wandering the wide world in search of wonders
(Sheung Wan, Hong Kong island) Names matter.
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.
Posted in Education, Singapore.
– August 12, 2009
(Taipei) Competition is a necessary but sometimes insufficient condition for quality.
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.*
Posted in Economics, Education, Essays & Writing, Singapore.
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– July 22, 2009
(Hong Kong tutoring agency ad) No tutors can compensate for a lack of personal motivation.
My little cousin recently received her O-level grades, which were disappointing to say the least. I wasn’t close to her, but I did try my best to make a difference: I emphasized the importance of attending a good JC and getting grades at least good enough to ensure admission to the highly subsidized local universities, if not secure a taxpayer-funded ride to the Ivy schools. I even gave her my extensive collection of college admissions guides – yes, I was that insane about it.
Posted in Bildungsroman, Education, Singapore.
– January 22, 2009
Climbing a mountain with Price Waterhouse Coopers (Mt. Santis, St Gallen)
1. An incredible experience
SGS is truly the best student conference I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve been to quite a few of them. I met the most amazing people there – networking opportunities abound – including Nitin from NextBillion. Naturally Geoffrey was there charming the ladies in his bespoke suit.
Posted in Business, College Life, Education.
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– June 28, 2008
Although my op-ed has finally been published in the Straits Times review section as a joint submission, I can’t help but feel a little upset that they rejected my original piece but took this one when the only differences are that 1) it is less critical of the state and 2) more conversational.
Posted in Economics, Education, Essays & Writing, Politics, Singapore.
– October 9, 2007
I was amused to find this 1991 WaPo article, James Fallows’ The Economics of the Colonial Cringe: Pseudonomics and the Sneer on the Face of The Economist, circulating on Young Republic, considering how most of its membership has been thoroughly saturated with Oxbridge-bound post-colonial angst/awe and required subscriptions to the Economist since middle school for debate club.
Posted in Economics, Education.
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– March 18, 2007
I won third place, and the essay can be found here. I don’t think I did that great a job personally, certaintly not as much effort as the libertarian-paternalism essay, so I wonder what were the differentiating factors that made my essay better than the others.
I am presently trying to sort out how I can facilitate payment of my award since I do not yet possess an SSN. My present course of action is to secure a campus job immediately – I had been delaying this since I was waiting for an opening for a research assistant position in the economics department (in line with my strengths and interests) instead of say, card-swiping at the dining hall… but in view of the circumstances I may have to take up something menial. Hopefully I can minimize the difficulty of finding a job by accepting one with minimal remuneration, and also minimize the workload. The policy of only awarding SSN to foreign students who have secured employment creates perverse incentives: incentivizing working at the least, and not the greatest, of one’s ability. This is clearly not an optimal outcome.
Posted in Economics, Education, Essays & Writing.
– September 20, 2006
Excellent address by Andrew Abbott from the U of C. Key takeaway:
Or on the other hand you can seek education. It will not be easy. We have only helpful exercises for you. We can’t give you the thing itself. And there will be extraordinary temptations — to spend whole months wallowing in a concentration that doesn’t work for you because you have some myth about your future, to blow off intellectual effort in all but one area because you are too lazy to challenge yourself, to wander off to Europe for a year of enlightenment that rapidly turns into touristic self-indulgence. There will be the temptations of timidity, too, temptations to forgo all experimentation, to miss the glorious randomness of college, to give up the prodigal possibilities that — let me tell you — you will never find again; temptations to go rigidly through the motions and then wonder why education has eluded you.
Though I wonder if he’s merely playing with definitions of education and skills, I do think this bit is right. Hat tip from SQ, my whartonite buddy who should be so pleased that he self-selected into the culture of success.
Posted in Education.
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– July 2, 2006
The National University of Singapore’s undergraduate business program (Bizad) is pursuing an aggressive advertising campaign. The first one I saw was the designer-jeans metaphor. The second was about A-level results – the message is that bizad is the school of choice for the very best. The third is about a foreign student who picks bizad over wharton/sloan (suspension of disbelief aside, note the small envelopes, and you know what that implies…)
Posted in Business, Education, Singapore.
– May 25, 2006
They had me at the synopsis. I was instantly intrigued by 女王の教室 and it’s implications to education:
Akutsu-sensei accomplished this feat by introducing a test-based rank and privilege system on the first day. The highest scorers on the Monday morning test get their choice of seats and other perks while the two lowest scorers are burdened with all the chores for the week from blackboard and toilet cleaning to serving lunch. When the students protest her system and call it unfair, she tells them to open their eyes. In Japanese society, she lectures, those who work hard or have influence get all the privileges, and the lazy or less affluent end up with the leftovers. She says only six in 100 people can expect to be happy and the elite already have most of the advantages and access to the best medical care. She tells them that, as products of the public school system, they will have to scramble to get anything at all, and most of them will end up as “bonjin” (ordinary people), to whom those on the top will be happy to leave the soldiering and service-sector jobs.
