those in sales.

Creating high-end jobs and increasing the incentives for young people to live in smaller cities are obvious ways to reduce their unemployment. But this is easier said than done. The Chinese economy is no longer centrally planned, and as we have observed on this side of the Pacific, relying on the market alone — even with stimulus packages — has not yet put enough people back to work.

A Terrible Education System

Yasheng Huang is professor of political economy and international management at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics” and will soon begin a large-scale survey of college graduates in China.

In 2007, the job openings for new graduates fell by some 22 percent compared with 2006, according China’s National Development and Reform Commission.

Although Chinese universities have pockets of excellence, they are churning out people with high expectations and low skills.

Some estimate that 30 percent of Chinese engineering students will not find jobs after graduation and that the average pay of the college graduates is now approaching that of rural migrant workers. At the same time, factories in Guangdong province cannot find enough labor. What is going on?

The idea that China is running out of unskilled labor is a myth. The news reports typically concentrate on Guangdong but this does not mean the country as a whole is short of unskilled labor. Development in rural areas in the past six years has meant that rural residents, previously denied economic opportunities close to home, now have a choice between going to Guangdong and staying in their hometowns. Many choose to stay. Any “labor shortage” in Guangdong is mostly evidence that the factories should not be located there in the first place.

But the job market is a problem for college graduates — with the opportunities created in the wrong places. Colleges educate students, but in China they also give a young person a formal right to move to an urban center.

Read more…

You cannot tell a Chinese college graduate, “you’ve invested years and money in a college education, but your job prospects are in your home village.” So there is now a geographic mismatch between locations of jobs and locations of college graduates.

Secondly, there is a skills mismatch. In my conversations with Chinese managers and entrepreneurs, they constantly complain about a shortage of people with the right set of skills, capabilities and inclinations. China is so short of the right human capital, and books with titles like, “War for Talent,” are best sellers in China.

The Chinese educational system is terrible at producing workers with innovative skills for Chinese economy. It produces people who memorize existing facts rather than discovering new facts; who fish for existing solutions rather than coming up with new ones; who execute orders rather than inventing new ways of doing things. In other words they do not solve problems for their employers.

You multiply this skills mismatch by a sixfold increase in the college enrollments between 1997 and 2008, you get a sense of scale of the problem. Although Chinese universities are not without pockets of excellence, they are churning out people with high expectations and low skills. That combination cannot be good for any country, let alone a country with a low capita income.

Going Back to Mao?

Daniel A. Bell is professor of political philosophy at Tsinghua University and author of “China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society.”

“In education, there are no social classes,” Confucius said. The value of equal opportunity for education has deep roots in Chinese culture and may help to explain why most Chinese parents, regardless of social background, put so much pressure on their kids to do well in school.

Even at an elite university, students are lowering their aspirations or settling for government jobs.

It also helps to why explain the university entrance examination system — one of the least corrupt institutions in China — is designed at least partly to provide an equal opportunity for all students. Those who make the cut go on to university, regardless of social connections.

In response to societal demands for more educational opportunities, the government has boosted university enrollment by 30 percent annually over the past decade. Even in the context of a booming economy, the predictable consequence is that there are large numbers of unemployed college students. My own students — graduates of the elite Tsinghua University — are also feeling the pinch, though it usually means lowering their aspirations or changing their plans rather than coping with unemployment.

Read more…

In the past, it wasn’t too difficult for graduates in the humanities to find highly paid jobs with foreign companies or Chinese financial institutions in Beijing or Shanghai. Many graduates are now considering working in smaller and less developed cities. Others are enrolling in graduate programs that delay the job search. Still others are considering jobs outside of their majors.

One of my graduate students has found a job as a Chinese teacher at a highly regarded secondary school and she says “with this job it will be impossible for me to make a great fortune but I’m quite sure I will be very happy.”

Increasing numbers of graduates are competing to take the civil service exams. Whatever their private misgivings about the government, a government job is increasingly seen as the best option in economically uncertain times.

In response to the job crunch, the government is cutting back on university enrollment growth to 5 percent annually. But the demand for university spots won’t stop growing and the government will find it increasingly difficult to maintain a “harmonious society.”’

The only long-term solution, in my view, is to change parental expectations. Not everyone is destined to be a successful professional or government official, and students will need to be filtered at an earlier age to vocational training, similar to the educational system in Germany.

But parents need to accept that working with hands can be just as socially valuable as working with the mind. A bit of Maoism, in that sense, might need to be reintroduced to China.

Waiting It Out

Albert Park is a reader in the economy of China at the University of Oxford. He has co-directed several surveys on China’s urban workers and is currently leading a World Bank-supported project on the impact of the global economic crisis on employment in China.

China has been confronting the challenge of employing college graduates for some years now. The number of graduates from regular institutions of higher education increased dramatically from 9.5 million in 2000 to 37.8 million in 2006.

The broader trends definitely suggest that the economy will be able to absorb more graduates.

Meanwhile, the urban unemployment rate for college graduates increased from 6.3 percent in 2000 to 11.9 percent in 2005, while declining for those with less education, according to calculations based on census data. It would be surprising if the expectations of college graduates have not begun to adjust to the new reality.

