GLOBAL:Higher education challenges post-2015 – UNESCO

Wachira Kigotho09 May 2014 Issue No:319

 

Unequal access to university education is likely to persist in most countries globally despite concerted attempts to expand opportunities by 2030, according to a UNESCO Position Paper on Education Post-2015.

It warns that the problem will not be limited to scarcity of places: there will also be a knowledge divide caused by lack of chances to acquire skills in technology.

Notably, considerable disparities will be experienced in most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the total number of entrants to education declines steeply as students move from primary to higher levels of education, in comparison to other regions of the world.

The crux of the matter, says the position paper, is that the quality of schooling in many countries has continued to suffer from limited learning resources, teacher shortages, teacher absenteeism, and distance and safety to travel to and from school.

Such factors result in high drop-out rates, especially among girls.

In the face of growing concern about increasing global social inequity, unequal participation in development and social unrest, UNESCO says more attention should be paid to the central role of education in promoting peace and social cohesion.

“Education is a right that transforms lives when it is accessible to all, relevant and underpinned by core shared values,” said UNESCO Director-general Irina Bukova.

“Because quality education is the most influential force for alleviating poverty, improving health and livelihoods, increasing prosperity and shaping more inclusive, sustainable and peaceful societies, it is in everyone's interest to ensure that it is at the centre of the post-2015 development agenda.”

Post-2015 educational imperatives

UNESCO identifies six educational imperatives for the post-2015 development agenda:

• Equitable access to quality education for children, youth and adults should be provided for all, from early childhood to higher education.
  
• Quality education and learning at all levels and in all settings should be at the core of the post-2015 education agenda.
  
• A focus on equity is paramount and particular attention should be given to marginalised groups.
  
• Gender equality requires continued and central attention.
  
• Opportunities to acquire knowledge and skills for sustainable development, global citizenship and the world of work must be enhanced.
  
• Lifelong learning is a central principle of the post-2015 education agenda. Flexible lifelong and life-wide learning opportunities should be provided through formal, non-formal and informal pathways, including by harnessing the potential of ICTs to create a new culture of learning.
  

Taking into account that higher education in the past has not always delivered better working skills, especially in developing countries, the underlying challenge for the post-2015 education agenda is to increase relevant skills and lifelong learning opportunities.

UNESCO is urging countries to expand their tertiary education systems in order to allow the most qualified students to access studies leading to university diplomas and degrees – and to improve quality so that students succeed one they have accessed high-level education.

“An increase in access to and attainment of quality tertiary education is central to ensuring better living conditions and getting access to specialised and better-paid jobs,” says the UN agency.

A skills mismatch, joblessness

Such sentiments were also expressed in an OECD study conducted with the Ford Foundation. According to their report, All on Board: Making inclusive growth happen, a skills mismatch is now a serious problem in most developing countries.

“The issue is of great worry in that joblessness is more widespread in developing countries among the highly educated than among individuals with primary levels of education or less,” said Angel Gurria, OECD secretary general, in a report released last week.

Describing the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, the report noted that a significantly high number of tertiary graduates have careers in the social sciences, humanities or law, rather than in technology or science-related disciplines.

“Recruitment work agencies in these countries report scarcity of tertiary level graduates qualified for technical fields, such as the extractive industries, logistics, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, manufacturing and agribusiness,” the report notes.

An emerging scenario in many countries is that a tertiary degree is not guaranteeing a job, as a result of poor student choices or mismatches between skills and what job markets need.

“Quite often, although skills are a powerful determinant of employability, there is a mismatch between the qualifications of workers and the demands of employers, which implies a waste of human capital,” said Gurria.

According to the OECD report, the global distribution of university education-acquired skills among the adult population post-2015 and beyond will continue to be largely determined by socio-economic background and status.

Disparities in access and gender

“Disparities in access to higher education persist regionally within countries, driven by factors such as wealth, location and gender,” says UNESCO.

For instance, in Latin America more than 70% of children whose parents are tertiary educated also complete tertiary studies, but only 3.1% of children with parents who did not complete primary school attain this level of education.

There are various barriers to higher education, including for young people living in rural areas. UNESCO predicts that in the post-2015 period and beyond, access to higher education in developing countries will become harder for young people in urban slums.

Interestingly, whereas female enrolment at tertiary level has grown almost twice as fast as that of men over the last four decades in most countries as a result of social mobility, enhanced income potential and international pressure to narrow the gender gap, there are indications that gender equality will require continued central attention in post-2015 era.

According to Edward Fiske, principal author of UNESCO’s World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education, a group of developing countries – including Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Tajikistan – have university enrolments heavily skewed in favour of men.

In contrast, a range of small island states in the Pacific including Anguilla, Antigua, Belize, Bermuda, Dominica, Jamaica and St Lucia, have more women than men in their higher education systems. Other countries in this category are Iceland, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Significant differences are expected to persist post-2015 in the extent to which men and women pursue education at various levels.

Developing and implementing a post-2015 agenda

UNESCO is urging countries to develop a global post-2015 education agenda based on lessons learned from the Education for All initiative and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

“However such approaches should be embedded in national educational plans in order to strike a balance between the globally-comparable and measurable targets and their national adaptability,” says UNESCO.

According to the position paper, in their efforts to implement proposed post-2015 education development goals, governments are being encouraged to provide free and compulsory basic education as well as improve access to higher levels of learning.

They are also being encouraged to strengthen participatory governance and accountability mechanisms, and improve planning and monitoring processes at all levels of education.

“In addition, strong partnerships are required in order to contribute to the common goal of education for all and ensuring everyone’s right to education is fulfilled,” says UNESCO.

In Sub-Saharan African and other developing countries, governments will be required to establish a broad coalition of partners including stakeholders from international donor groups and charities, civil society, academia and the private sector.

“Even then, monitoring and accountability mechanisms for the post-2015 education agenda should be country-driven while UNESCO will provide institutional capacities in developing countries,” said Bukova in a statement.

