My A.T. Still University Experience : international education

High Hopes in the Middle Kingdom

SteveFoerster — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:25:00 GMT

“Chinese researchers have more than doubled their output of scientific papers and now are second only to the United States in terms of volume” — Reuters

A trio of recent articles covers the ambitious goals that the Chinese have as they continue to transform their university system into one ready to compete against any in the world.

First comes the Times Higher Education supplement, which has an article describing the progress that China's higher education system has made from a near standstill during the Cultural Revolution. The article is reasonably upbeat, but it also highlights some of the challenges that the system faces, including corruption, and a lack of faculty who hold doctorates. Another obstacle that the article mentions that I expect will be a continuing source of tension is the lack of history of academic freedom in China. A country that hides behind censorship cannot, by definition, fully take advantage of the discovery and dissemination of information. The article describes China's political elite as being "obsessed" with the idea that its C9 group of universities will become world class, hopefully they will see the barrier that censorship presents to this goal and react usefully.

The second article relates to this; it's a report from Reuters that Chinese universities are now second only to those in the U.S. when it comes to research output. As I said, though, I have to wonder what subjects of research are completely unfettered. Perhaps it's not surprising that the bulk of this research is in the physical sciences and in technology, which are less likely to be controversial than research in the social sciences. Another issue not addressed is how much of that research is actually useful. If all one is counting is the number of research papers published, and not taking note of such additional metrics as how often those papers are subsequently cited by later research papers, then a complete picture is unavailable.

The third article is from China Daily, reporting on the dismissal of Zhou Ji, China's Minister of Education. The fact that the article would actually refer to the fellow as unpopular is a statement. By comparison, how many Americans can name the current Secretary of Education? Now, I realize that the U.S. education system is still largely decentralized, but with Washington wielding more and more influence over the sector, it may be that the two systems will become more and more comparable. And it's especially interesting to note that Mr. Zhou wasn't dismissed for causing problems, but merely being perceived as too slow to solve them.

As I've said before, the Chinese have a long way to go to reach their goal of a system on par with the best of the world. But they already have the most important thing they need to succeed — the will to do so.

Next up, why copyright means that students who are U.S. taxpayers are paying twice for academic research.

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The Chinese Ivy League

SteveFoerster — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:00:00 GMT

“I am [in Asia] because this is the exciting part of the world. This is the future, and I want my children to grow up knowing Asia, and knowing things Chinese.” — Jim Rogers, global investor and self-made billionaire

I first got the idea that things were changing about four years ago, when I was working as an international student advisor for a small university in Washington, D.C. I got into a conversation with one of my Chinese students, and she told me that while it used to be that Chinese students would do whatever it took to remain in the U.S. after graduation, it was starting to be that many would prefer to return to China, where they found their professional opportunities were better, their stress levels were lower, and their standard of living was higher. I figured then that the next step would likely be that fewer Chinese students would want to come to the U.S. to study in the first place.

So now I've just read a recent article from Xinhua, China's official news service, that suggests that the Chinese are well on their way when it comes to developing a competitive higher education infrastructure. The article explains that they are forming an academic conference of their top nine universities to form a "Chinese Ivy League", whose members are streamlining their cooperation, and who by working together will be better able to compete against any other school in the world.

In the meantime, while it wasn't my intention, I've been following the advice of global investment guru Jim Rogers, who when asked how to prepare for the future advises people to ensure their children learn Mandarin Chinese. As it happens, my twelve year old son is taking Mandarin Chinese as an elective at his school starting this year. I had initially steered him toward Spanish, thinking he'd be more likely to get use out of it, but he was insistent that Chinese was what he wanted to study, and thinking more broadly, perhaps he was right.

Now, I realize that just because there's an article from Xinhua, that doesn't mean that the end of the dominance of American higher education is at hand. And even the annual ranking of world universities from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a member of this new consortium, still shows that American schools still hold most of the top positions, and that their Chinese counterparts are still struggling to get into the top one hundred. But momentum may be on the side of the Chinese schools. And my son has suggested he'd be interested in attending university there rather than in the U.S. If he's not alone, then perhaps it's shaping up to be an interesting century for U.S. dominance of higher education — and I do mean interesting in the Chinese sense.

Next up, what's wrong with for-profit schools?

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Open University Opening to Americans?

SteveFoerster — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:41:00 GMT

“The English never draw a line without blurring it.” — Winston Churchill

One of the pioneers of distance learning — one of our forefathers, if you will — is the Open University in the UK. Founded forty years ago, it has grown over the years into being one of the success stories of distance learning, now with nearly 170,000 students. They've gone from being considered a questionable experiment to being one of the best respected universities in Britain.