In recent years, many college graduates have been disappointed by the salaries for starting positions. Some may feel they would rather wait for a better first job, since first jobs can strongly influence future career paths. Of course, wages of college graduates tend to rise with experience once employed. Eventually, the costs of waiting will force graduates to accept available job offers.

Read more…

But are sufficient jobs available? The economic crisis certainly reduced the job market for recent graduates, but evidence suggests that the Chinese economy has bounced back.

The broader trends definitely suggest that the economy will be able to absorb more graduates. First, the economic returns to college education (the percentage difference in wages for college graduates compared with high school graduates) in urban areas have increased tremendously over time, from less than 12 percent in 1988 to nearly 40 percent by the early 2000s, with no signs of declining, and such economic returns are highest for recent graduates. This suggests that increases in the demand for college-educated workers continues to outpace the increase in supply.

Overall, the percentage of the national urban labor force that is college-educated remains less than 10 percent, while global integration and rapid technological change increasingly place a premium on high-skill workers. China’s college graduates have reason to be optimistic about the future.

College Educations, Needed and Desired

Loren Brandt is a professor of economics at the University of Toronto. He is a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany. He has published widely on the Chinese economy and has been involved in extensive household and enterprise survey work in China. He is the co-editor of China’s Great Economic Transformation.

China’s urban labor market is fairly sharply divided between workers with urban residency permits (hukou) and migrants from rural areas. In general, the overlap in the job market for these two populations is relatively modest, but it has been increasing over time.

China’s emerging middle class will continue to demand expanded educational opportunities for their children.

Of the total urban workforce of 475-500 million, 60 to 65 percent have urban residency permits (hukou) with the remaining being migrants. A majority of those with residency permits (upwards of three-quarters) work in the “formal” sector in jobs that offer more security, higher wages, as well as the benefits of China’s social safety net. The migrants are more likely to be found in the “informal” urban sector, including manufacturing, construction and services.

For migrants, one huge barrier to jobs in the formal urban sector is their significantly lower levels of education. The most recent arrivals from the countryside have an average educational attainment of middle school (9 years in total), or five years less than their urban counterparts. Migrants are also willing to take the less desirable jobs that urban residents usually avoid.

Read more…

Estimates suggest that between 2002 and 2008 urban employment grew by nearly 4 percent a year (or 15 million new urban jobs annually), with annual employment growth of migrants outpacing that of urban residents (5.1 percent versus 3.3 percent). Indeed, on the eve of the recent financial crisis, labor markets in many parts of China were fairly tight.

At the end of 2008, total urban employment began to decline and continued to fall through the first half of 2009, but there are indications that urban job growth is now recovering.

The problem facing new college graduates is neither the economy nor the migrants.

Instead, it is the result of a rapid of expansion in higher education and a serious mismatch in the labor market. In 2003, surveys were already pointing to these difficulties. Notably, women, graduates from China’s lower-tier colleges and universities, and those with degrees in education, literature and science were faring more poorly. There were also important regional differences.

Nonetheless, overall there will still be high economic returns for a college degree, and China’s emerging middle class will continue to demand expanded educational opportunities for their children.

China’s educational system needs to do a better job of providing the skills that are valued by the market. On the demand side, other reforms, including those in the financial system, are required to relax constraints facing China’s private sector, which creates jobs. Neither of these changes, however, will happen quickly.

Associated Press Graduates from Jinan University at a job fair in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, 2009.

Super-active students are over-scheduled - Harvard Magazine

Today’s superhero undergraduates do “3,000 things at 150 percent.”

by Craig Lambert

Photograph by Stu Rosner

You wake up each morning with a fever; you feel like a shadow of yourself. But no time for sickness today—the Adams House intramural crew has one of its thrice-weekly practices at 6 A.M., and you…will…row. Some mornings, you watch the sunrise from Lamont Library after hitting your study groove there around 11 the night before and bushwhacking through assignments during the quiet time between 3 A.M. and 5. The rower and late-night scholar is Becky Cooper ’10. “Lamont is beautiful at 5 A.M.—my favorite time,” she says. “Sunlight streams in.” There’s plenty to do—Cooper is taking five courses, concentrating in literature but still pre-med: “I can’t close doors.”

She writes out her daily schedule to the minute: “Shower, 7:15-7:20.” Lunch might be at the Signet Society, the private, arts-oriented, undergraduate club where she is vice-president. She also belongs to the Isis, a female social club, and has held the post of Dionysus at the Harvard Advocate, planning social events like the literary quarterly’s spring dinner (which she revived) for 70 attendees. Cooper has an omnivorous appetite for learning and experience: new fascinations constantly beckon, and she dives in wholeheartedly. Yet the ceaseless activity leaves little space or time for reflection on who she is or what she wants. “I’m more terrified of being bored than busy,” she explains. “Though I’m scared I’ll work myself into a pile of dust if I don’t learn when to stop.”