UNESCO is in the process of ensuring that the future education agenda is fully reflected and anchored within the overall framework of the global post-2015 development agenda.

On the delivery of relevant higher education skills, UNESCO affirms that it will continue to encourage the use of technology for online and distance learning. Tertiary education systems are being urged to establish appropriate, high quality massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

UNESCO expects the post-2015 education agenda to be clearly defined, balanced and holistic, with a lifelong learning approach.

A strong common strand running through UNESCO’s post-2015 education policy paper is that investing in relevant higher education and skills will pay long-term dividends for economies and enhance the abilities of individuals to be competitive in the job market.
 

GLOBAL:The end of academic journal editors?

Jüri Allik09 May 2014 Issue No:319

 

The model of scientific publishing where the reader pays for the costs of publishing seems abnormal. It is clear that new knowledge is mainly beneficial to the public. As most science is done with the taxpayer’s money, it would be expected that all scientific results achieved with such support must be publicly available.

The United States Congress has taken this seriously and the Federal Research Public Access Act was proposed in 2006, ordering all publications using federal money to be publicly accessible. What does this mean? It means that many US scientists can no longer publish in journals that request money from readers in exchange for access to the content.

Right away, publishers smelled the possibility of further profits and made a proposal for those impacted by the act to make their articles publicly accessible by covering not only the publishing costs but the owners’ sturdy profit, too. As a result, some articles in the electronic versions of closed journals bear the ‘public access’ tag.

At the beginning of 2000, Nobel prize winner Harold Varmus, Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown and computer scientist Michael Eisen posted a petition in which they called on all scientists to boycott science journals with closed access. Journals with closed access are those that request payment in order to read the entire year’s worth of issues, a single issue or a single article.

At that time, the great majority of scientific journals were closed access. A reader who hadn’t paid for access could only read the title and abstract. Acknowledging the publishers’ right to profit, the authors of the petition made a compromise, allowing a variation of open access, which would come into effect after a moratorium of, say, six months.

This should have been acceptable to all publishers, as an axiom of the publishing business is that most of the profits are made in the first couple of months after publication.

PLoS One

Brown and Eisen followed their call to arms with a project they named the Public Library of Science, or PLoS. In 2002, philanthropists Gordon and Betty Moore gave US$9 million to the PLoS as a gift.

With this starting money, a series of journals were launched, all with PLoS in their name – PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine etc. But the flagship would be PLoS One which, at least at the level of declarations, does not discriminate against any field of science.

In the case that a manuscript is technically sound, anyone can publish his or her work in the journal after paying a publication fee of US$1,350.

(In real life, things aren’t that easy. In practice, the journal doesn’t exactly follow its promises. The scientists who are asked to review an article often act as though it were a typical closed journal. Still, one thing is certain: the shallow nature of quality control has had no dramatic effect when it comes to the quality of published works.)

Of course, publishing involves an electronic version. Paper probably couldn’t handle the popularity of the journal.

In 2013, PLoS One published over 31,000 articles, which made – it is easy to calculate – more than US$40 million for the journal. Sixty-four of those articles had at least one scientist working in Estonia among the authors.

Currently, PLoS One is the world’s largest scientific journal. In spite of the vast number of articles and low threshold of submissions, the impact factor of the journal is quite high, at 3.7 in 2012 (This is the quotient between the number of articles published in PloS One in 2010 and 2011 and the references made to them in 2012).

Unfortunately, the bad habits of closed scientific publishing have reached open journals.

One thing is clear: in the combination of a single fixed price for an article and the unexpectedly large torrent of articles, profits have been growing at a quicker rate than maintenance costs. The public was shocked when it turned out that Joseph Esposito, CEO of the PLoS journals, had a salary of over US$500,000.

The number of open access publications has grown really fast.

For example, in 2011 there was public access to half of the scientific articles published in the world.

Big publishers also gain

One would have thought that the world of closed publications, where Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and other publishing houses reign, would just wither and die out. But the actual picture is quite the opposite.

The big publishers have gained the most profit from the open access revolution. As many scientists can no longer publish in closed journals, payments have doubled. The library pays to subscribe to the journal, while the author pays to make his or her article public.

Springer has been especially aggressive, as it bought one of the biggest open access publishers, BioMed Central, with all of its 258 journals, which continue as open access journals under the new owner.

Actually, it doesn’t make much difference for the publisher if the author or reader of a scientific article pays for them. Probably the scheme in which the author pays has even less risk as there will be no trouble distributing the journals.

The worst of all possible worlds

I hope I have succeeded in showing that the existing world of management for science is by no means the best possible one. In some aspects, it’s even the worst, as it does practically nothing to protect the author’s dignity, let alone the truth.

I can imagine the joy that everybody vocally criticising all kinds of bibliometry feels while reading this. One cannot trust the number of publications because the acceptance or rejection of an article is often biased towards some kind of ideology (of science).

How can one keep a straight face when talking about the number of references if one can gain over a thousand references with data that’s basically fabricated?

In my opinion, it’s not very important how scientific significance is judged. For example, The John Hopkins University is much smaller than even the University of Tartu, be it in the number of students or lecturers (the latter being 609).

In spite of this, 20 researchers or professors from this university have won the Nobel prize over time, not to mention the eight Nobel prize winners who started working here after they had already received their prizes.

Appreciation is definitely a good measure to use when evaluating a scientist’s scientific significance.

One of Estonia’s science administrators has justified the obvious poor financing of Estonian science, stating that our scientists don’t deserve greater backing as they haven’t achieved anything remarkable thus far. There haven’t even been rumours about anyone being chosen to be a candidate for the Nobel.

In my opinion, it doesn’t much matter if scientific significance is thought to be based on the number of publications, patents or, for example, grants received. Certainly, counting references has its considerable shortcomings, too, as it’s not the best indicator of whether somebody has had something important to say to the world.

However, my mind refuses to accept knowledge of a couple of exotic details as scientific intelligence – for example, something scandalous about the relatively unknown laundry bills of DH Lawrence – something which is nice to share with your two friends.

