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.
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, 2) more conversational and most importantly, 3) has a nominated member of parliament’s name in front - same ideas, same structure, his prose. That, and I like my punchy policy-wonk prose better, even though his is probably more accessible.
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.
My initial response to reading Mark Eleven’s post on his experience as an ASEAN pre-university scholar was to dismiss it as the rant of someone who doesn’t have the talent, initiative, or willpower to benefit from being given such a great opportunity - the next best alternative would have been to pursue his studies in M’sia and fight through ethnic quotas on local university placement and primary Bahasa language instruction. I question his competence, and most of all, his ridiculous sense of entitlement that demands that the world owes him a living. They do not, and that should have been the first lesson he learned in this country - because it is the most important one in life.
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.
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.
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…)
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.
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.
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.
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