Cooper has always been super-active. Even in elementary and middle school, she “adopted an intense work ethic” and participated in track, basketball, chorus, a pottery class, and gymnastics. At the “pressure cooker” Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, she put the shot and racewalked for the track squad, and added cheerleading. After track meets and practices on Saturdays, she had a Sunday job as a docent in a science museum. And from seventh grade on, she attended summer camps for gifted students at upstate college campuses.

At Harvard, she has hosted a two-hour weekly jazz show on WHRB, and as a freshman acted in Ivory Tower, the long-running Harvard TV soap opera viewable on YouTube. (Last summer, she also acted in an independent film shot by a friend in Miami, learning American Sign Language for the part.) In the summer of 2007, Cooper tasted some ravishing ravioli di zucca (pumpkin)—“I was in heaven”—and determined to learn Italian and cook in Italy. As a sophomore, she got a job with Harvard University Dining Services, working with their consultant, cookbook author Mollie Katzen, and the next summer, after two months in Paris with the International Herald Tribune, was baking in Italy as a pastry chef and speaking only Italian.

As a Crimson staffer, Cooper wrote a food column every other week for the arts section. Frequently, her classes and meetings ran from 8 A.M. until 11 P.M., when she went over her column, line by line, with another Crimson editor. She returned to college this spring after taking the fall term off to continue a summer job assisting New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik. “It’s exhausting—here now, where next?—continually hopping from one thing to another,” she says. “You never let yourself rest. Harvard kids don’t want to do 5,000 things at 97 percent; they’d rather do 3,000 things at 150 percent.”

There’s no irony intended: “That’s the standard operating procedure,” Cooper explains. “College here is like daring yourself to swim the length of a swimming pool without breathing. A lap is a semester. I want to do everything I possibly can.” She works on a 28-hour day, she says: some days sleeping 10 hours, others, two. She can describe different levels of exhaustion. One level, she explains, is a “goofy feeling, like feeling drunk all the time; you’re not quite sure what’s going on. Then there’s this extra level of exhaustion, where you feel dead behind your eyes. The last four weeks, that’s where I’ve been. I get sick a lot.”

Keeping Up with the Einsteins

Amazingly enough, Cooper is not unusual at Harvard College. Students today routinely sprint through jam-packed daily schedules, tackling big servings of academic work plus giant helpings of extracurricular activity in a frenetic tizzy of commitments. They gaze at their Blackberries (nicknamed “Crackberries” for their addictive pull) throughout the day to field the digital traffic: e-mail and text messages, phone calls, Web access, and their calendars. Going or gone are late-night bull sessions with roommates and leisurely two-hour lunches—phone calls and texting punctuate meals, anyway.

“They are unbelievably achieving,” says Judith H. Kidd, formerly associate dean for student life and activities, who retired from Harvard last year. “They are always on. They prefer to be busy all the time, and multitask in ways I could not imagine. Students will sign up for three or four activities and take one of them up to practically NGO level. They were organizing international conferences.”

There’s a wide consensus that today’s undergraduates make up the most talented, accomplished group of polymaths ever assembled in Harvard Yard: there’s nothing surprising about meeting a first-chair cellist in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra who is also a formidable racer for the cycling club, or a student doing original research on interstellar dark matter who organized a relief effort in sub-Saharan Africa. “You could say it’s a high-end problem,” says dean of admissions Bill Fitzsimmons ’67, Ed.D. ’71, “but one of the dilemmas for the kind of multitalented people who come to places like Harvard is that they could do almost anything. And especially if that’s true, you need to think hard about what it is you really value, which direction is right for you.”

The paradox is that students now live in such a blur of activity that idle moments for such introspection are vanishing. The French film director Jean Renoir once declared, “The foundation of all civilization is loitering,” saluting those unstructured chunks of time that give rise to creative ideas. If Renoir is right, and if Harvard students are among the leaders of the future, then civilization is on the precipice: loitering is fast becoming a lost art. And if the tornado of achievement that whirls through Cambridge has its obvious rewards, there are, as with most tornadoes, downsides.

Sleep deprivation, for example: varsity athletes, representing about 20 percent of undergraduates, seem to be the only sizable student category to sleep and rise at roughly conventional hours, according to Harry Lewis ’68, Ph.D. ’74, McKay professor of computer science and former dean of Harvard College. At Becky Cooper’s high school, the standing joke was: “Friends, grades, sleep: you only get two.” Sleep was nearly always the odd one out. Cooper attributes her own frequent low-level infections and colds to exhaustion. Undergraduates tend to push themselves relentlessly and to disbelieve physical limits. “Harvard kids,” Cooper says, “think of themselves as superheroes.”

New technologies vastly enlarge the game of keeping up with the Einsteins. “If you aren’t on Facebook, you feel guilty, you feel like you’re being a bad citizen, or worse, that you are out of it,” says Hobbs professor of cognition and education Howard Gardner ’65, Ph.D. ’71, who studies excellence in the realm of work. “One thing we discovered in our research is that kids look up people whom they don’t know on Facebook, because they want to see how much they’re achieving. If you’re on the Crimson, but someone else is on the Crimson and the swimming team, well, then….”