Where is the world of science heading?

It’s quite obvious that the system of closed scientific journals is being substituted by open access. It probably doesn’t even require green thinking to end journals printed on paper. Instead, printing is becoming a private affair – everyone can use on-demand printing to have a paper copy of a journal if he or she should happen to need it.

One doubts that peer review will remain unchanged as well, as two primary reasons for it are becoming extinct – the reader who finances the printing of a scientific article and the constraints on a journal’s volume.

One possibility is that peer review (censorship, in fact) will vanish altogether. Physicians, for one, have for more than 10 years used arXiv, managed by the Cornell University Library, where one can post his or her article without it going through the ordeal of review.

The format of an article must be .pdf or LaTeX. The archive can be freely accessed by all, and every month 7,000 manuscripts on average are added – quite an amount to read.

Another possibility is to make the review system interactive, offering the author a chance to argue with the reviewer if the former considers the latter to be wrong or unjust.

Such a system is used by the journals published as Frontiers, founded by Swiss scientists Henry and Kamila Markram. The first journal in the series was Frontiers in Neuroscience, and the first issue was published in 2008.

In 2013, Nature Publishing Group bought all the Frontiers journals. Frontiers is distinguished by its interactive reviewing system. After an article is accepted, the names of the reviewers are made public, so, in a way, they share responsibility for the article.

Publishing an article there is not exactly cheap, but a scientist working in an establishment and getting grants can afford the expense of €770 to €1,600 (US$1,070 to US$2,230).

(A good alternative would be SAGE Open, which asks only US$99 for publishing an article shorter than 10,000 words. Although the journal is open to all social and humanitarian sciences, it hasn’t achieved the same kind of popularity as PloS One. This will probably change when Web of Science starts to index it.)

Many journals with open access have maintained anonymous reviewers but lowered the threshold substantially.

The PloS journals, for example, say that, when reviewing, mostly the reliability and technical quality of the means used is evaluated, not the prospect of possible scientific contribution. Unfortunately, the reviewers often cannot follow the guidelines, as the line between the content and technical quality is often really vague.

When trying to conclude what is happening, one has to admit that open access hasn’t led the world’s science astray.

Scientific articles produced under conditions of open access haven’t turned out to be much worse than the closed science with its strict censorship. Based on what has happened, one can predict that not very much would change if most of the 80% of articles that the journals used to reject were in fact published.

The only risk the journals would have is contributing to the already vast number of articles that no one ever references. On the other hand, it’s very likely that some of them would have a lot of citations and advance science.

One of the virtues of open access publications is the modern technological platform inherent to them. PloS journals will tell the reader how many times the article has been accessed via the internet, how many times it has been downloaded as a text document, how many and which other publications have referenced it, and if it has made any waves in social media.

For instance, in 2009 the article on the “Genetic Structure of Europeans” by Andres Metspalu’s research group was published in PloS One.

In the following 57 months, the article was viewed over 12,000 times and the full article was downloaded over 3,000 times. In addition, we found that journals indexed by the Scopus database have already referenced the article 99 times and Wikipedia articles have mentioned it 14 times.

So, the indicator of an article’s relevance would be its ‘life’ after it’s published and the activity surrounding it which, in the case of the article mentioned above, has been remarkable.

With this in mind, it doesn’t seem strange at all that the four main authors of the article – Mari Nelis, Tõnu Esko, Reedik Mägi and Andres Metspalu – are among the 1% of scientists referenced the most in the fields of molecular biology and genetics, according to the current chart of the world’s scientists, renewed by the Essential Science Indicators every two months.

Electronic publishing

Internet-based, open-for-all publishing has brought along the predictable extinction of many old concepts.

I remember the uplifting feeling and the smell of chalky paper from my distant youth, as I took the fresh issue of a journal out of the envelope, containing my own article next to others. For sure, approximately 200 articles later, the feelings are much more subdued, but the main thing is that the conception of ‘an issue’ is rather up for debate when it comes to electronic publishing.

Most standards of referencing, nowadays entrusted to computer programmes such as EndNote, don’t even require you to refer to the issue number of a journal. As the pages are counted throughout the volume or the year, the numbers of these are enough for precise identification of the article. Although some electronic journals are still imitating a virtual single issue of a journal, there isn’t much point.

One of the best things about electronic publishing is that one doesn’t have to wait a year or so between the acceptance of a manuscript and its publication. In fact, it only takes a few minutes or an hour until the article is available on the web, after the decision to accept it has been made. The biggest delay comes from waiting for the publication fee to be transferred.

The numeration throughout the volume and the year is a thing of the past as well. A scientific article published on the internet is an autonomous entity. Its location is no longer determined by these numbers.

The more recent scientific articles have their own digital object identifiers. This is enough to identify every article, as well as recognising and finding its location, or at least the address of its location.

All these developments hint that after some time passes, the concept of a journal as such will become vague, too. When there’s no peer censorship – I mean, peer review – anyone who has finished his or her manuscript can put it on his or her homepage where it will be available to the whole world.

Really, why should I pay €1,600 to someone else for putting my article on the internet? At the moment, the trouble is the vastness of the internet, with my article possibly just vanishing. But it’s highly likely that soon there will be a device that finds the articles, indexes them and makes them visible to all who are interested.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, have already given scientists a present, as they have created a search engine called Google Scholar.

This search engine finds virtually every scientific publication on the internet and identifies all other publications that have referenced it. Moreover, each scientist can create his or her researcher profile that will automatically start counting everything the scientist has published, as well as which other publications have referenced his or her output.

My good colleague Andres Metspalu, for example, has no trouble writing his CV, as it’s always possible to visit his Google Scholar profile and learn that by today (23 April 2014) his works have been referenced 9,390 times.

If no one else will do the job first, then Google alone could possibly make centralised journals extinct, with something that one could call the social network of science taking their place.

Still, I’d argue that scientific journals will not vanish altogether.