Despite this, most Americans have never heard of it, because they limited their enrollment to those in the UK, and then to those elsewhere in Europe. So when my friend Gavin Baker asked me about one of their Master's degree programs, I responded that sure it was probably a great program, but alas, as an American he wouldn't be able to enroll in it.

Ah, but it seems that in this case what I know wasn't so. The program in question is a Master's degree in Society and Science and it requires three courses, one that is a project and two others from a list of three. Gavin pointed out that the site has a list of acceptable countries for applicants, and that the U.S. is on it. And he's right, the list of courses available to Americans includes all four of the ones that pertain to this degree, and many more besides. Moreover, at three courses required and £2000 per course, the total fees are six thousand pounds, a shade more than ten thousand dollars at today's exchange rate. (Note that their courses are very comprehensive, about the equivalent of four courses at most U.S. universities.) For a Master's degree from a world class university that's a very good deal.

So now I'm intrigued. The list of courses available to Americans was much longer than I expected, and evidently there's been a change in the "Yankee go home" attitude that the Open University used to have. They attempted to enter the U.S. market years ago with a failed "Open University of the United States" that was a separate institution based in the U.S., only to find that this market was a tough nut to crack. With their excellent reputation and reasonable tuition rate, however, it could very well be that this renewed willingness to serve American students could now position them as a strong new competitor in the American distance learning marketplace, a position that eluded them last time around.

Next up, it seems that distance learners aren't a bunch of cheaters after all.

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Considering Doctoral Programs

SteveFoerster — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Getting there is half the fun

What to do for my Bachelor’s degree was easy: I simply wanted the fastest route to a credible degree so that I’d be eligible to apply for a Master’s degree program. What to do for my Master’s was easy too: I chose that program around the same time as I chose what to do to complete a Bachelor’s degree, thinking of the two together as sort of two phases of the same plan.

Deciding what to do for doctoral work, however, was a torturous process that took several years and involved a search that literally covered the globe. Especially after I started working in higher education, I knew I’d want a doctoral degree of some sort, but none of the ones with which I was familiar jumped out at me the way that my other two programs had.

I started by putting together a set of criteria based on my goals and circumstances.

I knew I wasn’t interested in being a full time university professor, so I didn’t have to stick only to those programs that might make me competitive for the tenure track. This was actually very liberating, in that otherwise I’d have had to stick to traditional classroom-based programs.
I wanted something in Education, IT, or Educational Technology.
I knew I wanted to do this as inexpensively as I could, since I’d be racking up student loan debt to make this happen. For those who don’t have kids, it’s practical to pay for graduate study by taking an assistantship and working for the school in exchange for free tuition and a small stipend. With my four kids, though, those meager stipends just weren’t going to cut it.
I knew I wanted something online. By this time I was back in the Washington, D.C. area, and while there are some world class schools here, they’re all very expensive, very inconvenient, or both.
I didn’t have to worry about doing something international. I met my wife when I was living in the Caribbean, and eventually we plan to return to Dominica permanently. While Americans sometimes think the world stops at the border, and find the idea of studying through foreign universities to be strange, or even suspect, in Dominica that’s not the case, so I was at liberty to consider foreign options.

Because of all these points, I started by looking at doctoral programs at South African universities. Dominica is a member of the (British) Commonwealth, and since South Africa is too I knew that no one in Dominica would think twice about credentials from their universities. In fact, South Africa has a number of world class universities, including four that routinely make the annual SJTU list of the world’s 500 best.

These universities don’t necessarily offer distance programs as such, but Master’s and doctoral degrees can be earned there without taking courses by conducting laborious research projects that lead to a dissertation that’s even longer than those required by American doctoral programs.

In addition to several South African universities, I was also attracted to India’s Indira Gandhi National Open University, which in the last year or so has made a concerted effort to reach out to international students who might be interested in a research-only doctoral program.

The financial upside of these sorts of programs was that they are among the best values in higher education on the planet: one can do a complete PhD at a South African university for less than three thousand dollars. IGNOU is comparable to that as well. The downside, however, is that often more than one trip to the university might be required, say for colloquia or for an oral or written defense of one’s research. Given that a trip to either of those countries would cost several thousand dollars, a few required trips would negate the financial advantage.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t also look at American programs. I considered programs at New Mexico State University, Liberty University, and Dakota State University, among others. I’ll talk about which ones I considered, why I liked them, and why I didn’t apply to them in later posts.

Nevertheless, after having considered many different programs at many different schools, I thought I had settled on IGNOU, where I planned to do research on perceptions of higher education students in the developing world.

But that’s not what I ultimately decided: eventually I switched gears and decided to do the Doctor of Health Education program at A.T. Still University. Why the change of heart? I’ll explain that in the next installment.

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