The explosion of busyness has occurred not in academics (most students still take four courses a semester), but largely in extracurricular activities. “Extracurriculars are now as important as coursework,” says Gardner. “I wouldn’t have said that 40 years ago.” The number of student organizations grew almost sevenfold from 1960 to 2007-08, skyrocketing from 60 groups to 416, although undergraduate enrollment grew only about 10 percent, from about 6,000 to 6,655. In recent years, the College has added an average of 40 to 50 new student groups annually (though about half don’t endure), says David Friedrich, M.T.S. ’04, assistant dean of Harvard College for student life. In singing, for example, there are now 19 small a cappella groups at the College; before the Radcliffe Pitches were founded in 1975, the Harvard Krokodiloes were the sole such group on campus.

Does this mean that students are starting new groups to build their résumés, so they can boast of having been the founder or president or editor-in-chief of an organization? Impossible to say.

“Yes, it can often be frenetic and [done] with an eye toward résumés,” says Friedrich, “but learning outside the classroom through extracurricular opportunities is a vital part of the undergraduate experience here.” And extracurricular experiences may in fact be the strongest preparation for the “real world”; for years, Harvard alumni have achieved notable success in the arts, for example, despite the lack of undergraduate concentrations in the performing arts. Instead, they learned and practiced their crafts at the highest levels in groups like the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, the Harvard Lampoon, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

In Excellence Without a Soul, his 2006 book on the future of liberal education, Harry Lewis relates a conversation with three of his former students who had launched a highly successful Internet start-up. What in their computer-science educations had contributed to their success, Lewis wanted to know. There was an awkward silence, then one spoke up. “I really loved my computer-science education,” he said, “but I could have read books and learned a lot of that on my own. The thing that was really valuable was running the Quincy House Grill.” Lewis explains: “He’d had to get people to show up on time, and make sure there was enough hamburger ordered the day before—but not too much, or he’d have to waste it, and that would cut into his profit margin. He took all this stuff and combined it with his technical skills to become a very successful entrepreneur. The way social progress gets made is by learning to work together, and the real place where people can learn to cooperate is in extracurriculars.”

“There are so many opportunities here, I don’t want to sleep,” declares the preternaturally busy Will Guzick ’11. “I want to soak it all in and make the most of my four years.” Last year he pulled plenty of all-nighters, but this year is “shooting for seven hours a night,” usually rising at 9 A.M. for a day of classes, going to meetings for activities in the evening, and studying in the Quincy House library (open all night) or the dining hall until 2 or 3 A.M. “The man who cleans the dining hall knows me well,” he says, grinning.

Guzick rooms in a centrifugal Quincy House suite with four other driven young men who found themselves together (and awake) only twice during the fall term: once on Guzick’s birthday, and one night when they fortuitously encountered each other in the dining hall “and decided to take a picture to commemorate the occasion.”

Guzick juggles an astonishing array of commitments in addition to five courses for his economics concentration with a secondary field of statistics. He played varsity tennis his first two years, but dropped that 20-to-25-hours-per-week commitment to clear time for other activities. These include the Leadership Institute at Harvard College, which aims to promote leadership on campus; work as a research assistant to a Business School professor, a grader for an Extension School finance course, and as a campus representative for a GMAT tutoring business; the Harvard Undergraduate Economics Association; running (he runs 10 to 15 five-kilometer races per year); working at the Banco Credito del Peru in Lima for four weeks this January; and serving as a peer adviser for nine freshmen and as a drug-and-alcohol peer adviser (he is trying to launch a Friday-night movie series at the Science Center as an alternative to intoxicants). Guzick is also working to organize a series of conferences on French, Italian, and Spanish at Harvard and other colleges because “We don’t have a system of language learning outside the classrooms.”

He’s applying to the Harvard Business School’s new 2 + 2 program for college juniors, which would assure him entry into its two-year M.B.A. program after he’s worked for two years beyond college. Regarding on-campus leadership positions, he says, “From a résumé perspective, yes, you have to have them. From a personal standpoint, they prepare you very well for staying on top of things in the business world.”

The pace of that preparation, though, can be frantic. “People are going nonstop,” says Olivia Goldhill ’11, a philosophy concentrator from England, “and there are a lot of negative implications. You don’t have time to dedicate to your friends or to yourself—or to thoughts that you haven’t been taught to think.” Goldhill, educated at London’s venerable Westminster School, where discussion and debate are the warp and weft of the school day, marvels that, at Harvard, “there are so few intellectual discussions outside of classes. I try to take at least an hour for lunch with friends. There are days, though, that even when you want to go and hang out, everyone else is in their nonstop mode.”

An aspiring journalist, Goldhill herself writes opinion columns for the Crimson; she also volunteers for the Phillips Brooks House Association, tutoring female ex-prisoners for their GEDs and in job skills. But she believes, too, that “People need to have hobbies, not just extracurriculars—things they do for themselves.” (Her own hobbies include reading fiction and plays, going to the theater, and meditation.) “Many have such busy lives building up credentials,” she says. “A lot of extracurriculars are résumé builders, and you sit in these meetings not really doing very much. To me, time with friends is the most important, and to my mind it’s a little bit selfish, putting future jobs before relationships.”