The centralised editing practice, making enormous profits for the owners of publishing houses, will cease to exist. With distributed editing, all authors are editors as well. Naturally, there will be no use in maintaining the entire bureaucratic machine of the editorial staff. Anyone interested in this topic can just visit the e! Science News portal.

Compared to other analogous portals, it’s definitely not worse. It might even be better and more interesting and, what is most important, more operative. The only substantial difference would be the lack of an editor.

This electronic news engine has been directed by an artificial intellect since it was started in 2008. The code was written by Michael Imbeault, a student of virology and bioinformatics, using the high-level programming language Drupal, created by another doctoral student Dries Buytaert.

In my opinion, this is a really convincing example that there’s no point for a human being to do the job that a computer can do much better.

The losers

As I see it, the revolution looming in the near future has a sole loser – the big publishing houses, which will lose their enormous profits.

But when thinking about the great mass of scientists who have to – in addition to their main job and often instead of it – do the work of the editor and reviewer, which is not only mostly thankless but also, as I hopefully made clear, simply meaningless, then the number of winners is bound to be much greater.

The biggest winner would be science, as the amount of pointless work would decrease.

I really hope that some influential group of researchers will soon join forces with some capable programmer, resulting in a model of a scientific journal using, for example, the above-mentioned Drupal, where there will be no editor or peer review. Registering could just require the address of a university, just as when creating a Google Scholar profile.

The quality of articles published would be determined by post-review: the number of all views, downloads, likes, comments and references would offer a suitably diverse evaluation of the ideas in the article.

* Jüri Allik, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Tartu in Estonia, belongs to the top 1% of the world’s most cited scientists in his field. Allik has written two other articles on scientific publishing: “Brave New World of Scientific Publishing” and “The Crazy World of Peer Review”. This article was first published on the University of Tartu blog.
 

Malaysia cannot succeed unless equal opportunity given to non-Muslims, says Obama

The Malaysian Insider – 2 hours 33 minutes ago

Malaysia must ensure non-Muslims in the country also have equal opportunites as its Muslim majority if the Southeast Asian nation wanted to continue prospering, United States President Barack Obama said today of his landmark visit, 48 years after the last American president paid a visit.

"Malaysia won't succeed if the non-Muslims do not have the same opportunity,” Obama said in a townhall meeting for Asean youths at Dewan Tunku Cancelor in University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur today.

Obama said non-Muslims in Malaysia are currently facing hostility, and some have felt oppressed.

"There shouldn't be reason to discriminate, and you have to make sure that you are speaking out against this in daily life.

And as you emerge as leaders, you should be on the side of politics that brings people together rather than drive them apart," Obama said to cheers from the crowd.

Obama said this today when answering a question from a Myanmar youth on factors of cooperation that can bring Asean together given its diversity.

He pointed out that the biggest source of conflict and war and hardship throughout the world was due to people treating those who were not like them differently.

He said the situation in Myanmar right now was that the country was going through a transition after decades of oppressive government, and it was now trying to open things up, which he said is to be lauded.

"However, the danger now that they are democratising, is that there will be groups inside Myanmar that might organise themselves politically around religious or ethnic identities instead of principles of justice or rule of law and democracy.

And you can actually see conflict that would move Myanmar in a bad direction," he said, adding that one of the problems in Myanmar was that the rights of its minority Muslim community were not protected.

Obama then added that the situation was not unique to Myanmar, and that in Malaysia, which had a majority Muslim population, there were instances where those who were not Muslims found themselves experiencing hostility.

He also said that even in the US, historically, the biggest conflicts arose around race, but over the course of generations the situation had improved, to the point that he could be elected as a president.

"All of us have within us biasness and prejudices against people who are not like us or people who are not raised in the same faith or come from different backgrounds, but the world is shrinking and getting smaller.

"You could think that way when living separately in villages and tribes and did not have contact with each other.

“But with the internet and smartphones, cultures all colliding, no country is going to succeed if part of its population is sidelined and being discriminated against," he added.

He then went on to say that similarly, Malaysia would also not succeed if non-Muslims were not given the opportunity, while the same would happen in Myanmar if the Muslim population was oppressed.

"Malaysia won't succeed if non-muslims don't have equal opportunity, Myanmar won’t succeed if the muslim population is oppressed.

"No society is going to succeed if half your population made up of women are not getting the same education and employment opportunities as men too," he added.

As such, he called on youths to embrace culture and be proud of who they were, while also appreciating differences in languages, food and how differently one worshipped God, adding that these were things to be proud of and not a tool to look down on a person.

He also called on the new generation to stand in "other people's shoes and look at things through their eyes".

Obama said that almost every religion teaches the basic principle of "do unto others as you want others to do unto you" and to "treat people the way you want to be treated".

"And if you are not doing that, then we are going backwards instead of going forward and this is true for all over the world," he told the 700-strong crowd of youths and civil society representatives. – April 27, 2014.

Putin calls Internet 'CIA project'

AFP News – Fri, Apr 25, 2014

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called the Internet a "CIA project" and warned Russians against making Google searches.

Putin assured a group of young journalists that the Internet was controlled from the start by the CIA and its surveillance continues today.

"That's life. That's how it's organised by Americans. You know all of this started during the dawn of the Internet as a special project of the CIA. And it keeps on developing," Putin said in televised comments.

Responding to questions from a young pro-Kremlin blogger, Putin warned that information entered on Google "all goes through servers that are in the States, everything is monitored there". 

He also made ominous comments on Russia's most popular search engine Yandex, suggesting it could become more tightly controlled.

Yandex is "partly registered abroad and not just for tax reasons, but for other reasons too", Putin said, mentioning it is partly owned by international investors and reiterating his fear of foreign control of the Internet. 

When Yandex was starting out, Putin said, they were "pressured" to have "that many Americans and this many Europeans among the executives".

"We must fight determinedly for our own interests. This process is happening. And we will support it from the government side, of course," he said without explaining what he means in detail.

Yandex handles some 60 percent of search queries in Russia and has a presence in several other countries. It allows users to search blogs and rates the most popular entries.

