Recently I received an unsolicited invitation to a one-week ‘international student conference’ in Singapore. The sender had hijacked a facebook group for another student conference I had attended and spammed its list of members with this invitation. Prima facie, the invitation looked pretty good. They offered to pay return airfare to Singapore for all participants, and international travel is typically the largest cost component of participating in these kinds of events (the rest is usually sponsored).

The invitation then added a brief note that participants would be responsible for other fees, conveniently omitting that these fees were around USD 4000 (about twice as much as a comparable two-week summer program at the local public university). The invitation then included a short paragraph explaining that blogging about them would be met with legal action under Singapore’s infamous defamation laws.

Reading their website didn’t inspire much confidence. The site design was almost identical, down to the very source code, to the sites of certain government agencies and academic institutions. Some of their documents were word-for-word the same as those for other conferences. I suppose imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but this was really inexcusable.

After tracking him/her down, I confronted the organizer of this conference with these. His/her reply (verbatim):

I am [person’s name], the overall in charge of the organizing committee for the [fancy name of conference]. I am also the Chairperson of the [conference].

Firstly, I wish to let you know that i am an undergraduate student, currently at [good university], previously from [good high school]. The entire project is funded by [some official-sounding organization]. The entire organizing committee, who are also undergraduates coming from universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford etc and are very grateful for the opportunity that [some organization] has been providing us, as well as the opportunity to work with international students in year 2010. If you can help us with that, that will be good. But the committee do not welcome any undue obstacles especially after hearing from our student ambassador, [other person], who is a close friend of mine, being interrogated by some unknown authority.

Honestly speaking, the conference aims to create thus opportunity for high school and undergraduates to tackle global issues. From day 1 of the conference, defining the problems and proposing resolutions, then day 2 is already about creating the logo of the organizations that students will be going ahead with the proposed resolutions. The entire conference is task oriented. We are daring to make a move on this, and wish to have this opportunity to work this out. [some organization] has given us this opportunity, so has all the invited speakers, [local university VIP] and the rest who wish to see the potential development in the conference proposals and putting them immediately into work.

Just sit and watch how we can deliver the standards. Personally, i don’t like the kind of tone and your style of writing. Truely exceptional students want to do something to help and contribute to the betterment of this world, not to deter such change. I believe you want to do something that changes the world for the better as well. We have already started, thus finding the opportunity to do so. I do not want to kill an idea we have built from last year till now, and hope you are not the cause that make us lose that opportunity.

I believe no matter what kind of organizations, be it private limited company, sole proprietor, public or non-profit organization, if you are doing something that contributes to the betterment of the society or nation, then the end result is worth commendation. There is a regulatory authority that keep track of the things and systems that would need to fall in place. I believe it is not the job of anybody who wish to be that authority. After the conference, the fundings will go into scholarship to be given to students who come from poor backgrounds and also to fund the resolution projects initiated by the students attending the conference. Why not you wait for the post conference press release?

Returning back to you regarding the Defamation act, it was an initiative by us, the organizing committee, because we foresee difficulty while countering the fact that the conference is being held in singapore for the first time. A comment posted online will tarnish the reputation of all relevant organizations involved, so we took the safe approach to prevent anyone posting the same. That is to be fair to all relevant organizations as well. You cannot underestimate things that have unlimited complications. The posted comment online will be there forever, thats why legal actions to retrieve back such erosion to all cooperating organizations is necessary. Singapore government has been practising that as well. I am sure you are well informed about the regulatory freedom of speech in singapore. We have consulted a lawyer, father of one of the organizing committee, that this could be one way to prevent unwanted and irresponsible comments. The committee wish to focus on the operations, and deliver a good conference. Thus, we feel such Act reminds people to be responsible for their actions. I mean, if you say things that cause undue complications for others, undue obstacles that people need to spend extra effort to overcome, then be responsible to cover the consequence with justice.

Join us if you want to be part of the team to initiate changes in the world. For i believe you are also a talent, and someone who have a passion in the things that you do. From your followed ups with [other person] via emails, we can tell that you have the best interest at heart. You must have also sacrificed lots of your valuable time too. Join us and be the change.

You just can’t make this stuff up – shameless self-promotion and unwarranted indignation is truly a winning combination. The frightening thing is that he/she, in all likelihood, sincerely believes that they have done nothing wrong or improper, and are doing everyone a great service. Would make a great future bureaucrat, and an even better politician. Keep your eyes on this one!

I was the last of the tour group to board the train to Pyongyang at Sinuiju, and all the cabins were full, except for a cabin of mostly middle-aged Chinese men. Across from my seat was my Chinese roommate for the tour, a college student from Anhui. As I sat down, my fellow passengers were pointing at one of the guides, the fair lady in a yellow hanbok who never smiled. 朝鲜美女 (trans. Joseon beauty), they laughed, come and join us. If she had heard them, she pretended not to.

As the train rolled its way through North Pyong’an, I noticed ragged children sleeping in a shady spot by the train tracks. Even the cows in the fields looked skinny.

(Yanggakdo hotel lobby, Pyongyang) For a country that has officially banned hanja, I guess they know where the credit comes from…

One morning, while my roommate was in the shower, I turned on the television in our hotel room, reminded of Orwell’s telescreen. The morning news show I saw was just like the novel’s description of perpetual war news. Big, black bold comic-book-style headlines superimposed over scenes of crisis and famine. It was as if the world outside was all gloom and doom. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

As I waited in the hotel lobby for the tour group to gather from breakfast, I saw a group of catholic nuns in traditional habits. Among them was an old man in a grey robe with a long, white beard. For some reason, he reminded me of Uncle Ho.