Cradle to Goldman Sachs

“Students are very conscious of what it will take to get into graduate school or to get a job,” says dean of freshmen Tom Dingman ’67, Ed.M. ’73. “I regularly have conversations with freshmen who say things like, ‘This summer, I have a chance to go back to the yacht club where my family has been involved, and I would run the sailing program. But I don’t think I should do that. I should be doing an internship in an office somewhere so that next summer I can build on that, and maybe ultimately get an internship with Goldman Sachs.’ But they’re not paying attention to the things they really enjoy, and not seeing the opportunity to develop themselves holistically—it’s more strategizing about how best to build a launch pad.”

The strategizing starts early; today’s parents groom their children for high achievement in ways that set in motion the culture of scheduled lives and nonstop activity. “This is the play-date generation,” says Kidd. “There was a time when children came home from school and just played randomly with their friends. Or hung around and got bored, and eventually that would lead you on to something. Kids don’t get to do that now. Busy parents book them into things constantly—violin lessons, ballet lessons, swimming teams. The kids get the idea that someone will always be structuring their time for them.” Dingman notes that, “Starting at an earlier age, students feel that their free time should be taken up with purposeful activities. There is less stumbling on things you love and that give you fire in your belly, and more being steered toward pursuits—some of which may, in fact, become passions.”

For her part, Olivia Goldhill recognizes that “filling time with activities can be almost a distraction, so you don’t have to investigate other aspects of life. The reaction to J-term was a good example of people being scared of what they would do if they weren’t given some structure by the University” (see “January Reading,” January-February, page 52).

Home life has changed in ways that would seem to undercut children’s development of autonomy. There was a time when children did their own homework. Now parents routinely “help” them with assignments, making teachers wonder whose work they are really grading. Youngsters formerly played sports and games with other children on a sandlot or pickup basis, not in leagues organized, coached, and officiated by adults; kids had to learn to settle disputes over rules and calls among themselves, not by referring them to grownup zebras. Once, college applicants typically wrote their own applications, including the essays; today, an army of high-paid consultants, coaches, and editors is available to orchestrate and massage the admissions effort.

Adults have taken charge even of recreation, as in play dates. “When birthdays come along, kids have been entertained by magicians,” says Dingman. “Or taken out to Chuck E. Cheese. They are the ‘Chuck E. Cheese generation.’” Having had their parents organize play and social activities, many young people now arrive at college expecting the institution to operate similarly, in loco parentis. “It’s very upsetting to read on [year-end freshman] surveys that people have been spending Friday and Saturday nights doing problem sets, finding it hard to escape from what they characterize as the ‘intense pressure’ of this place,” Dingman adds. “When they identify what they think is lacking, they say, ‘You haven’t organized other things for us’—things like ‘trips to bowling alleys.’ When I was in college, it never occurred to me that it was Harvard’s responsibility to entertain me.” Kidd, too, recalls “complaints from parents that we weren’t providing enough social activity.”

Indeed, parental engagement even in the lives of college-age children has expanded in ways that would have seemed bizarre in the recent past. (Some colleges have actually created a “dean of parents” position—whether identified as such or not—to deal with them.) The “helicopter parents” who hover over nearly every choice or action of their offspring have given way to “snowplow parents” who determinedly clear a path for their child and shove aside any obstacle they perceive in the way.

Some of the impetus for this is probably “overcompensation,” explains Dingman. “With more and more families having both parents working, there’s some guilt, and there’s a sense that ‘When I can be available to you, I’m going to make all things happen for you.’ There’s no recognition that by stepping up to clear the path, they’re really handicapping their sons and daughters, making them unaware that they actually have the capacities to do things themselves.” Parental involvement can reach astonishing extremes. One Chicago father received a call from his Harvard-freshman daughter who had taken the subway into Boston and wanted to know whether to go right or left at a downtown intersection. (He supplied the answer.)

Dingman’s office writes to families of incoming freshmen, asking how Harvard can welcome and support their progeny, and “Oftentimes, we get from parents a very definitive chart of where that student is going,” Dingman says. “We’ll hear, ‘So-and-so has always wanted to be a doctor and will be a pre-med at Harvard, use the summers to work in labs, go to med school, and begin a career in pediatric medicine.’ The parents’ letters are expressed with such certitude—it’s quite remarkable. This doesn’t suggest that the student has much room to explore, or that there’s much support for someone falling in love with a different field of study.”

Today’s college students, partly due to cell phones, texting, and e-mail, “are in remarkably close communication with their parents,” Dingman continues, citing frequent conversations with undergraduates who tell him things like, “‘My mother’s going to kill me because I didn’t get to the [Institute of Politics] Forum last night—Newt Gingrich was speaking, and she said I had to get a ticket.’ My parents never would have known what was happening on campus; nor would they have thought it was their role to push me toward it.” A survey carried out, in collaboration with Cornell and several other colleges, by associate professor of psychiatry Paul Barreira, director of behavioral health and academic counseling for the University Health Services, showed that one-third of undergraduates are in contact with their parents daily.