Yandex's shares fell over 4.3 percent on the NASDAQ after Putin's comments.

The company said in a statement quoted by news agencies that registration abroad is not done to dodge taxes but due to issues of corporate law, while foreign investment is a common feature of any Internet startup.

"Since our main business is in Russia, we pay almost all taxes in Russia," Yandex said.

While the Internet remains the main sphere for political discussion, Russia has recently cracked down on debate, with a new law allowing the government to block blacklisted sites without a court order.

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny had his popular blog blocked and a widely read news site that covered opposition causes sacked its long-term editor and changed its stance after a warning on extremism from the state watchdog. 

Russia this week passed in its initial stage new legislation that would force popular bloggers to register their sites and comply with similar regulations as mass media.

The 61-year-old president has frequently been scathing about the Internet, which he once described as "half pornography", unlike Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who posts snaps on Twitter. 

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted this month that the president is a regular Internet user and even sometimes laughs at jokey Photoshopped images.

VIETNAM: Too many graduates for too few jobs

VietNamNet Bridge – The number of graduates produced by Vietnam universities every year is 10 times demand.

That is the word of the unemployment report released last month by the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs, which spotlighted the high unemployment rate of workers with higher education.

According to the report, over 1.2 million workers were reported as “lacking jobs” by the end of 2013, accounting for 2.63 percent of total laborers. Of this amount, 900,000 laborers had been reported as “unemployed”, which accounted for 1.9 percent of the labor force. 

The proportion of unemployed workers finishing junior colleges (3-year training) and universities (4-5 year training) was relatively high, at 20.75 percent. More than 72,000 holders of bachelors and masters degrees are unemployed.

However, the figures have not surprised analysts at all.

Professor Nguyen Minh Thuyet, former Deputy Chair of the National Assembly’s Committee for Culture, Education, Youth and Children, commented that the situation was foreseeable: the number of workers with higher education simply far exceeds demand.

In a report he released in 2004, Thuyet estimated Vietnam would only need 13,000-15,000 new bachelors every year. At that time, Vietnam had about 100 industrial zones (IZs) and export processing zones, which could utilize 500,000 workers at maximum. Of the workforce, 5-7 percent had junior college or university degrees, 60 percent were skilled workers, with the remaining cohort unskilled.

Supposing that Vietnam developed 10 new IZs every year, and 10 percent of workers with high education retire, Thuyet posited. Vietnam would then need to prepare 13,000-15,000 new workers [with college degrees] ever year.

At the time of Thuyet’s report, ten years ago, junior colleges and universities in Vietnam were already producing more than 200,000 bachelors every year, 10 times higher than demand. Today, the “capacity” of the universities is now double that, at 400,000.

Under the national human resource (HR) development program, Vietnam set a target of 3.5 million of workers with higher education by 2015. However, the country already had 3.7 million workers with higher education by the end of 2013.

Deputy Minister of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs Doan Mau Diep said on Tuoi Tre that a large percentage of Vietnamese <intellectuals | degree holders> remain unemployed or have to take low-paying jobs because of the “oversupply of unqualified workers with higher education”.

However, ignoring warnings about the surfeit of workers finishing junior colleges and universities, schools continue to scale up, producing more and more baccalaureates every year. Vietnam is striving to have 460 universities and junior colleges by 2020.

Diep attributed the problem to an unrealistic education program. 

Dr Luong Hoai Nam, an analyst, has pointed out that 37 percent of university graduates cannot find jobs because they lack the necessary job skills. Moreover, 83 percent of them lack life skills, in the eyes of employers,

Nam, who as a senior executive of big corporations has interviewed thousands, noted that enterprises, or employers, usually have to re-train their employees before assigning duties to them, and prepare them with basic skills they should have learned at school.

Chi Mai

GLOBAL: Why scientists should stop publishing?

Brianne Kent25 April 2014 Issue No:317

 

Earlier this month a Japanese researcher was found guilty of scientific misconduct and two groundbreaking studies published in Nature were retracted. This is a symptom of a broken system.

Ask most scientists why they pursued a career in research and the majority will tell you that they had an innate passion for discovery. However, the current 'publish or perish' culture in academia is arguably impeding the discovery process.

Even Nobel laureates have spoken out about the negative impact of this culture, including Peter Higgs, who told the Guardian that even he would not be productive enough to compete in the current academic system.

To be a successful academic you must publish research in peer-reviewed academic journals, and preferably 'high impact' journals such as Science and Nature.

While the intention behind peer review – to maintain standards of quality – is critically important, the implementation of this process may actually be contributing to a systemic flaw.

Online archives

Using an open access archive system as the primary way of communicating and evaluating science instead of peer reviewed academic journals may be an answer. Fields such as mathematics and physics already use online archives in addition to journals.

For example arXiv.org, hosted by Cornell University library, is a not-for-profit online platform where scientists upload their papers to share their most recent findings without having to spend time and resources trying to publish their work in a traditional journal.

Once papers are submitted to the archive, moderators organise the research into categories, papers are critiqued by other scientists in the field, and authors can then revise and re-submit in a transparent process.

Employing an archive system may (1) make research more accessible to other scientists and the general public (2) help save time and resources when sharing research and (3) reduce the emphasis on impact factor as a proxy of an article's importance.

At its core, science is a collaborative global community, intended to benefit everyone.

Yet our traditional mode of publishing, peer reviewed journals, operate on the opposite principle: you only get access if you pay for expensive subscription fees. Keeping papers locked behind journal fees is a fundamental flaw in the traditional publishing system.

Over the past 10 years there has been a growing movement towards open access journals. Some publicly funded research councils, such as Research Councils UK already require that authors make their papers freely available to everyone.

Because of this, there has been an emergence of professional peer reviewed open access publishers such as PLoS, BioMedCentral, F1000 and eLife.

Open access journals are undoubtedly a step in the right direction, and are taking advantage of the digital age. However, the reliance on the pre-publication peer review system, and because they are marked with an impact factor, means there may still be room for improvement.

