China Background: Final Installment (For Now...)

One final installment of background readings for China -- (see here and here for previous posts)...

The Economist magazine also maintains up-to-date profile on China. I'll check it regularly.

This week they publish a special report on China's hunger for natural resources. The report comes in several brief articles, but it's definitely worth scanning.

China Background Reading: Part II

Earlier this week I shared some recent reading I'm doing on China. It's on my mind because I encounter so many significant connections between the University of Missouri and the institutions and people of China.

Missouri has deep - and wide - collaborations with Chinese partners. For example, work in China by our School of Journalism goes back 100 years. The Colleges of Engineering, Agriculture, Education, and Arts and Science and other academic divisions all engage in active China research projects. Our campus is also sending more students to study in China, and we're seeing rapid steady growth in applications and enrollment of Chinese students.

As Director of the International Center, I stand in the middle of all this productive, multi-directional traffic. I keep thinking that the connections I witness are very important to the past, present and future of our university. If that's true, I need to learn a lot more.

In case you're interested, here are two more sources I've found for my edification.

1. For general purposes, there's a great and current China profile published by the BBC. This provides a really useful current background at your fingertips. (Of course, this goes for other countries of interest, as well).
2. For a recent and thorough overview of higher education issues in China, see this recently published report from the OECD.

According to this report, the potential student population for higher education is growing rapidly in China, and the demand for education far outstrips their current capacity.

The report also reaches the following additional conclusions:

A major task is to clarify the mission of all types of tertiary education institutions to meet varying needs, while ensuring consistency in the performance standards of institutions to improve equity and efficiency.

Opportunities for access and success are unequally distributed. This reflects differences in economic circumstances of regions, and the capacity and quality of their primary and secondary school systems.

China must take particular care to balance the need to build research-intensive globally competitive universities and the need to build the capacity of other institutions to contribute to national and regional needs.

Educational authorities and institutions should engage more directly with employers, to identify changing job requirements and monitor employers’ expectations of graduates and satisfaction with their performance.

There must be a higher level of investment in the national quality assurance system and a more nationally consistent approach to quality control.

Further enlargement of China’s national innovation system will require continuing efforts to build basic research capacity in selected universities, increase the pool of science and technology researchers and promote stronger processes of knowledge exchange.

The internationalisation of tertiary education and research in China is changing the nature of educational demand as well as supply, leading to new pressures on national policy frameworks, including qualifications recognition, tuition pricing, quality assurance and consumer protection.

In my opinion -- you could make very similar points about higher education in the US.

Get a Passport!

Through the International Center, the University of Missouri is a founding partner in the Institute of International Education's "Get a Passport" campaign.

The program is designed to motivate more people to study abroad.

For more information about Missouri's involvement, check here.

My Reading List: China

This week I hope to catch up on readings on China. On Sunday, The New York Times Book Review highlighted several new works, including James Fallow's, Postcards from Tomorrow Square. This review was written by Jonathan Spence, a celebrated scholar in the history of China, and author of such books as The Search for Modern China and Treason by the Book.

In this book, Fallows attempts to give us panoramic views of contemporary China.

Here's the summary from Spence's review:

What then is of enduring interest in Fallows’ observations about China? First, he has created portraits that illuminate the fragility and hustle of the Chinese pattern of growth, its constantly shifting boundaries, reminding us that nothing of this current growth should be seen as permanent. Fallows rightly emphasizes the deeply rooted poverty and the accompanying perils and opportunities that are present in China’s bypassed far-western regions. He shows us — for China’s economic life as a whole, and in response to global patterns — that China’s strength is not just that it is cheap but that it is fast. He shows us how unclear China’s goals are, how opaque its political system remains, how messy and ineffective and arbitrary its social controls can be. At the same time, he shows the remarkable inventiveness and energy that China’s entrepreneurs can bring to global competition. Perhaps most important to Fallows (and to us), he shows that the worst thing the United States can do is to cut itself off from China’s skills and opportunities.

For Fallows, the effort that the United States should (and must) make is to open itself to the Chinese, to develop the areas where mutual cooperation is feasible and valuable, to respect China’s brainpower and do everything possible to recreate the United States in Chinese minds as a focus for research and a potential source of fruitful collaboration. The venues for this collaboration range from basic agriculture to banking, from global warming and the conservation of natural resources to the reconfiguring of Chinese views of their own future. If China has taught him one key thing, Fallows suggests, it’s that a meeting of the minds from both societies is essential to the well-being of all.

The Art and Politics of (Global) Science

I've been reading a recently published book called The Art and Politics of Science by Harold Varmus. Dr. Varmus is a Nobel Laureate in medicine, and the former Director of the National Institute of Health. For a good overview of the book, check out this review in the New York Times.

I definitely recommend this work to scholars who want to enhance their political skills - and to anyone who's life depends on science. (In other words, the book deserves a broad audience).

The chapter most pertinent to this blog is called,"Global Science and Global Health". It's near the back of the book, (chapter 14) but you may want to jump right here from the start. Here, Varmus draws on his own experience and the work of economist Jeffrey Sachs to make three points:

1. The world's future depends on major improvements in health in the developing countries.
2. Such improvements will require scientists (and their home institutions) to work in global networks. In fact, more hubs of research excellence must be based in developing countries.
3. This will require substantial funding increases in global health research. (See this WHO Report for a detailed estimate of funding needs).
   

In this economy, these points may seem trite or politically impossible. However, Varmus makes a pretty compelling case.

Read this chapter -- and another Varmus speech in which he proposes a Global Science Corps to address these issues.

Visa Delays May Drive International Students Away

This story in the New York Times reports on difficulties that seem to be more common for international students and scholars in the US. Obtaining visa documents takes more time, and the length of time required is not predictable.

The problems are attributed to a shortage of staff in the US State Department. However, students and visiting scholars can find delays costly, stressful and sometimes, career-altering.

If the delays persist, Missouri's best and brightest international students and visiting scholars may choose to further their research in a different country. This would greatly diminish our research capacity and our abilities to prepare students to communicate across cultures.

Evaluating Chinese Students' Experience Studying Abroad

I read with interest a study by Simpson and Tan (2009) published in the Journal of Studies In International Education. The study tracked the experience of 160 Chinese students enrolled in New Zealand universities.

The study was conducted in the context of very rapid growth in international student population. In 1999, there were approximately 28,000 non-resident students in New Zealand. Five years later, this number had increased to ~ 120,000.

When growth is this fast, universities are tempted to see the numbers as new revenue streams and only in aggregate terms. In other words, we lose track of the quality and importance of individual student experience.

For the long term, I think universities need to pay much more attention to investigating the learning experience of all students. However, as student applications from China, India and other countries grow, we should start by focusing on these special populations.

Simpson and Tan (2009) adapt a SERVQUAL method to ask four key questions:

1. What are the primary factors that students consider when evaluating the overall quality of their educational experience?
2. What is the relative importance they assign to each of these factors?
3. To what extent did their educational experience meet their expectations?
4. What are the policy implications of these questions for universities?