The parental tendrils can extend even into academic work. In the early 1990s, some undergraduates faxed drafts of term papers home to their parents and received edited, marked-up faxes back; today, e-mail streamlines the process. Barreira cites a study indicating that students who were in frequent contact with parents did better academically; perhaps parents are still “helping” with homework, boosting grades, or perhaps close parent-child ties enhance performance in more indirect, diffuse ways. Barreira doesn’t see reason for alarm. “You hear about parents dictating exactly what is going on with their kids, what courses they are going to take,” he says. “I actually think that’s a minority of students—it may be overplayed.”

Fitzsimmons adds, “Sure, there are more helicopter parents, and they come in all different forms—rich and poor, from all kinds of backgrounds. But for the most part, the helicoptering has worked, and is perceived as a positive thing by students.” He cites a study by the College Board indicating that more than 60 percent of students felt their parents had the “right” level of involvement in the admissions process, and that only 5 to 6 percent felt their parents were overly involved.

The Ecology of Overachievement

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the composition of Harvard College changed dramatically. The funnel of access became tighter numerically (20 percent of applicants were admitted in the mid 1960s, versus 7 percent today), yet broadened for greater diversity in race, sex, ethnicity, geographical origin, and social class. “Twenty-five percent of my class [1967] was on some kind of need-based financial aid,” says Fitzsimmons. “It’s a little over 60 percent for the current freshman class. True, we have a better financial-aid program now, so the comparison isn’t exact, but there’s no question that this place has many more people from the bottom quarter and bottom half of the American income distribution. Now, about a quarter of the class comes from families earning less than $80,000 per year.” New financial-aid initiatives have accelerated change in the last five or six years; consequently, for many students now, “This is their big chance,” Fitzsimmons says. “They have no safety net, no family money—or ‘social capital’—to fall back on.”

Harry Lewis explains: “People who come, on average, from more comfortable backgrounds are less worried about getting a job after college than those who are very strongly motivated to do better than their parents did. The second group are their parents’ best hope for moving the family up in the world. So there’s more upward mobility, which makes people more energized and ambitious, and sometimes driven—and I don’t consider ‘driven’ itself to be a negative term. That helps create the energy.”

Another shift is that Harvard has become a far more international university than it was a few decades ago. “Harvard may or may not be the greatest university in America,” says Howard Gardner, “but it is clearly the greatest one in the world” in that it’s known from Malaysia to Chile to Sri Lanka, whereas references to Yale, Stanford, and Princeton draw only blank stares even in western Europe. “To get in, you’re competing with people all over the world,” he continues, “which makes it an incredibly selective process.”

Hard-working, enterprising international students may well be raising the benchmark on achievement for everyone, as well as enlarging students’ reference group to global scale. “The average American kid does very little homework,” explains Fitzsimmons. “You can find statistics that show high-school seniors averaging 45 minutes to an hour of homework per night. In many other countries, the norm is four, five, or six hours of homework each day.”

Perhaps the pendulum has swung to an extreme, and a reaction will set in, with a new balance asserting itself. But right now, many College students seem to suffer from a horror vacui, a fear of empty spaces, whether those be the J-term, a leisurely summer near the water, or simply an unplanned hour.

“Like one of those puzzles in which you try to rearrange little tiles—to get the number 1 in the upper left corner, and so on—it’s the empty space that makes the other squares maneuverable,” says Dingman. “Without it, the pattern can be fixed and not open to new permutations. I tell students that’s a good way to think about their lives: if they don’t have any empty space, there’s not likely to be any movement. It’s really in those moments where they have created windows of free time that they may learn the most about themselves and end up with the kind of movement they’re looking for.”

One undergraduate who seems to have a feel for empty spaces is Olivia Goldhill, who makes sure there is time in her day for friends, unhurried meals, and cultivating her inner garden. Although she had to take a required quantitative reasoning course to graduate, “I wasn’t willing to put in vast hours of work just to get an A,” she declares. “I think a lot of other students would.” She also feels less pressure because, given her career interests (journalism) and the likelihood of returning to England, “My GPA won’t matter.” Her family, too, has a relaxed, low-pressure attitude about grades. “My mom said she doesn’t want me to get As,” Goldhill says, smiling. “Because that would mean I was missing the college experience.”

Craig A. Lambert ’69, Ph.D. ’78, is deputy editor of this magazine.

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Applicants to Tufts University Turn to YouTube

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: February 22, 2010

MEDFORD, Mass. — There are videos showing off card tricks, horsemanship, jump rope and stencils — and lots of rap songs, including one by a young woman who performed two weeks after oral surgery, with her mouth still rubber-banded shut.

Matt Golden’s YouTube video for Tufts University.

Multimedia

Interactive Feature

Tufts, Please Pick Me

There is also Rhaina Cohen’s video, working off the saying “You never truly know someone until you have walked a mile in her shoes,” and featuring the blue sandals from her bat mitzvah, the white sneakers she bought cheaply in Britain, and the black heels in which she “stood next to Hillary Clinton.”

It is reading season at the Tufts University admissions office, time to plow through thousands of essays and transcripts and recommendations — and this year, for the first time, short YouTube videos that students could post to supplement their application.

About 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants submitted videos. Some have gotten thousands of hits on YouTube.