I wonder if I might have been better motivated to excel earlier if my primary school teachers had instituted such a system that directly links performance to lifestyle instead of the diffuse, indirect and somewhat opaque system of ’streaming’ that most 6th graders don’t fully appreciate. One might say that our supposedly ‘unforgiving’ education system in Singapore isn’t nearly unforgiving enough to create an effective feedback mechanism to the most important stakeholder – the student – and create buy-in.
There is some moral ambiguity in the drama series about whether or not it is right for Akutsu-sensei to put her young wards through a gauntlet of social and moral dilemmas, even if they are meant to strengthen their personal development and internalize integrity. It just isn’t very clear whether or not that is the intent, or whether that intent justifies the hell her students are put through. Hell isn’t too far from the mark, as Akutsu-sensei meets most literary parallels to the Devil from the medieval morality plays and later works: she is omniscient (knows all the students’ transgressions), omnipresent (appears everywhere she is needed), omnipotent (at least relative to the 6th graders). Ultimately, the life lessons she teaches are important and meaningful, and she teaches them effectively, though indirectly. On the question of the justness of her methodology, I am undecided as to how much intent should be a factor.
All things considered, Jyoou no Kyoushitsu is probably one of the best J-dramas of 2005, along with Nobuta wo Produce and Byakuyakou. I highly recommend it. For lighter fare, try Hana Yori Dango or Densha Otoko.
Posted in Education, TV Dramas.
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– March 26, 2006
Context: In Singapore, ’scholarships’ are contracts offered by various public sector agencies (and some private firms) to sponsor tertiary education that come with (generally six-year) employment obligations. This is probably rather different from the traditional meaning of the term, which refers to the academic quality of a ’scholarly’ individual, or the sponsorship of such an individual. As such, they are not primarily ‘need-based’ or redistributory as per most sponsored tertiary education programs, but employment-centric.
The A-level results are to be released later this afternoon today. I remember the day I got my results – and how all our result slips came with a ‘goodie-bag’ package of scholarship material. Today’s Straits Times came with their Scholars’ Choice special, in which the state agencies take out full page advertisements, and have their scholars interviewed. These ads and interviews also appear in local magazine Career Central. Within the school term there was also a significant emphasis on scholarships, particularly in celebrating those who obtained them. Perhaps it may be useful to take an objective look at scholarships and whether the attention they command in Singapore is warranted.
The value of a scholarship can be derived from the sponsorship amount (tuition fees, expenses etc) and the projected income over the duration of the contract. Then we discount and adjust for (dis)utility to get the present value. Let’s call this value X.
The opportunity cost of X is the next best alternative foregone i.e. not taking up the scholarship, paying for college and working somewhere(s) for the equivalent time frame. The value of this is derived from the projected income, discounted for risk etc to get the present value. Let’s call this value Y.
In an efficient labor market, X and Y must converge and equate. If X is greater than Y i.e. the scholar is ‘overvalued’, the incentive for the sponsor is to reduce income to match productivity/value levels or increase effort/disutility – after all the scholar is ‘captive’. If Y is greater than X i.e. the scholar is ‘undervalued’, then a rational individual would go do something else. An efficient labor market would result in an equilibrium where scholars are correctly matched according to their value.
Of course markets are not fully efficient, and everyone seems to think they can arbitrage between X and Y and come out on top. However, this usually suffers from overvaluation of X and undervaluation of Y. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most scholars would do a lot better elsewhere. Why? More on this later.
Posted in Economics, Education, Singapore.
– March 1, 2006
My own alma mater, Anglo-Chinese Junior College, has a twenty-year-plus tradition called ‘fun-o-rama’, a biennial school carnival, the proceeds of which go into the school’s building expansion fund. I participated in this carnival in my own time at the school, manning my class’s stalls, and selling coupons. At the time, it was an enjoyable experience, and I have (mostly) fond memories of it.
Perhaps in light of ACS’s present circumstances, it is time for a more objective look at this school tradition.
Proponents of maintaining the ‘fun-o-rama’ tradition usually conflate two separate issues: the carnival as a source of revenue, and the carnival as a social-cohesion activity. The carnival is meant to generate revenue for its expansion, and to provide a shared experience that bonds students. Other reasons cited are developing entrepreneural skills but I will not address those here.
As a source of revenue, the carnival is highly inefficient. Many of the coupons are purchased by the students themselves and their immediate family and friends (which often belong to the same extended ACS old boys network). The goods and services in the carnival are provided by the students and paid for out of their pockets (or their families’ or friends’ or in-kind donations), which are then purchased by coupons. The result is a complicated series of transactions between closely related agents that tends to hide its effects – a regressive incidence that falls heavily on students and their families, with large overheads and expenses. Unlike a donation drive, this process loses much of the potential revenue in conversions, which is a highly inefficient way to transfer funds from students to the school. Some people might argue that the process itself ‘creates demand’ (or supply, depending how you look at it) like Say’s Law – the question then is whether the demand generates more revenue than the process loses through inefficiencies. My guess is that it does not. Alternative revenue streams might include soliciting direct and corporate donations.
I won’t even talk about opportunity cost here.