(Kaesong city)

We stopped for lunch in Kaesong city on our way back to Pyongyang from the DMZ. It was a restaurant for tourists, and they had souvenirs and gifts for sale with prices listed in euros. I saw bottles of Ryongtongsul soju across the counter, and asked about them. 8 RMB each. I tried to buy more than two bottles, as gifts for my friends in Beijing, but they wouldn’t sell them to me. Some kind of socialist rationing system, perhaps.

The other tourists were attempting to bargain down the prices of some kind of medicinal herb tonic, which took a long while as our guides translated the back and forth of negotiations. So much for central planner set prices. I stepped outside for some air, onto the wide streets of Kaesong city. It was eerily quiet, without the typical hum of urban activity. As I looked up into the nearby apartments, trying to see how the inhabitants lived, I heard the soft tones of piano keys playing an unfamiliar melody, and wondered if there was Chopin here, or Rachmaninov.

On the remaining drive, the guides sang karaoke for us. We passed by an old woman, her back bent under a bundle of sticks. She looked like she had carried these loads of firewood for a lifetime.

(Pyongyang) They must subscribe to the broken window fallacy here. Except the windows don’t get replaced.

One of our early stops was at the ‘international friendship’ museum at Mohyangsan, where gifts to either elder or younger Kim from around the world were displayed, some of which were quite strange, like an alligator holding a serving tray (Nicaragua). Apart from the Soviet bloc countries, there were some unexpected names there: Billy Graham, various US-based groups I had never heard of before, like the ‘World Council of Democratic Youth’. Gifts from chaebols, and companies based in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

At the start of the route was a board listing each country from which gifts had been sent, and how many gifts there were. What interested me the most were 2 gifts originating from Singapore, and although I kept my eyes peeled for them, I could only found one. It was from a ‘Sunko company’. Having seen a gift from Suharto, right next to another from Sukarno earlier, I wondered if the second gift had been from one of our heads of government. After all, they are not so dissimilar.

On our route, we crossed the paths of local tours several times, and they seemed just as curious about us as we were about them. They looked like ordinary people from the rural provinces, wearing plain grey or navy shirts adorned only by little red pins. Very few of the men were taller than I am, and I’m pretty small. Men and women alike had faces weathered and tanned, like they spent all their days toiling in the fields under the hot sun. Not at all like the tall, fair-skinned folk of soap operas.

Ginseng wine loosens lips that could sink ships.

Our, or rather my English-language guide, not being a Chinese speaker, could only talk to two of the tour participants. Myself, and roommate. Armed with my prepared list of ‘safe’ questions and conversation topics, I started with a question about the guide. (People usually love to talk about themselves) Did he have a wife or a girlfriend? He laughed and said that he did not. I then asked when men and women typically marry. Around 30 for men, 25 for women, which I suspected was an urban number. The age of consent is 18, though kids typically start dating secretly while in school at 14 or 15. I replied that it was about the same as Singapore. And then my Chinese roommate asked about whether a hypothetical foreigner (i.e. himself) could marry a local girl.

That was the point the cultural sensitivity alarm bells went off in my head, about the historical relationship between the Korean kingdoms and imperial China, modern issues of cross-border bride trafficking and stories of forced abortions of pregnant repatriates. I hadn’t read Brian Myers’ The Cleanest Race at the time, but I already had some idea about the xenophobic racial purity ideology. And here was a dude from a ‘lesser’ race, asking an elite university student thoroughly steeped in regime propaganda, about stealing away a pure Joseon maiden. This could not end well.

The guide’s eyebrows narrowed. His smile disappeared. No. It is not allowed. I quickly changed the subject to sports and movies. Apparently ‘Titanic’ is popular.

A brief aside: At Myers’ book talk at Columbia a few weeks ago, I asked how the racial purity ideology could be reconciled with an overwhelming economic reliance on China. His answer: It cannot, which is why that reliance is downplayed. I didn’t find this answer satisfactory – how effectively is it downplayed? What happens when it can’t?

(Juche tower, Pyongyang) Salarymen and OLs are Workers too!

We arrived at the Juche tower near sunset. In front of the statue of the worker, peasant, and ‘socialist intellectual’, hundreds of people marched in formation, raising metal rods in the air as they said 만세 (manse, equivalent to banzai 萬歳 or wansui 万岁). I use the term ‘march’ loosely, as they seemed less than enthusiastic about whatever it was they were supposed to be celebrating. Probably something related to Juche.

The only people that were really into it were the ones in front of the formations shouting into megaphones. The rest of them looked like regular people who, after a long day at work, had to spend their evenings on Workers Party duties. One of the tourists, a middle-aged teacher from Shanghai, walked up to the back of the line and joined in. She probably had more fun than any of the real participants. I would have joined in too, had I not been busy snapping pictures, until one of the megaphone-wielding comrade commissars spotted me and cried foul. Fortunately, the guides intervened, and I was spared and survived to write this diary entry.

(Juche tower, Pyongyang) Sunset of the Workers Party?

Previously on Pyongyang Diaries: The Guides

Congratulations! In the face of a very difficult selection process, one of your photos was selected to be included in the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Columbia University’s Photography Society’s upcoming exhibition. This is a strong testimony to your talent, as we received over 130 photos submitted and had room for only 25. The jury was very impressed by your work and looks forward to including it in the exhibition.

The photo the jury selected is “Sewing and Reaping.”

The Opening Reception for Views In: Undergraduates Photograph a Year in East and Southeast Asia will be on Tuesday, October 13 from 5-7PM. The location is the exhibition space itself, on the 4th floor mezzanine of the International Affairs Building. I hope that those of you in New York will be able to attend and bring your friends (and family if possible)! I expect to have postcard invitations for the exhibition and opening reception by the end of the week.

Yes, I know the title wasn’t very creative.

