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.

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.

While admittedly part of this was projecting my regrets about my first choice colleges onto her, I don’t think my advice was wrong. This is a competitive world we live in, and early choices make a big difference in later outcomes. The subsidized local universities are a very good deal for the price, so demand far exceeds supply.

In retrospect my approach was a failure, because it did not encourage her enough to want it for herself. I failed to communicate the benefits of a competitive education in a way that would relate to her perceived interests. Looking back, the main reason why I studied hard for O-levels had nothing to do with practical considerations about financing college tuition or career prospects. It was simply what was done by those I considered my peers, the scholar-class kids I met during a creative writing summer camp when I was 15.

The reason I applied to the summer camp? Having an crush on a scholar-class girl I met by chance, who had participated in the camp previously and encouraged me to apply. Admission to the program was not very competitive, but it self-selected on the basis of English language ability, upper-middle-class cultural tastes, and personal initiative – all of which are relatively good indicators of academic success. It was there that a boy from a mediocre public school entered the social circles of the gifted program and special assistance plan students – the cream of Singapore’s highly stratified education system. It was a fun summer camp. I enjoyed it very much, and the friends I made there now attend every top university I can think of.

I worked hard at O-levels for their acceptance and respect, not my own career prospects. I knew then that Huntsman and Harvard and Oxbridge were the aspirations of the scholar-class kids, even though I had only a faint understanding what Huntsman et al were at the time. I didn’t even know what Goldman Sachs was until after A-levels. But that aspiration made all the difference.

On a side note: that summer camp is called the Creative Arts Program, and is organized by the Gifted Education branch of the Singapore Education Ministry every year. While in Singapore, I met one of the program administrators, and we discussed how to evaluate the performance of the program. While I am skeptical of whether the program has a significant causal impact on professional literary development, I do believe it has a powerful socialization effect on upward mobility in general, and I hope they will focus their study on that, as they will probably find more significant results than if they concentrate solely on ‘publishing literary work’ as the dependent variable of interest. Though I think it would be difficult to control for the self-selecting bias in the sample, I would also include other measures of upward mobility as possible dependent variables.

Thus in retrospect, I should have encouraged my little cousin to participate in social activities that would have surrounded her with highly-motivated kids, and thus acculturate her in their values of upward mobility. If I hadn’t attended that summer camp back then (or if I hadn’t met that girl), I might have instead adopted the values of my middle school and the culture of entitlement and mediocrity that poisons it. While she wasn’t suited for the summer camp I attended, there are probably many other social activities that would have had the same effect. My advice on college admissions would have been better received at a more mature age, when she is self-motivated to succeed. But by then, it would have been too late. It really sucks to have to learn this the hard way, but I guess some people have to.

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.

It really opens your eyes to the quality of life in Switzerland. On my first day, my hosts treated me to dinner: Rösti, bratwurst, and a local beer. It brought me to tears On the second day i.e. when the student program started, we had an even better meal. I’d really like to live here if it wasn’t so ridiculously expensive.

What was most unfortunate about the Symposium is that my interaction was mostly limited to the participants. With 200 of them I always had someone new to talk to. But I didn’t get to interact much with actual St. Gallen students, apart from my hosts, the ones in charge of our arrangements, and the few that got to be participants. The students who we saw most often were in a conference logistics and catering role, and the organizing committee was busy behind the scenes.

I hope I can participate in future years, but from the dates given, I suspect that it will disadvantage most US colleges due to final examinations. It was already extremely difficult for Geoffrey and I to come – both of us hopped on a plane right after finishing the last exam, and that was after I had pulled all kinds of strings with instructors and administrators to adjust my exam schedule. If they push the dates of the next symposium slightly forward as is anticipated, it will become almost impossible for me to participate.

This was right next to a Wall Street Institute. (St Gallen)

2. Egalitarian St Gallen

Europe prides itself on its egalitarian creed in higher education, but the students who attended the symposium were mostly from highly selective, elite universities around the world. The majority of participants from the US were from ivy schools, the Japanese students were from Todai/Waseda/Keio etc, and the list goes on. The same was true for the European students, who by and large came from a similar elite (Oxbridge etc).

I was thus surprised to discover that St. Gallen itself has an egalitarian entrance policy: They are required to accept anyone with the appropriate certification, which I suppose is meant to limit the development of affiliation preferences. I don’t know how they accommodate all qualified applicants with a limited capacity though. When I asked my hosts to elaborate more on this, they told me that although entrance is easy, graduating is not – the selection/screening process for a cognitive elite takes place after one starts.

It’s hard to tell whether this is any more egalitarian that a selective acceptance policy. It might be fairer if one is trying to control for variance in high school quality, so everyone gets an equal chance in the same large lecture classes.

An argument for separation of investment and commercial banking functions? (St Gallen)

3. Finance as a national industry

I asked my hosts what they thought about the subprime crisis and UBS. They were very upset with the bank’s leadership, and said that they would get beaten up if they dared show their faces in public – I sensed a very European instinct about income inequality here, but I thought it might also be the fact that unlike Bear Sterns, which the average person doesn’t really care about, the public here is a large stakeholder in UBS, which is partly seen as a Swiss national icon.