Tufts, which, like the University of Chicago, is known for its quirky applications, invited the YouTube videos. Along with the required essays, Tufts has for years offered applicants an array of optional essays — “Are we alone?” is one of this year’s topics — or a chance to “create something” out of a sheet of paper. So it was not too far a stretch, this year, to add the option of posting a one-minute video that “says something about you.”

Lee Coffin, the dean of undergraduate admissions, said the idea came to him last spring as he watched a YouTube video someone had sent him. “I thought, ‘If this kid applied to Tufts, I’d admit him in a minute, without anything else,’ ” Mr. Coffin said.

For their videos, some students sat in their bedrooms and talked earnestly into the camera, while others made day-in-the-life montages, featuring buddies, burgers and lacrosse practice. A budding D.J. sent clips from one of his raves, with a suggestion that such parties might be welcome at Tufts.

A few students created elaborate productions.

“We’ve got some who are really good with the technology,” Mr. Coffin said. “There’s a real technical savvy out there in this generation, and this lets them show off their splicing, their stop action, their animation. Some of the engineering applicants show us what they’ve made. One kid is talking, and then all of a sudden, he’s in the water, to show off his underwater camera.”

While elephants are a common theme in the videos — Jumbo the elephant is Tufts’s mascot — only Michael Klinker went so far as to build a small remote-control blue-elephant helicopter that flies merrily around his backyard.

Some of the videos have developed a YouTube following. The popular favorite is probably Amelia Downs, with more than 6,000 views for her video combining “two of my favorite things: being a nerd and dancing,” in which she performs a bar graph, a scatter plot, a pie chart, and a sine and cosine graph.

“I tried tap dancing at first, because that’s what I do most, but we only have a cheap digital camera, and the sound came out badly,” said Ms. Downs, who is from Charlotte, N.C. “My best friend filmed me, and we did each shot once or twice. I did the editing in about an hour, and the computer crashed five times while I was doing it.”

Still, Ms. Downs said she thought it was “very cool” that Tufts invited videos.

For a number of colleges, this is the year of the video, what with Yale’s 16-minute YouTube offering, “That’s Why I Chose Yale,” a spoof of “High School Musical,” and “Reading Season,” a musical by admissions counselors at the University of Delaware.

Even without prompting, admissions officials say, a growing number of students submit videos. Maria Laskaris, the dean of admissions at Dartmouth, noticed the trend last year, and said this year had brought even more videos, mostly showcasing music, theater or dance talents.

For Tufts, the videos have been a delightful way to get to know the applicants.

“At heart, this is all about a conversation between a kid and an admissions officer,” Mr. Coffin said. “You see their floppy hair and their messy bedrooms, and you get a sense of who they are. We have a lot of information about applicants, but the videos let them share their voice.”

Videos are genuinely optional, he said, so not having one does not count against a student — and a bad video would not hurt an applicant’s admission chances “unless there was something really disgusting.”

Mr. Coffin remains committed to the traditional essay-writing requirement. “We will never abandon writing,” he said. “No matter what, it’s important to be able to express yourself elegantly in writing.”

But, he said, it is good for Tufts to show new-media savvy as well.

“Kids who are 17 and 18 are very facile with new media,” he said, “and one of the challenges for colleges right now is to stay ahead of that curve.”

To his surprise, about 60 percent of the videos are from women, and two-thirds are from financial-aid applicants, easing concern that the video option might help the already-advantaged affluent applicants.

Mr. Coffin said he never worried about YouTube privacy issues.

“These kids blog, they tweet, they don’t seem to worry much about privacy,” he said. “Maybe I was naïve, but it didn’t occur to me that these videos would be so public, and so followed.”

While the application allowed students to put their video on any easily accessible Web site, he said almost everybody used YouTube.

Having seen the popularity of the videos — and heard from current Tufts students who want their favorite applicants admitted — Mr. Coffin now plans to put the best ones into a “Tufts Idol” contest once admissions season is over.

“So much of what we do in admissions is opaque, and that contributes to all the frenzy,” he said. “This is something that’s completely transparent.”

Why Minority Students Don't Graduate From College

American universities are accepting more minorities than ever. Graduating them is another matter.

By Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 19, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, was justifiably proud of Bowdoin's efforts to recruit minority students. Since 2003 the small, elite liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, has boosted the proportion of so-called underrepresented minority students (blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, about 30 percent of the U.S. population) in entering freshman classes from 8 percent to 13 percent. "It is our responsibility, given our place in the world, to reach out and attract students to come to our kinds of places," he told a NEWSWEEK reporter. But Bowdoin has not done quite as well when it comes to actually graduating minorities. While nine out of 10 white students routinely get their diplomas within six years, only seven out of 10 black students made it to graduation day in several recent classes.

The picture of diversity—black, white, and brown students cavorting or studying together out on the quad—is a stock shot in college catalogs. The picture on graduation day is a good deal more monochromatic. "If you look at who enters college, it now looks like America," says Hilary Pennington, director of postsecondary programs for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has closely studied enrollment patterns in higher education. "But if you look at who walks across the stage for a diploma, it's still largely the white, upper-income population."