The second issue of cohesion is vitally important, as much of ACS’s appeal is to a sense of identification with the school even decades after graduation. The Ivy League schools amass huge alumni donation rates because of this brand identification. This is partly material (networking benefits, alumni connections, some prestige that comes with association) and partly sentimental. Fun-o-rama is a powerful experience – yet many of the ways it functions is detrimental to this purpose. Purchasing (and selling) coupons is often coercive rather than voluntary, often playing on tunes of guilt and duty. Students, family, friends, and alums are all subjected to an increasingly hard-sell campaign. This tends to drain rather than build goodwill.
The problem is that many people can identify these problems but tend to conflate the two issues. They rationalize the inefficient revenue process with the community goodwill it (supposedly) generates, or they rationalize its coercive nature with the need to generate revenue (however inefficiently). My answer is to delink these two purposes – Fun-o-rama must reform itself into a purely cohesive activity (its core compentency) and forget profit (which it was never suited for). This will allow carnival organizers to relax and focus on creating a great (and completely voluntary) experience that students will remember.
However, I fear that ACS’s culture will make reform unlikely. The hard-sell nature of fun-o-rama comes from a hard-sell of all ACS paraphenalia – I’ve bought all kinds of ACS pins, mugs, bears, tickets, coupons etc. We have reached a point where overloading alums will have negative returns. Yet we never seem to learn.
I will write more on alternative revenue streams for ACS in the future.
Posted in Education, Singapore.
– January 8, 2006
Economic theory posits that education is more than simply increasing productivity (through knowledge/skill gains) – it is also about signalling and screening. A highly selective admission/graduation process, or the act of self-selection in opting for a competitive school, sends signals to others with asymmetric information (ie employers) about the candidate’s value. This helps them screen candidates and reduce the decision space. The perennial question about elite schools is how much of the candidate’s value is through the education or innate (ie selected) – an NBER paper ‘Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables’ finds:
We find that students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges. However, the average tuition charged by the school is significantly related to the students’ subsequent earnings. Indeed, we find a substantial internal rate of return from attending a more costly college. Lastly, the payoff to attending an elite college appears to be greater for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds.
Swarthmore Associate Professor of History Tim Burke writes:
For another, the more highly selective a college or university is in its admission policies, the more useful it is for an employer as a device for identifying potentially valuable employees, even if the employer doesn’t know or care what happened to the potential employee while he or she was a student. If so, this has bad implications for expensive noncompetitive lower-tier private colleges, possibly, but since they’ve long since been the most economically tenuous part of the higher education sector, that’s not news.
What does this mean for ACS, which has recently set up its ‘international’ school, Anglo-Chinese School (International)? As a new institution, the quality of the education is yet to be determined, though we will soon be able to make projections on this. However, where screening and signalling is concerned.. Anecdotal evidence (from friends who have been involved with the school recently) suggests that admissions is not academically rigorous. The primary screening mechanism is the tuition fee, which is high relative to heavily subsidized public school fees, but more or less comparable with the private schools. This means that the primary signal about their students is one of privilege. That might be important for clients who want their children to associate with the ‘right sort of people’ (whatever that means) but it seems like the wrong brand strategy to me, if clients are interested in say, increasing productivity or getting into a competitive university.
What worries me more is that, in this niche of the education industry, price is being taken as an indicator of value – a giffen good – which tends to create a vicious cycle of increasing prices and perceived value, which is almost always artificial. Perhaps the heavy subsidies on public school tuition have distorted the market and my perceptions of what a fair price is for a privately run, highly efficient education provider (ACS Independent, maybe?), but I can’t help but see the price tags as some sort of educational arms race in a prisoner’s dilemma for schools.
The answer for ACS (International) is to adjust its entrance signal from mere privilege to include academic rigor and potential – but that is what ACS (Independent) already does and would be redundant/inefficient. If we believe that privilege is precisely what the ‘international’ school seeks to signal, then I wonder how this fits in the overall strategy for ACS as a whole.
Posted in Economics, Education, Singapore.
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– November 1, 2005
Full disclosure – both writers of this blog are third/fourth-generation ACS alumni, with complete ACS educations.
Malcolm Gladwell would call it a ‘tipping point’ - the Anglo-Chinese School (Independent)’s recent decision to go co-ed. The school’s motto was that every student should be ‘a scholar, an officer, and a gentleman’. Now it will be something like ‘a scholar, a leader, and a global citizen’. Not quite the same ring to it.
There are many reasons why such a move is ill-conceived, some to do with pedagogy, and some to do with strategy. I believe this model, while to be lauded for its inclusivity, is one that is inefficient in terms of specialization and division of labor. The ACS family of schools (which is inclusive of the other Methodist schools) offer a broad range of differentiated products and specialize in different levels of education. Leveraging on economies of scale, coordinating and cooperating in the market can create value and strengthen institutional position. Instead, the school has chosen multiple redundancy.
This decision is only symptomatic of a larger trend in ACS, which I will write more of soon.
Posted in Education, Singapore.
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– October 30, 2005