Impact factor

The second reason for moving towards an archive system is to keep time and resources focused on the discovery process.

An archive would remove some of the typical submission and subscription fees, would reduce time spent conducting (arguably unnecessary) experiments to appease reviewers, and reduce time spent resubmitting to different journals in hopes of trying to publish in the one with the highest impact factor.

The third reason we should adopt an archive system is to change our focus away from impact factor.

Because impact factor is calculated as the average number of citations for papers published in a particular journal during the previous two years, it is affected most by papers that make the biggest immediate splash and use methods that are deemed trendy, instead of reflecting long-term impact.

Additionally, a study showed that papers published in the highest impact journals were more likely to be retracted because their findings were no longer considered trustworthy.

This may be because the most novel, surprising and perspective-changing findings are often published in high impact journals or because they receive more attention and critique, but it is also possible that the intense pressure to publish in high impact journals may be indirectly encouraging poor or 'dodgy' science practice.

One study showed that the integrity of research is negatively affected by the pressures of the 'publish or perish' culture.

If we move away from journals with impact factors and pre-publication peer review, we could use post-publication reviews, commentaries, endorsements and number of citations to reflect the quality of the science.

We need a system that incentivises and rewards sound research methodology.

An archive could increase transparency and foster the collaborative nature of science, while also re-directing a higher proportion of time and resources towards conducting the best science, instead of trying to publish in the best journals.

* Brianne Kent is a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, doing a PhD in experimental psychology. She and fellow postgraduate students at the university have formed a discussion group to address the current science culture.

Japan: Riken affair boosts orders for anti-plagiarism software

Kyodo 

Apr 17, 2014

KOBE – A growing number of universities in Japan are introducing software systems to detect plagiarism in academic papers amid the evolving controversy over the “STAP cell” papers produced by Riken, the state-backed research institute.

Under an ordinance that took effect in April 2013, the education ministry has made it mandatory for all doctoral theses to be published on the Internet, replacing its decades-old rule requiring publication in print.

An official at a company selling plagiarism-checking systems said, “I believe more and more universities are introducing the system because if plagiarism comes to light after the theses are published, the credibility of the university’s oversight will be called into question.”

One popular product is iThenticate, which was developed by a U.S. company. It uses a database containing 130 million theses published on about 45 billion websites or in academic journals including the U.S. magazine Science and the British journal Nature, which published the papers at the center of the Riken incident.

The program reveals, for instance, the percentage of descriptions in papers tested that match those found in papers in the database.

Tokyo-based iGroup Japan, which markets the software, said nine universities including Waseda University, Nagoya University and Kanazawa University are already using the software, while Kobe University and the University of Fukui are considering it.

The company said it has seen a surge in inquiries since the Riken controversy erupted after Nature published findings by one of its researchers, Haruko Obokata, in January.

Obokata was hit by a number of allegations, including that she quoted a passage from another paper about a laboratory experiment method without identifying the source.

Riken, in its final investigation earlier this month, said Obokata had not engaged in willful misconduct concerning the passage, noting the quote was the only one of 41 where Obokata did not give attribution, and that the method in question is a common procedure used in many laboratories.

Obokata’s doctoral thesis for the degree she received in 2011, however, has been investigated by Waseda University after allegations she copied passages from at least one other paper.

The top private university also announced it has started checking all doctoral papers — around 280 of them — at its science and engineering school set up in 2007, citing possible retractions. Plagiarism has been alleged in at least one other paper so far.

A Nagoya University professor affiliated with a scientific research department said he checked papers to be submitted to academic journals by two of his students, using the plagiarism checker. He said he found minor similarities with other papers but determined there was no plagiarism.

“It’s convenient because academic instructors aren’t aware of all the writing in the world,” he said, adding that one defect with the software is that it cannot check plagiarism in images.

Seiichi Fujita, an executive director in charge of education at Kobe University, said, “Once the students know that we have introduced the system, we can also expect a deterrence effect.”

At least 30 universities across Japan have introduced a similar program called Turnitin, which uses almost the same database as iThenticate and allows registered students as well as instructors to check theses.

Another product named Copypelna launched in 2009 has been introduced at over 300 universities across Japan. It combs the Internet to see if there are any passages similar to those found in the paper in question.

The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry has been reviewing guidelines on research misconduct and is planning to encourage universities and research institutions to hammer out their own programs to raise awareness of ethics among researchers.

Shigeaki Yamazaki, professor of scientific communication at Aichi Shukutoku University, said, “If universities introduce (a plagiarism checker) abruptly, it may create distrust between instructors and students.”

He suggested that schools try various approaches slowly to increase ethical awareness such as by asking students to consider how they would feel if others stole their theses.

MALAYSIA (USM): CROSSING BORDERS, BRIDGING MINDS

Sources:Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) at http://www.usm.my/index.php/en/admin/news-article-english/2151-crossing-borders-bridging-minds

PENANG, 14 April 2014 – Career success depends on graduates with an ability to understand and work effectively with others of different cultures and backgrounds, Professor Dr. David W. Chapman said in his talk Crossing Borders and Bridging Minds in Higher Education.

The public talk, the first in a series on higher education organised by the National Higher Education Research Institute (IPPTN), was delivered at the University Conference Hall by Chapman who is a Distinguished International Professor and Birkmaier Professor of Educational Leadership, Policy and Development at the University of Minnesota. He is also a Fullbright visiting professor to IPPTN.  

He said that universities have to create opportunities within their curriculum that connect their students and faculty members to their peers in other countries and other cultures.

Such opportunities are in the form of partnerships and collaborations that Malaysian universities have created with universities in other parts of the world.

“Many countries want to strengthen their higher education system as a means to national economic development,” he said.

On the other hand, international organisations such as the Asian Development Bank, United States Agency for International Development, World Bank, and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Culture Organisation need to disburse and seek strategies that can be used to strengthen the quality of instruction and research in universities.

Chapman pointed out that international university partnerships have grown in popularity with more than 1,000 cross-border university partnerships among universities with Asia alone.         