The ST review editor’s stated reason for rejecting it was ‘insufficient detail on policy implementation’ but this piece isn’t any more detailed on implementation, so the real reason must be that 1) someone higher up didn’t like my emphasis that the policy is anticompetitive/protectionist and undermines the global schoolhouse economic development strategy, or that 2) it was too policy-wonky (i.e. contra stated rejection reason), or most likely, that 3) an undergraduate has no business questioning policy.

Yet I don’t really care about getting credit as long as a means-tested university tuition voucher system gets implemented, even though I am not likely to be a beneficiary.

If you can’t read the article, it is also posted here. Unlike most major newspapers, the Straits Times insists on pay-only access to online articles, which makes no sense to me since it is state-owned and presumably less concerned with quarterly profits than say, expanding market share, when the marginally additional revenue from online subscribers is more than offset by the potential increase in circulation. Even if it was privately owned, the value of greater circulation would still greater – NYT doesn’t take losses on the print edition for nothing.

The far more critical piece I wrote for The Online Citizen can be found indirectly here.

Why do people apparently buy the Journal (or The Washington Post or the New York Times) only if they want actually to read it — rather than just to carry it around, as a suspiciously large number of Economist “readers” seem to do?

Oh dear. Fallows might have been describing me, considering how little on average of each issue I actually read. Oh dear. But that’s probably symptomatic of having a core curriculum I barely finish anyway. So it’s kind of a fashion accessory, since I can’t wear a suit to class every day unlike a certain gentleman in west philadelphia.

The cover of anonymity for the magazine’s writers is an important part of its omniscient stance, among other reasons because it conceals the extreme youth of much of the staff. “The magazine is written by young people pretending to be old people,” says Michael Lewis, the author of “Liar’s Poker,” who now lives in England. “If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves.”

A certain modesty would seem appropriate in The Economist’s leaders these days, considering that after 10 years in which the Thatcher government essentially did what the magazine said, Britain has the weakest economy in Europe. (Remind me, again, why we’re looking to the British for economic advice.) But the implied message of the leaders often seems to be, “I took a First at Oxford. I’m right.”

“I took a First at Oxford. I’m right.” sounds horribly close to the attitudes of some *cough* PPEople I know… But surely that is the implied message of all forms of signalling? WaPo authors’ credentials included? To me the value of the Economist is more about being a screening mechanism, to filter out all the noise of the news and give me as pure a signal (different meaning used here) as possible. I don’t want to have to get through Anna Nicole and Britney and the normal fluctuations to figure out what’s important – I let filters do that for me. News aggregators like blogs act like focal points for my attention. Google News picks out the top stories based on my interests. And the Economist does pretty much the same thing, more consistently and a better read, though a little less timely due to the nature of print publishing.

My subscription is ending in a few months and I really should get it renewed, though perhaps after the summer – might be a little hard to get my subscription sent wherever it is I might go, might as well just pick it up at bookstores. Somehow reading it online isn’t quite the same… All the advertisements about openings in international agencies and executive public administration programs make me feel like greater things are possible after reading it.

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.

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.

Advertising is advertising but this marketing campaign is poorly conceived, and a business school ought to know better: The top students who are considering an undergraduate business education are likely to prioritize placement statistics and salary ranges – they want to see how many from the current graduating class are in which firms, at what average salaries. They want to see lists of on-campus recruiters. They want to see summer internship and graduate school placement numbers. When the claims in the ads have very little correlation with those numbers, the campaign may even be counterproductive.

If Bizad truly intends to rank among the best (as the advertisements imply) then it should invest more in getting placements up. This will require being much more selective – aggregate placements rise when firms trust schools enough to effectively outsource hiring to them. Since this is itself dependent on being able to attract the best students, Bizad should probably pursue a ‘big push‘/’sunspot theory‘ hiring blitz to break past the positional advantage feedback loop of the top schools, but that probably requires more political will and human capital than they possess.

If that is the intention of the ad campaign at all. This campaign is probably targeted at the demographic at which it is most effective – the local students whose decision space is solely between the top 3 local universities and the regional alternatives. And personally, of the 3 I much prefer Singapore Management, where I see a greater institutional commitment to competing – Geoffrey and I were just at a session last weekend at SMU about the new quant finance track they’re offering. Notably, the panel of speakers they invited from industry were very coy during Q&A about projected placement numbers, but that’s another story.

SMU now needs another big push to change the culture from the present ‘SMU students are different’ image (meant to attract fun-oriented students and boost applications) to a more ‘SMU students mean business’ culture of hardcore competition and preprofessionalism. Scrap the ads with kids jumping around and start having them wear suits to class every day. Not just during on-campus recruiting season. Ok, maybe not suits, but at least business casual.

If I had one piece of advice for Bizad it would be to leverage on the larger institutional resources of NUS – the larger alumni network and faculty – and its advertisements would emphasize those advantages. They could import the competitive culture of the medicine and law faculties. NUS has the greatest positional advantage in the local market for higher education, and I am glad that the competition brought about by higher-ed-services liberalization here has spurred it to improve. Its greatest challenge is complacency.

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.