While I’m glad they picked this one to showcase, I was quite surprised that my other submissions were not taken, especially my North Korea portfolio – some of which I thought were also visually striking. Perhaps it was too ‘current’. At least this one will make it to the 4th floor of SIPA. Hopefully it will get placed on the corridor outside the main auditorium, where the most traffic is.

The short blurb I came up with:
“Balinyouqi, Inner Mongolia autonomous region, PRC. Mrs. Zheng is a client of the Chifeng Zhaowuda Women’s Sustainable Development Association (赤峰市昭乌达妇女可持续发展协会), a local microfinance institution I visited with Wokai Microfinance. After her husband was laid off from a state-owned construction enterprise, she became the family’s primary breadwinner. She used her first loan to upgrade her pedal-operated sewing machine to an electric one, increasing her productivity, and employ other women in her tailoring business, creating jobs and training others in her trade.”

Unfortunately they didn’t give me a lot of space to tell her whole story, so I had to condense it to the bare essentials like who, what, where, emphasizing how she overcame difficulties with support for investment (or maybe consumption smoothing), and how to help others like her. Hopefully Wokai and its clients will get a little more attention through my efforts.

Those of my readers from Singapore or familiar with its customs should be aware of a particular social institution known as, among other similar names, the ‘government scholarship’. However, this term is highly misleading, not only to foreign observers but also many Singaporeans, as the institution has only a passing resemblance to what the rest of the world understands the term ‘scholarship’ to mean. Here I propose a different name.

First note that the first part of its name is accurate. The ‘government scholarship’ is administered by several branches of the state bureaucracy, that is, the various ministries, the subministerial agencies (known as ‘statutory boards’, a peculiar term I have not found elsewhere), and the state-owned enterprises, by which I include the so-called ‘government-linked companies’ i.e. firms partly owned by the state investment vehicle, Temasek Holdings, or its subsidiaries. Some of which were originally subministerial agencies subsequently ‘privatized’, some of which were originally ‘private’, insofar as a large local firm can be said to be private. Which large local firms are private in the sense of being independent from the state I leave as an exercise for the reader. Those thus considered private which may offer a similar ‘scholarship’ only do so to compete with the state’s recruitment practices. My point here is that the social institution is primarily the domain of the state, and it is generally funded directly or indirectly with taxpayer money. There is an entire branch of the state whose sole function is to administer it.

Since the agencies that offer this ‘scholarship’ are numerous and go by many names, and the precise terms and conditions offered by each will vary, I will offer a generic description that should apply to most cases. Typically, prospective candidates apply shortly after the release of the A-level examination results to their organization of choice. Those selected sign a contract to work for the respective agency for a period of four to six years after graduation. The contract stipulates that the agency will cover full undergraduate tuition fees and related expenses at most universities around the world. Some will even cover graduate school.

The actual amount payable depends on which university the agency has decided the prospective candidate will attend. Some are offered coverage at universities abroad (e.g. ‘overseas merit scholarship’) and some at the local public universities (e.g. ‘local study award’). If the terms are acceptable, the contract is signed, and the new hire proceeds to university. For male citizen hires, some state agencies (the ministries) facilitate a deferment of conscription to after graduation, and include the term of military service within the service obligation. For male non-citizens, the contract includes acquiring citizenship and serving the draft first.*

Sound like a good deal? It does to many, and many apply. Thus the selection process must begin with a screening phase, to reduce the number of applications to a manageable level. This screening mechanism is academic merit, that is, A-level results. Those that make the first cut are called for interviews to assess their personal characteristics. Final offers are made to those candidates perceived most suitable for employment, and conversely, accepted by candidates with preferences for a career with that agency, with all its contractual benefits, relative to all other possible careers.

As the primary criteria for being a ‘government scholar’ is not academic merit or personal achievement but career preference, I believe the term ‘scholarship’ is inappropriate. It more closely resembles a practice in recruitment known as the signing bonus, and is better understood as such.

Signing bonuses are typically part of recruitment strategies where firms competing for new hires, but their compensation packages do not differ very much. The signing bonus, a one-time payment, provides an additional incentive for the candidate to choose firm X over firms Y and Z, which could be the make or break factor if everything else is similar. A one-time payment is much easier and less of a risk than raising the offered wages (due to wage stickiness) and benefits, or improving the working conditions, company culture etc.

Similarly, the ‘government scholarship’ is a signing bonus. Since government compensation packages are more heavily weighted on benefits than wages, and the culture and internal practices of a large bureaucracy are usually harder to change, this is the easiest way to incentivize candidates to choose the civil service over all other possible employers in the world. For the scholars pursuing their undergraduate degrees in the US, it’s a ~200,000 USD taxpayer-funded signing bonus paid out over four years before the first day at work. In comparison, the typical signing bonus for entry-level investment bankers was about 10,000 USD during the good years.

Whether such large signing bonuses are a sound use of taxpayer money is beyond the scope of this post, and I leave it as an exercise for the reader. Many others have written extensively on the benefits and harms of this social institution, and I will discuss my perspectives on those at some other time.

Stop calling it a scholarship! Now that I have divined its true name, my hope is that people will start using it, and that when they do they will notice the absence of anything resembling a real scholarship in Singapore, that is, one awarded purely on merit alone, or on financial need – see my previous post on means-testing.

In the interests of full disclosure, I did apply to a few agencies with my peers, and being a slow kid did not even make it to the interview phase. As you can tell, I’m still pretty slow.

Update: Mo-ha-med asks about the up-front military service requirement for male non-citizens. This may seem like a horribly unattractive deal, but it is not intended for foreigners who would otherwise have no obligation to Singapore, but male 2nd generation permanent residents born and raised on the island, who would have the same military service liability as natural born citizens.