The United States once had the highest graduation rate of any nation. Now it stands 10th. For the first time in American history, there is the risk that the rising generation will be less well educated than the previous one. The graduation rate among 25- to 34-year-olds is no better than the rate for the 55- to 64-year-olds who were going to college more than 30 years ago. Studies show that more and more poor and nonwhite students aspire to graduate from -college—but their graduation rates fall far short of their dreams. The graduation rates for blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans lag far be-hind the graduation rates for whites and Asians. As the minority population grows in the United States, low college--graduation rates become a threat to national -prosperity.

The problem is pronounced at public universities. In 2007 (the last year for which Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group, has comparative statistics) the University of Wisconsin–-Madison—one of the top five or so "public Ivies"—graduated 81 percent of its white students within six years, but only 56 percent of its blacks. At less-selective state schools, the numbers get worse. During the same time frame, the University of Northern Iowa graduated 67 percent of its white students, but only 39 percent of its blacks. Community colleges have low graduation rates generally—but rock-bottom rates for minorities. A recent review of California community colleges found that while a third of the Asian students picked up their degrees, only 15 percent of African-Americans did so as well.

Private colleges and universities generally do better, partly because they offer smaller classes and more personal attention. But when it comes to a significant graduation gap, Bowdoin has company. Nearby Colby College logged an 18-point difference between white and black graduates in 2007 and 25 points in 2006. Middlebury College in Vermont, another topnotch school, had a 19-point gap in 2007 and a 22-point gap in 2006. The most selective private schools—-Harvard, Yale, and -Princeton—show almost no gap between black and white graduation rates. But that may have more to do with their ability to cherry-pick the best students. According to data gathered by Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier, the most selective schools are more likely to choose blacks who have at least one immigrant parent from Africa or the Caribbean than black students who are descendants of American slaves. According to Guinier's data, the latter perform less well academically.

"Higher education has been able to duck this issue for years, particularly the more selective schools, by saying the onus is on the individual student," says Pennington of the Gates Foundation. "If they fail, it's their fault." Some critics blame affirmative action—students admitted with lower test scores and grades from shaky high schools often struggle at elite schools. But a bigger problem may be that poor high schools often send their students to colleges for which they are, in educators' jargon, "undermatched": they could get into more elite, richer schools, but instead go to community colleges and low-rated state schools that lack the resources to help them. Some schools out for profit cynically jack up tuitions and count on student loans and federal aid to foot the bill—knowing full well that the students won't make it. "Colleges know that a lot of kids they take will end up in remedial classes, for which they'll get no college credit and then they'll flunk out," says Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust. "The school gets to keep the money, but the kid leaves with loads of debt and no degree and no ability to get a better job. Colleges are not holding up their end."

A college education is getting ever more expensive. Since 1982 tuitions have been rising at roughly twice the rate of inflation. University administrators insist that most of those hikes are matched by increased scholarship grants or loans, but the recession has slashed private endowments and cut into state spending on high-er education. In 2008 the net cost of attending a four-year public -university—after financial aid—equaled 28 percent of median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of median family income. More and more scholarships are based on merit, not need. Poorer students are not always the best-informed consumers. Often they wind up deeply in debt or simply unable to pay after a year or two and must drop out.

There once was a time when universities took a perverse pride in their attrition rates. Professors would begin the year by saying, "Look to the right and look to the left. One of you is not going to be here by the end of the year." But such a Darwinian spirit is beginning to give way as at least a few colleges face up to the graduation gap. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the gap has been roughly halved over the last three years. The university has poured resources into peer counseling to help students from inner-city schools adjust to the rigor and faster pace of a university classroom—and also to help minority students overcome the stereotype that they are less qualified. Wisconsin has a "laserlike focus" on building up student skills in the first three months, according to vice provost Damon Williams.

State and federal governments could sharpen that focus everywhere by broadly publishing minority graduation rates. (For now students and counselors must find their way to the Web site of the Education Trust, which compares data obtained from schools by the federal government.) For years private colleges such as Princeton and MIT have had success bringing minorities onto campus in the summer before freshman year to give them a head start on college-level courses. The newer trend is to start recruiting poor and nonwhite students as early as the seventh grade, using innovative tools like hip-hop competitions to identify kids with sophisticated verbal finesse. Such programs can be expensive, of course, but cheap compared with the millions already invested in scholarships and grants for kids who have little chance to graduate without special support.

With effort and money, the graduation gap can be closed. Washington and Lee is a small, selective school with a preppy feel in Lexington, Va. Its student body is less than 5 percent black and less than 2 percent Latino. While the school usually graduated about 90 percent of its whites, the graduation rate of its blacks and Latinos had dipped to 63 percent by 2007. "We went through a dramatic shift," says Dawn Watkins, the vice president for student affairs. The school aggressively pushed mentoring of minorities by other students and "partnering" with parents at a special pre-enrollment session. The school had its first-ever black homecoming. Last spring the school graduated the same proportion of minorities as it did whites. If the United States wants to keep up in the global economic race, it will have to pay systematic attention to graduating minorities, not just enrolling them.