He added that it is often assumed that if weaker universities work with stronger universities, they will be able to raise the quality of their universities.

This subsequently led to surveys and modified focus group discussions with universities and government administrators across Asia to garner their views.

“It was found that they feared that the greatest benefits of university-to-university collaboration can also be the greatest risks because, while there are opportunities for quality improvement, there is also a risk of low quality instruction.

On the question of whether cross border partnerships can actually help universities, Chapman said that the prevalent view of those questioned is that the benefits outweigh the cost of collaboration but none of those questioned can agree on what models of collaboration work best.

It was found that research collaboration is mostly limited to top tier universities and that there is some scepticism about the motives of collaboration, mostly concerning about the profit orientation of partners and universities often sought partners of equal standing.

Earlier, the Organising Chairman Professor Dr. Wan Fauzy Wan Ismail highlighted that IPPTN aimed to promote knowledge dissemination, share issues, solutions involving higher education in local and international institutions of higher learning, and collaboration and specialisation in higher education policy.

Professor Dato’ Dr Susie See Ching Mey, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Industry & Community Network) said on behalf of the Vice-Chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) Professor Dato’ Dr. Omar Osman that globalisation has opened up opportunities for countries to share their experiences and learn from one another.

She added that in keeping touch with globalisation and the borderless world, USM is committed to enhance and produce graduates who are not just intellectuals, knowledgeable in technical and professional skills but also meet the needs of the global society.

Also present at the talk were Professor Dr. Ahmad Nurulazam Md Zain, USM IPPTN director; and Professor Dato’ Dr Norzaini Azman, an associate research Fellow from the Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. 

- Text: Yong Check Yoon/Photo: Mohd Fairus Md Isa

GLOBAL: Rethinking private higher education

Wachira Kigotho11 April 2014 Issue No:315

 

Economic stagnation and high youth unemployment in developed countries have contributed to emerging concerns over whether traditional models of higher education are capable of producing employable graduates, the International Finance Corporation's 6th International Private Education Conference heard in San Francisco this month.

The high-level conference had the theme “Rethinking Education, Shaping the Future”, and brought together education experts, and investors and employers in private education.

The conference highlighted how technologies, scientific applications and innovations in education could improve the prospects of many graduates who are currently worried that their degrees might not lead to good jobs.

Conference sessions covered a wide range of topics “from access and affordability, quality, employability and skills of the 21st century, impact of globalisation, the role of education entrepreneurs and results measurement,” said the International Finance Corporation, or IFC.

HE and labour market disconnect

High on the agenda was how universities could help students to master skills.

Leuny Morell, provost and chief academic officer at the NEU – a new, practical engineering university being developed in partnership with the University of New Haven in the United States – said the main issue was how to eradicate the unintentional disconnect between traditional higher education and the labour market.

“For instance, universities must bridge the gap between education and the world of today by teaching competencies and professional skills that are needed to solve societal problems,” Morell told University World News.

The former president of the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies pointed out that universities should also try to identify talented students, especially in science and engineering.

She explained that there was a direct relationship between science, engineering, technology and innovation and economic development and sustainability.

“Countries that will invest in talented graduates in innovation, science, technology and engineering will undoubtedly achieve economic and social progress in comparison to their counterparts that will be unwilling to grow their human talent pool,” said Morell.

Unfortunately, the level of such investments and the number of science and engineering graduates do not alone necessarily mean quality or obtaining desired outcomes, because a well qualified talent pool is becoming increasingly hard to find in some parts of the world.

Quality is all-important

According to the new thinking emerging in higher education, if students acquire degrees or obsolete knowledge that cannot be applied in the modern world, then it is a high-level waste of time and money.

University degrees are still highly associated with employment prospects and even providing perfect pathways for career opportunities.

Stressing the importance of the acquisition of skills in higher education, Dr Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow in education at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a key speaker at the IFC conference, said the future of every country would depend on the skills of its people.

In his recent study, Economic Growth in Developing Countries: The role of human capital, Hanushek noted that the focus on a high quality talent pool as a driver of economic growth had put a spotlight on school attainment and the importance of cognitive skills.

Hanushek noted that whereas developed countries might adapt their higher education to the needs of the 21st century quickly, this would be difficult for countries in the developing world.

The case of Africa

Such is the case in Sub-Saharan African countries, where it had been generally easier to expand access to education rather than to improve quality.

According to Hanushek, the critical talent pool in Sub-Saharan Africa had been shrinking because simple approaches to improving the quality of education had not proved very effective.

He noted that the inability of higher education in the region to produce human capital required for development was embedded within the entire education system. If students did not have basic cognitive skills when they got to higher education, they could not learn at a level that would make them competitive internationally.

“Consequently, without improving school quality, countries in Sub-Saharan Africa will find it difficult to improve their long run economic performance,” Hanushek told University World News in an interview.

The IFC conference was a global event, but its agenda was perhaps most significant for Africa when it reflected on graduate unemployment.

This is a major problem in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to Simon Gicharu, founder and president of Mount Kenya University, East Africa's largest private university.

“Beyond the unemployment crisis, in the absence of adequate labour laws and social safety nets, graduates from African universities are often under-employed, too often compelled to take low-paying jobs for their survival,” said Gicharu in an interview with University World News in Nairobi.

Gicharu agreed with speakers who noted that African countries were at a crossroads in matters related to improving the quality of higher education. “So much pressure is on learning facilities in both public and private universities due to unmet demand for higher education.”

All about the skills

The IFC conference rooted for advanced innovations in learning platforms in tablet technology, mobile applications, virtual and cyberspace learning networks, and advanced science, technology and engineering laboratories and other cutting edge facilities.

Governments and private investors in higher education everywhere will have to undertake self-appraisal if they are to prepare young people for the jobs market of the 21st century, conference participants agreed.

According to Hanushek, it is all about the skills and much of the IFC conference focused on how to provide labour market opportunities to the more than 200 million unemployed youth globally by bridging the gap between learning outcomes and job requirements.
 