Having them serve the draft up front, instead of the usual practice of deferring scholar draft terms to after graduation, is 1) due to the perception that male 2GPRs have a lower ‘loyalty/patriotism/no alternative’ threshold to well, dodging the draft and ‘running off with the money’, than natural born citizens do (I don’t know if this perception is justified), and 2) to assuage popular grouses that non-citizens get all the benefits of residency without paying in as much (this perception being somewhat justified).

Does the up-front service clause dissuade male 2GPRs? Probably not, they would have had to serve it out anyway, and a 200,000 USD signing bonus may well be worth the delayed suffering foregone. Anecdotally, I know several male 2GPRs who signed up.

Two years ago around this time, shortly after my stint at a DC think-tank and a public policy summer camp, I wrote my first op-ed on higher education subsidies in Singapore, and it got some attention from legislators and published in the state media.

The subsidy, the Tuition Grant Scheme administered by the education ministry, is not means-tested and subsidy amounts depend on the specific university and field of study, and is fairly substantial – as much as 75% of full tuition. It is also tied not to citizenship or residency (as is common elsewhere) but to attendance at certain schools in Singapore, namely the local public universities and the vocational and trade schools (the polytechnics and other diploma providers). I use the term public because all of them also receive operating subsidies via the education ministry. Anyone who attends these schools is eligible for the subsidy – rich or poor, citizen or foreign national – but these schools only. I am primarily concerned with its provision at the undergraduate level though in principle my arguments extend also to the vocational and trade schools.*

*While not too familiar with the vocational schools, I understand that the p.a. subsidy can be as much as 85% of full fees, though the shorter duration of vocational schooling means that the total subsidy per student is lower than in the universities. While the same arguments for means-testing apply, my guess is that with the income distribution in vocational schools almost all their students would be eligible for some level of means-tested subsidy.

What’s new?
Two years on, not much has changed. Subsidies have been extended to certain programs at one more school, UniSIM/SIM University, a continuing education provider, but the amounts are not as extensive (40%) and limited to the domestically accredited programs, arguably not their historical core competence.* More generally, residents and foreign nationals now receive a lower amount of subsidy though the amount is still fairly substantial.** While I am tempted to claim some credit for making this happen, subsidies are still not available for students who choose to study at any other university course in Singapore or elsewhere.

*UnISIM was previously the Singapore Institute of Management, primarily a local distributor of distance courses, first from the Open University and later a number of distance programs from the US/UK/AUS. The rebranded name reflects the wider breadth of programs on offer and also distinguishes the (now subsidized) domestic-accredited programs from the foreign-accredited distance courses. More about this later.

**Excluding residents and foreign nationals from subsidies was never my intent! My original op-ed makes that clear. Pointing out that they received subsidies too was merely to demonstrate how unfair the (not means-tested) policy was then, and still is now. I hope that the subsidies withdrawn from foreign nationals will be replaced with an equivalent amount of merit-based scholarships for them.

I proposed two changes in subsidy policy. First, to means-test the subsidy. Second, to make Singapore citizens eligible wherever they choose to enroll and whatever they choose to study. The two are closely related, because (I suspect) lower SES students are more likely to enroll in the less competitive local private schools and thus miss out on subsidies altogether.* But I will discuss the first component of my proposal, because it is the less contested one.

*My guess here is that lower SES students tend to pursue vocational schooling instead of the academic track (A-levels, then university), not because they don’t make the grade for the academic track (at least not only because), but as a choice to enter the workforce faster and with lower fees paid up front. Case 1: They then hit some kind of glass ceiling (real or perceived) on diploma holders sometime after entering the workforce, perhaps in the transition to managerial roles or in the kinds of professions and industries available. For example, the ceiling between paralegal and barrister/solicitor for those who took a legal studies diploma course. To attempt to break through the ceiling they opt for part-time continuing education, which until now wasn’t subsidized. Even now that it is (at UniSIM), the total costs incurred of vocational schooling and continuing education will be greater relative to the academic track. Case 2: If they anticipate this problem, vocational students will then opt to attend (the subsidized) local universities instead of entering the workforce directly, where they will enjoy advanced standing, but I haven’t seen detailed data on how many actually do so. My impression is that a good proportion of those who opt for this circuitous route will get crowded out by the academic track cohort, and go elsewhere (i.e. AUS) paying full fees. If either case is true, then our current subsidy policy is regressive.

Means-testing
A means-tested undergraduate tuition subsidy would give eligible students a subsidy whose amount would depend only on the individual’s financial need. It could range from a small discount to a full ride plus stipend. Let’s assume away the second part of my proposal, ie. assume that the status quo of preferential treatment for the local public universities prevails.

Apart from the local public universities, those whose interests are harmed by a means-tested tuition subsidy are those students with the means to pay. This is the Singapore upper-middle class and above. The median household earned income was 46320 SGD per annum in 2005. (Mean is 65400 SGD but median is more appropriate because of the fat tails in the distribution). I will demonstrate below that the full p.a. cost of undergraduate tuition is about 75% of this annual median income, so only upper-middle class and above households should be means-tested out.

How much does it cost to attend a local public university?
Let us first consider the cost to Singapore citizens, since they make up the majority of students at the local universities. Residents and foreign nationals pay 10% and 50% more respectively, and those of you interested can mentally adjust accordingly. I will focus on tuition fees at Singapore National. Comparable tuition fees at Nanyang Tech and Singapore Management are about the same.

The heavily subsidized tuition fees for most disciplines at NUS are fairly similar, the major outliers being medicine and dentistry*. It’s about 7K SGD p.a. or 15% of the median household income . But if we look at the full unsubsidized amounts, we see that engineering/science is more expensive, and so is music. There’s a lot of variation in the current subsidy amount based on discipline. For example, some taxpayers may wish to know why music is subsidized twice as much as law. But those questions are beyond the scope of my present inquiry.

*The unsubsidized fees for medicine and dentistry are 100K SGD p.a., for six and four years respectively, which probably reflect the cost of education and the earnings potential afterwards. Whether these fields deserve an additional subsidy over and above the means-tested grant is also beyond the scope of my present inquiry. It would depend on many things including labor force requirements in the healthcare sector, etc.

Excluding the outliers music, medicine and dentistry, we see that the unsubsidized tuition fees at NUS range from 26-33K SGD p.a.. There are some additional university-specific fees (NUS ‘modules’?) and I welcome comments on how much these amount to. Living expenses are harder to compute an average for since most Singapore citizens who attend local schools live at home, and this varies a lot from household to household.

How much does it cost to go elsewhere?
The appropriate comparison of costs when deciding whether or not to go overseas, is to compare total costs of attendance. However, since I can’t readily compute university-specific averages and living expenses when student live at home, here I compare tuition fees alone. Readers can make the mental adjustment to factor in other expenses, cost of living etc.

Australia. Undergraduate tuition fees at UNSW Sydney for foreign students in comparable disciplines range from 20-26k AUD = 23-30K SGD. Note that UNSW Asia charged 26-29K SGD p.a.
UK. Tuition fees at Cambridge for non-EU/UK nationals for non-clinical studies range from £10-13k = 23-30K SGD.
US. Undergraduate tuition at Harvard is $33,696 USD p.a. = 48546 SGD. (I assume that upper-middle class Singapore citizens will generally not qualify for financial aid).

Do note that living expenses can vary substantially, and that cost is not the only criteria relevant to decision-making (value is). I welcome comments from readers about whether the fees listed above are representative. Now that we know the cost of going elsewhere, what can we expect to happen if subsidies are means-tested?

Expected Effects
First consider those excluded by means-testing, the students who can afford to pay full fees. There are 3 possible categories thereof:

1. Those who choose to attend local universities. The money saved on subsidizing them goes to other uses, like improving our universities teaching, no-strings merit scholarships etc.
2. Those who choose to go elsewhere, because they do not consider local universities worth the full cost relative to alternative options.
3. Those who forego university altogether and opt for vocational education, direct entry to workforce, or NEET status.

Since I believe the 3rd group to be a null set, the 2nd group will determine the changes caused in enrolment in the local universities. How large it is will depend on the current income distribution in the local universities, and the perceived relative value of a local university education.

I welcome readers’ comments on the former. I suspect the majority of students at our local universities can afford full fees, since SES strongly correlates with academic achievement, but I haven’t found a breakdown of students at NUS/NTU/SMU by household income. That would be pretty interesting to see, especially a year-by-year breakdown by discipline. It would be really useful for estimating the causal impact of particular majors.

As for the latter, I can’t comment on since I don’t attend a local university, except to note that they will have to compete harder to attract and retain the 2nd group under means-testing, and that the incentive structure under competition tends to raise quality and customer satisfaction for everyone. With the caveat in the picture above.

As Charles Murray notes, assessing the value of a bachelor’s degree is pretty difficult. I would also like to see a greater focus on objective measures of quality of education (such as detailed career placement statistics) rather than the usual methodologically-murky international rankings. For example, Singapore Management could import another practice from their model school, the on-campus recruitment survey. We can’t improve quality without measuring it, and we need to measure the right thing. Competition only improves quality if customers can measure quality effectively, and fact is, a lot of parents and students out there are pretty clueless about the value of degrees. These academic ‘rankings’ are so irrelevant, whereas I think students will care more about future earnings projections. This is where the state can come in, in requiring all the schools that receive operating and tuition subsidies through the education ministry to comply with a simple transparency initiative to publish their placement records.

Why don’t we have a means-tested system yet?
Entrenched interests, policy inertia and upper-middle class sense of entitlement aside, means-testing is difficult to implement. As my friend Ringisei notes:

Household income. I suppose this will be income tax data but this is notoriously inaccurate as IRAS does not tax income accruing from foreign sources. This has applied very much to the business community here – those whose businesses extend beyond Singapore. And increasingly applies to many professionals who get posted to KL, Beijing/Shanghai, Jakarta, Bangkok etc and have their salaries paid out of there instead of Singapore. Which is why the government tends to prefer using the annual value of a person/household’s primary residence as the proxy measure of income/wealth – but that, as you well know, presents its own set of problems.

Difficult but not impossible. We already means-test healthcare, housing, and various cash handouts. No reason why we can’t means-test university tuition either.

Extending Subsidies
Let’s now consider the second component of my proposal, making the means-tested subsidy available to Singapore citizens wherever they choose to enroll and whatever they choose to study.

From the list of education providers in Singapore, you can tell that the vast majority ineligible for the subsidy are local distributors of foreign-accredited distance courses, much like UniSIM’s parent business model. Many of these programs tend to be in continuing education. There are also the local satellites of foreign universities, though they tend to be smaller in scale unlike the late UNSW Asia.

Recall subsidies are limited to UniSIM’s domestic-accredited programs, but not its foreign-accredited ones. This recent policy suggests the reason why subsidies are limited to local public schools. My interpretation is this: It is the industrial policy of the state to support domestic brands, and not domestic firms per se. The firm itself (UniSIM) may be based locally, owned by locals, fully staffed by locals, and the services provided primarily to locals, but because the product on offer is essentially foreign (accreditation from Open University et al) it is therefore not in the interest of the state to promote it.

I don’t agree with this because I do believe it is in the interest of the state to make the playing field level, so that new entrants have a fair chance against incumbents, who have to compete harder for customers. A lot of you have told me that you have no desire to subsidize degree mills and predators on less-savvy paper-hungry students. Neither do I. But the current population of private providers in the education market isn’t representative of what we would expect in a competitive one. The state has crowded out everyone who isn’t low-cost. How could UNSW Asia compete for students who can go to NUS for a quarter of the price? It couldn’t.

Singapore Management is a good example of why it makes sense to welcome foreign competition. SMU is basically a Wharton replicate, from the curriculum to the joint programs to the scholarship modeled on IS&B to the pervasive investment banking / management consulting culture. That was its main selling point back when it first got started – a brand-name foreign-style education available locally. SMU students were eligible for subsidies from the beginning. But nobody thinks that subsidizing SMU diluted the Singapore brand. If anything, it made Singapore a more attractive place to go to school, and gave students more choices. It might’ve also motivated NUS and NTU’s business programs to improve.

However, the degree of competition unleashed by extending subsidies to all undergraduate programs in Singapore will always be limited by the fact that starting a new (comprehensive) university in Singapore, even with subsidies from the state, is a massive endeavor fraught with risk, and the market cannot support an infinite number of players. It also takes years to establish one – the fourth public university is now under construction, and nobody knows if it will succeed or not. Competitive forces will have a glacial pace. But there are hundreds of universities abroad that our local players might compete with, and if citizens eligible for the means-tested subsidy could take it anywhere they chose to go, competition will be that much more perfect.

They were the first to greet us at Sinuiju. That is, after the KPA soldiers had inspected our documents, presented by the mainland tour guide. It was a printout of tour passengers, with our passport-size portrait photographs pasted on adjacent to our profiles. The border guard who came onto the Dandong-Sinuiju train cabin only asked for it after seeing my passport cover of a different shade of red, which after glancing through, was satisfied. I wondered if the reason for his increased vigilance was that mainland Chinese were considered less of a security risk, and that I would have normally required a more intensive background check.

(Pyongyang subway) Notice the red pins. I wonder what happens if you forget to put it on in the morning.

Because of this delay, I got off the train last of all, and on the other side of the platform waiting by the Sinuiju-Pyongyang cabin car were two figures, one lady in a yellow hanbok and a man in a white short-sleeved shirt and black trousers. As I approached, I noticed they wore the red great leader pins on their left breasts. They did not, however, wear smiles.

They were the two guides assigned to our tour group. One male, and one female, to better facilitate communication with the varying interests of the passengers. Both spoke Mandarin fluently. The lady interacted mostly with the female tourists, older middle-aged ladies, and so I had few chances to discover who she was. She was pretty in a conventional way, or at least she would have been if she had smiled more.

The male guide, however, I had much more opportunities to chat with. Especially after he escorted roommate and myself back after our attempted escape from Yanggakdo. Complimenting him on his native-level Mandarin, he explained that he had grown up and went to university in China, so I surmised that he was from a highly mobile urban upper class – not the refugees hiding in fear of deportation by the Chinese authorities (and subsequent imprisonment), but those officially sanctioned to live, work, and conduct trade for the state abroad in its most important neighbor.

And then there was someone else, another local guide attached to our tour group. An ‘English-speaker’. He did not speak Mandarin, and could not interact with any of the mainland tourists. Since there were no English-speakers in our group, other than myself and roommate, I can only surmise that he was there because of me, which was initially quite alarming. However, his English language abilities seemed somewhat limited, which I supposed was due to a lack of oral practice with a native speaking partner. Perhaps he was feigning, and listening intently to my every word, or perhaps not.

(Pyongyang) A soft-serve ice cream vendor. Too bad there was only one flavor.

In our first conversation, I discovered that he was about my age and had just graduated from Kim Il Sung University’s mathematics department before starting with the tour agency. I wondered what a member of the elite and a rising cadre in the Workers Party was doing here as my tour guide. Was I paranoid to assume that he was there as my personal minder? Was he just as suspicious of me as I was of him? He seemed like a nice guy. Treated me to an ice cream one time when I was bored to tears by the overpriced-souvenir-shopping component of the tour.

(Arirang Mass Games, Pyongyang) I wonder what was on her playlist. Maybe some Super Junior?

At the Mass Games, I sat pretty close to the guides up front since I wanted a good view of the show, and I noticed that one of the female guides (for the other tour group) was listening to a slim iPod Nano (probably bored since she’d seen the show before). Even I don’t have an iPod Nano! Being a tour guide could be pretty lucrative since it allows travel and regular access to foreigners, and the possibility of hard currency tips and gifts for barter, but I didn’t think it would be that lucrative. I guess even in an egalitarian society some are more equal than others.

Previously on Pyongyang Diaries: Escape from Yanggakdo!
Next time: The People

Regular posting will be delayed yet again as I will be in Taipei for the Global Initiatives Symposium at National Taiwan University. GIS is an Asian business student conference, modeled on the St. Gallen Symposium – I met one of the organizers when I went to SGS – except that its Asia focused and not Eurocentric like SGS is. It’s the first time Taida is putting this together, and I’m optimistic that it will be just as professionally organized. This will be my first visit to Taiwan, and a welcome break from my summer of Stata.

As the train rolled into the station, I looked out the window and saw the sign above the entrance: 평양 (Pyongyang). Finally – the capital of the hermit kingdom. KPA soldiers herded us out of the train onto the platform, and down through a dark tunnel underneath the tracks. There were no lights, and it was too dark to make out the red script on the walls, but I had some idea of what revolutionary things they said. Only a few hours earlier that day, I had been in a similar tunnel at Dandong station, except on the walls there were advertisements. I was disappointed, because I really wanted to see what advertising was like in the DPRK.

(Pyongyang station, across) Pyonghwa motors ad with four cars… spoilt for choice!

Right outside the train station was the first advertisement I saw in North Korea: a billboard for Pyonghwa motors, the DPRK joint venture with the unification church. It was also the only advertisement I saw; there were other Pyonghwa billboards scattered around the city, but no other company enjoyed this privilege. I suppose Pyonghwa would have cornered the DPRK auto market if not for all the imported Toyotas I saw, which may reflect the relative cost/value of its product lines.

(Pyongyang highway) Another Pyonghwa ad. This one is for the hwiparam (whistle) aka Fiat Siena. I never actually saw one on the road, though.

I didn’t have time to ask the local guides about it then, as they rushed us from the train station doors into the tour bus, as if to limit our exposure to the people outside (or perhaps their exposure to us). I snapped a brief shot of the ad for later perusal, when we were warned again not to take pictures unless expressly permitted to. Yeah, right. I put away my DSLR, which was perhaps too conspicuous, and switched to my teeny point-and-shoot, which is why many of the street pictures you will see here are somewhat blurry and poorly composed.

(Pyongyang street) Another propaganda mural about songun and juche. There were so many I was almost glad that my vocabulary was too limited to understand them.

As we drove through the city, it occurred to me that it was like I had stepped into a time warp to the fifties and sixties. Some of the vehicles on the street looked like they had been manufactured then. The buildings looked dull, their monochrome paint faded in patches. The only bright colors were the red banners and propaganda murals. I wanted to get off the bus right there to get a closer look at the shops and pedestrians, and perhaps also the jangmadang black markets, and hatched a plan to escape from the hotel as soon as the coast was clear.

(Pyongyang street) I was under the impression that all their school uniforms included red scarves. One kid is wearing his orange cap backwards, no doubt a dangerous nonconformist.

Unfortunately, our tour group was to be accommodated at hotel Yanggakdo. Not Ryugyong hotel. Not Koryo hotel. But Yanggakdo hotel, on Yanggak island. It had not occurred to me that I would be stuck on an island in the middle of the Taedong river, and I despaired, seeing the many checkpoints and lack of cover. Unfortunately, my only stealth training was from playing Metal Gear Solid and watching Bond movies. Which is to say, none.

(Yanggakdo hotel) I guess one way to isolate the foreigners is to put them on an island.

We arrived at the hotel and were given our room assignments when I noticed a large delegation of tourists from the ROK in the lobby – I could tell because they wore special passes on lanyards. A few of them were priests and nuns, which I thought was interesting. The mainland tourists went off to enjoy the entertainments offered in the hotel. I dropped off my stuff in the room, and against my better judgment, told my roommate that I was going out to walk around. He insisted on coming along. I guess I felt better that at least I wouldn’t be alone if I were arrested for ‘hostile acts’ like seditious foreign journalizing.

(Yanggak Island, Pyongyang) The view from the 46th floor of Hotel Yanggakdo. Note the checkpoint on the bottom right.

It was a bad idea to bring him along. We got past the empty parking lot and golf course and took a short detour towards the spiral-shaped building, which was the ‘international cinema house’. And then we saw a group of locals playing volleyball. This kid just didn’t have any discretion – instead of avoiding them by going around, he went right up to announce our presence and tried to chat up the ladies with his phrasebook Korean. (more about his antics later) They looked half confused, half afraid. The entire group stopped playing and stared at us. Soon after, our tour guide came running up from the hotel and told us that we were not allowed to wander unsupervised. Someone must have sounded the alarm that foreigners were on the loose.

(Pyongyang international cinema house) Doesn’t look like its operating… maybe it only opens during the Pyongyang film festival.

In retrospect I probably wouldn’t have gotten much farther on my own either. First mistake: daylight (I thought I wouldn’t get good photographs otherwise) Second mistake: appearance. While my ‘southern province’ complexion wouldn’t necessarily give me away from a distance, I hadn’t been dressed and groomed conservatively to blend into the populace – I didn’t see a single local rocking a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers and a messy college hairstyle. Also, my DSLR was a dead giveaway. If I had looked the part, brought the point-and-shoot, and snuck out after dark, it might have worked, as it did for Jerry Guo – but the game was up for me.

(Pyongyang TV) I haven’t seen this kind of test signal since the early 90s.

We were taken back to the hotel, and since I have no interest in casinos, bars and the other ‘entertainments’, I ended up watching k-dramas like I always do (DPRK-dramas, that is). The one I saw that night was set in the colonial era. While I couldn’t understand most of the dialogue, it was pretty easy to tell what was going on: Japanese girl is in love with Korean guy, Japanese dude who is into the girl gets jealous, Korean guy prevails. Gee, I didn’t see that one coming. I think I’ll stick with F4, thanks.

(Pyongyang apartment building) All the buildings were grey and dull… the only bright colors are on the banners and murals.

I wondered that evening why I came on this tour if I wasn’t going to see economic reform and real, grassroots market development. Without seeing the jangmadang, everything else would be reading between the lines, seeing between the road stops of regime propaganda at the pain and suffering beneath. And I wasn’t here to see pain and suffering. I don’t want to have anything to do with poverty porn. And unlike the MDV tourism, the profits of the Communism zoo only go to the development of a privileged few.

I remember the older mainland tourists exclaiming to me how the countryside and the cityscape reminded them of the China of their youth, like we had stepped into a time machine back to the Cultural Revolution. The tone they had was a kind of sad sympathy mixed with a sense of schadenfreud relief. They could’ve gone anywhere else for a holiday but chose to come here. Why?

(Mangyondae, Pyongyang) The kids on their school trip seem as disinterested as we are to visit the great leader’s birthplace.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the tour operators to the developing world, or to here, don’t contribute something positive – they do, and I hope they prosper and flourish to the point where they become obsolete, and tourists will come to the DPRK for different reasons altogether (like maybe historical/cultural/eco-tourism or whatever). But to reach that point, we should be aware of the unspoken premise of the tour as it is now: to see an impoverished people living in fear and isolation. To be fair, awareness-raising on both sides, learning more about what’s going on, being part of the solution, are also part of it. I wonder how much we can really learn though.

Previously on Pyongyang Diaries: The Tourists
Next time: The Guides

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I heard them chattering away even while getting through security screening at the Dandong station entrance. Thirty to forty (2 busloads worth) of middle-aged mainland Chinese people old enough to be my parents were clustered on hard plastic seats around the tour operator’s flag. I was the only ‘foreigner’, but thankfully I don’t look too different. Just younger. Hopefully if I kept my mouth shut, my crummy Mandarin and accent wouldn’t betray me.

One teacher from Shanghai, upon learning about my age, asked to introduce me to her daughter if I’m ever in town. She and her colleagues are on a group tour, and there are other groups of colleagues from other firms here too. They seemed like fairly middle-class people from the eastern provinces, affluent enough to go on a tour of ‘mysterious North Korea’ (that was how the tour was advertised), but perhaps not wealthy enough to go somewhere else, like Seoul. I wonder if they are spies collecting intelligence.

(Somewhere along the Pyongui line) Theme tourism idea: Considering how ancient the rolling stock looks, the DPRK might make a good retro trainspotting location.

When we had gathered at the train station, our Chinese tour guide explained that from this point on, we should not take any photographs unless expressly allowed to. Fortunately for this blog’s audience, I’m not that good at following instructions I don’t agree with. Around 9.30am, we then boarded a train that looked like it has been in service since the Second World War, and leave Dandong for Sinuiju (新义州/신의주). As the train begins to move, the group starts singing some kind of train ride song from their childhood days. I imagined them as little Young Pioneers during the Cultural Revolution. Guessing from their age, they would have been elementary or middle school kids at the time.

The train tracks run across the bridge across the Yalu river at Dandong. Perhaps it is more accurate to describe it as one of the one-and-a-half bridges there. The other bridge, right next to it, stops abruptly halfway across. The DPRK side is incomplete, as if they started construction and then just stopped many years ago: The orphaned stone bases resemble little stepping stones across the river. From the window I saw tourists posing for photographs from a little observation deck on the Chinese half, and I waved to them. Farewell, civilization! And then we were past the river, in North Korea.

(Yalu river) I guess you could try to swim the rest of the way, stopping to rest at each stone base, but border security here is probably tightest.

The first thing that greeted us was a bronze statue of Kim Il-Sung, his arm outstretched to the statue of his counterpart across the river. We stopped at Sinuiju station to switch to the Pyongui line. As I waited for the border guards to go through our passports and bags, I looked outside. Above the red text of the station’s name was a faded portrait of the great leader, as if to tell us that he is always watching. When the guard saw that my passport is of a different color he asked our Chinese guide to show him the tour paperwork. I tried to look as inconspicuous as possible.

As the train left Sinuiju for Pyongyang, we passed many more murals and statues of the great and dear leaders, and endless pillars with patriotic messages in red I couldn’t understand. I lost count of how many I saw.

A quick aside: Writing this from a 꽃보다 남자-themed Dunkin’ Donuts in central Seoul as I wait for my friends to get off from work, it strikes me that the juxtaposition of my present environment with what I recall is stark. As many F4 advertisements and posters I’ve seen around the city, they still aren’t quite as ubiquitous.

(Sinanju) Unfortunately I couldn’t take the equivalent picture at Sinuiju station, but they look fairly similar. The red text on the left says ‘long live the great leader comrade Kim Jong-il’.

Along the dirt roads there are few motor vehicles, mostly bicycles and ox-drawn carts. The trucks I saw carried dozens of workers standing. We passed a stream and I saw women carrying babies on their backs washing their clothes there, while the children play in the rice marshes. Maybe it was just my imagination or maybe it was malnutrition – some of them resemble those photographs of Somalian children with distended bellies. Considering the Pyongui line is the ‘nice’ part of the countryside since it’s the one that foreign eyes see most, I wondered how much poorer the rest of the countryside must be.

It was also then that I met my roommate for the duration of the tour, a college student from Anhui who speaks some English and wants to practice with me. Paranoid me immediately imagined that he had been planted by the PRC intelligence services to spy on me, but he seemed fairly harmless. He was here to accompany his aunt and cousins, and one of them (18~19yo) is cute. I told him so, and he replied that that’s all she is. (Chatting her up later, I learned that she hopes to become a flight attendant)

Taedonggang maekju: Great taste of Juche! I have no idea what the 11 on the label is. Maybe the factory’s administrative number?

Our local guides handed out packs of bottled water with our Styrofoam lunch packs, and I scrutinized mine carefully, holding the water up to the light – I saw little dust particles floating in it. The label said ‘koryo sindeoksan’. I suppose Mt. Sindeok’s streams aren’t as pure as they should be, or perhaps it’s the bottling factory. Shortly afterwards, the beverage service began, and the attendants rolled their cart to my cabin. Most of the goods for sale looked like cheap imports of the kind you might see in a mom and pop grocery store – one was a chocolate wafer manufactured in Malaysia. My fellow passengers preferred to drink beer than water, and bought two bottles of Taedong River beer (4.5%) for 5 RMB each, and a pack of myuhyang cigarettes for 10 RMB. As they lit up, I decided it was time to switch cabins.

Ryongseong beer and Sindeok mineral water. I was surprised to see Chinese characters printed on the label, since the DPRK has abandoned hanja, so I presume this is mainly for export to the PRC than domestic consumption.

I wandered into the next cabin to talk to the Chinese guide, who is studying for a local government position. She studied Korean in Seoul and then joined the tour agency as a guide. She tells me that she brings tour groups here throughout the year, and not only during the Mass Games season, so it occurs to me that the combined revenue from PRC-DPRK tourism could exceed that of Koryo Tours et al and Hyundai Asan despite the price differential. Possible research project: Contact all tour operators and compile aggregate tourism revenue data set.

We arrive in Pyongyang around 3.30pm.

Previously on Pyongyang Diaries: Getting There
Next time: Escape from Yanggakdo