UNITED KINGDOM: Women in academia – Different views of success

Shima Barakat18 April 2014 Issue No:316

 

The last 12 years has seen a plethora of writings on the experiences of women academics, describing how the challenges and barriers they face differ from their male counterparts. However, even earlier Nadya Aisenberg and Mona Harrington wrote in the 1988 study Women of Academe: Outsiders in the sacred grove about the difficulties women were overcoming to access the 'sacred grove' (academia) in the United States.

Three decades later, the subject is still being written about because structural and cultural issues across the globe have not been fully addressed, frustrations continue to exist and both men and women are speaking up. The issues are complex and fraught with myths, gross generalisations and mixed emotions.

The University of Cambridge commissioned research challenging the notions of success, aiming to address the stereotypes and, most importantly, giving women a heterogeneous voice. Some 196 women were nominated by their peers as 'successful', 126 responded to surveys and 26 were interviewed.

The results from this research were published in the book The Meaning of Success: Insights from women at Cambridge by Jo Bostock, launched last month.

The book offers rich evidence that women are not all the same – their experiences are not the same, the value they bring to the university is not the same and their paths to success are very different.

Four main themes

The book elaborates on the stories of the women of Cambridge around four main themes:

• The challenges of working at a top academic institution irrespective of gender: what constitutes excellence, funding, job security and conflicting demands. The gender dynamics were often an additional dimension of complexity in this demanding environment, like challenges outside work and a sense of 'falling short' (imposter syndrome).
  
  
• What is valued and what matters: awards, promotion and recognition, but not only those. The women valued and thrived on much more, for example: challenging and interesting work that was of excellent quality and had an impact, maintaining happy and healthy work and family lives, managing challenges and change, exercising leadership, and authority and influence as well as being pioneers. Being at the forefront of change, at the intellectual, organisational and institutional levels, was a very significant element.
  
  
• Framing the gender influences: different women had different perceptions of whether and to what extent gender was relevant to their work lives. Issues like education and upbringing, gender assumptions and stereotypes as well as bias and discrimination were all honestly discussed, busting the myth that these issues no longer exist but also nuancing the debate by showing that these are not only challenges but sometimes opportunities too. These were stories of leveraging expectations, not conforming and reaping the rewards.
  
  
• Admired qualities and role models: The spectrum was wide around who women perceived as role models: men and women, famous and modest, work and life, in general and for specific tasks. However, some themes emerged as being admired: integrity, relationship focus, inspirational leadership, political savviness, being pioneers, accessible, fallible, an inclusiveness advocate, doing high quality work and being rounded, confident, authentic and resilient.
  

For the women of Cambridge demonstrating authenticity, integrity and roundedness were key. As you read the book you are struck by the diversity of talent at Cambridge University which is not dissimilar to other academic institutions in the United Kingdom, the Western world and most probably internationally too.

This book provides evidence that today the issues surrounding gender are potentially more varied and more complex than they have ever been and raises the question: How much talent is being wasted around the world in academic institutions and other organisations?

As one senior academic in the book commented: “I am well aware that serious talent is being wasted in Cambridge and elsewhere by systems that have allowed 50% of the talent pool to occupy fewer than 15% of the senior positions.”

Broader notions of success need to be embraced within academia to redress this imbalance as well as allow all men and women to contribute to the fullest.

Ripple effect

Is the Cambridge project the start of a ripple effect? Anecdotal evidence says it may well be as other universities start to react and other groups within other universities start to question and highlight issues and women within their own organisation.

I heard one woman say: “I am going to raise funds to carry out a similar project in my university.” If that happens, it would be another several hundred-year-old organisation that is shook up – even if just a little.

At Cambridge, the buzz is still there weeks after the book launch. There is a raised awareness at all levels, resources are allocated for change, new programmes and further development and senior academics are recognising the richness of talent in the university.

Personally, I am surprised by how often I am stopped on campus to be told how some issue has resonated with someone. I am awed by how many people have read the book and can recognise one person, me, from among the cases.

Being involved in the book has certainly raised my visibility and allowed me to seek advice and support at levels that were obscure to me before. It has also given me a chance to reflect on what I actually think about issues of gender, myself, my work and what I want.

I fundamentally believe in a broader notion of success and this work reinforced my commitment to recognising the strengths of my team and making sure these are nurtured and developed in line with their ambitions and dreams.

Will a book make all the difference? Of course not. To truly change and offer a place where diversity flourishes universities need to do two things primarily: the first would improve the existing system and the second would revolutionise it:

• Review espoused values and criteria of what constitutes quality and success. It is common wisdom among younger academics that research is valued above all else and universities are littered with people who play by the rules, but get overlooked for promotions. Yet most universities have more sophisticated promotion criteria.
  
  'Service' is one key culprit for this apparent mismatch. Service and good citizenship are explicitly written into the criteria for promotion, but service takes time, time away from writing. Rewarding what is espoused as valued is important to avoid the apparent mismatch between criteria and practice.
  
  
• New pathways through the academic institutions need to be defined, supported and equally valued. The rise of the academic manager is one such new 'route'.
  
  Yet there could be many more like the practical researcher whose work is excellent with respect to practice rather than theory, the implementer who translates research for practice through consulting and-or commercialisation, the motivational leader who may be less excellent at the research itself but is superb at motivating the team and leading them to exceptional results, and the creative resource investigator who has visions of research and can leverage resources to deliver it, but may not write as prolifically as other colleagues.
  

In a world where complexity dominates, it seems ludicrous that everyone is judged and promoted based on the same criteria.

It brings to mind a cartoon that has gone viral on social media depicting a set of animals waiting to be tested with a caption that says something like: “We have a fair system. You will all undergo the same test of climbing that tree.” What chance do the elephant and fish have? I hope now, more than they did before.

Initiatives like Athena Swan and EnterpriseWISE help to change individuals and some practices, but system level changes will be needed to truly transform culture and embedded practices.

* Shima Barakat is a research and teaching fellow and director of the EnterpriseWISE and ETECH projects at the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK.