【clover】ECONOMIST DEBATE 01 University recruiting by 小g

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December 11th 2007 - December 24th 2007  

University recruiting

This house believes that governments and universities everywhere should compete to attract qualified students, regardless of nationality or residence.


http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/122


结构：
about the debates
background reading
opening statements
guest
guest
rebuttal statements
guest
guest
closing statements
decision
comments
comments
comments
comments
汇总

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About this debate

Over the last several decades, large investments have been made to equip primary and secondary schools with computers and teacher training. Now it is time to examine whether there has been a sufficient return on this investment. Does technology really offer substantive（真实的，实在的） advantages to students? Does technology accelerate or impede real progress in education? Similarly, does technology serve as a teaching crutch（拐杖） or does it offer the ability to promote sustainable change in the world's classrooms? And if so, is the technology deployed（部署）today being used to best possible advantage? What conditions need to exist in schools for technology to have an impact?

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background reading
A

Intelligence

Dimming

Disturbing evidence of a decline in youngsters’ brainpower

Oct 30th 2008 | From The Economist print edition

Jupiter Images

The hands-on way to budding minds

EVERY year Britain’s school-children provide gratifying（令人满意的） evidence of their increasing smartness. More leave primary school having done well in tests of reading, writing and arithmetic; more get top grades in national exams at ages 16 and 18. Nay-sayers（反对者）, though, think this progress overstated, even illusory. They attribute rising marks to dumbed-down curricula, downward-drifting grade boundaries and teaching to the test. But even the gloomiest assessment, it appears, may not go far enough. In important ways, the country’s children appear to be becoming dumber.

Michael Shayer of King’s College London has been testing children’s thinking skills since 1976, when he and colleagues started studying the development of reasoning abilities in young people. In 2006 and 2007 he got 14-year-olds to take some of the same tests as 30 years earlier. The findings, to be published early next year, are sobering（使清醒的）. More than a fifth of youngsters got high scores then, suggesting they were developing the ability to formulate and test hypotheses. Now only a tenth do.

The tests did not change, so the decline was not caused by different content or marking. And since they explored the ability to think deeply rather than to regurgitate（依样复述；使反刍） information or whizz（能手；飕飕作声）through tasks, the results matter deeply. In the purest test of reasoning, pupils were shown a pendulum（摇摆不定） and asked how to find out what affects the rate at which it swings. “Their answers indicated whether they had progressed from the descriptive thinking that gets us through most of our days, to the interpretative（作为说明的，解释的） thinking needed to analyse complex information and formulate and test hypotheses,” Professor Shayer explains.

In 1976 more boys than girls did well, a fact the researchers put down to boys roaming（漫游） further out of doors and playing more with tools and mechanical toys. Both sexes now do worse than before, but boys’ scores have fallen more, suggesting that a decline in outdoor and hands-on play has slowed cognitive development in both sexes. Britain’s unusually early start to formal education may make things worse, as infants are diverted from useful activities such as making sand-castles and playing with water into unhelpful ones, such as holding a pen and forming letters.

British children’s schooling may be hampered（束缚，限制）, too, by the tests that show standards rising. These mean teachers’ careers depend on coaching the weakest, rather than on stretching all children, including the most able. This interpretation is supported by another, more positive, finding from the research: that fewer children do very badly now than did 30 years ago.

When asked to speculate further on why fewer British teenagers now display mature reasoning, Professor Shayer eschews（避开，回避） local explanations and puts the blame squarely on television and computers. They take children away from the physical experiences on which later inferential（可以推断的）skills are based, he thinks, and teach them to value speed over depth, and passive entertainment over active. That chimes（一致） with other researchers’ findings of cognitive gains on tasks that require speed rather than close reasoning—useful, perhaps, as the pace of life accelerates, but hardly a substitute for（替换） original thought.

So what of children elsewhere? Britain’s are not the only ones kept inside for fear of traffic or paedophiles（恋童癖）, or slumped（大幅下降） in front of a screen for much of the day. “There is no similar evidence from elsewhere,” says Professor Shayer. “No one has looked for it.” Perhaps they should.

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B

University admissions

Accepted

A rarer word, these days

Apr 17th 2008 | WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print edition

ON APRIL 21st 1,000 high-school students will flock to（成群结队走向） Yale's Old Campus to be greeted by a three-storey, inflated statue of the university's bulldog mascot, Handsome Dan. With their admission to the university just secured, it is their turn to be feted（游乐会） during Yale's “Bulldog Days”, with everything from meetings with famous professors to pizza parties and, yes, the handsome hound（猎犬）in the flesh.

Admissions season has just concluded, and it has been another record year. The big four—Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale—all took less than 10% of their applicants for the first time ever. Harvard accepted just 7.1% of those who applied.

Explaining the absurd competition at the top is easy. A (peaking) population bump has increased the college-aged cohort（大队人马）for the past 15 years just as higher percentages of students have decided to enter university. Add to that two other factors: an intensifying obsession with big-name colleges rather than the ones that are cheapest or nearest to home, and the rollout（首次展示） of big new financial-aid packages at the best universities.

These trends have profoundly altered the selection process in lower ranks. So-called “almost-Ivies” such as Bowdoin and Middlebury also saw record low admission rates this year (18% each). It is now as hard to get into Bowdoin, says the college's admissions director, as it was to get into Princeton in the 1970s. That has boosted the cachet（威信） of what used to be “safety schools” for Ivy-league rejects and the selectivity of universities even lower down the pecking-order—which, after all, educate most American undergraduates.

Rarer in lower tiers, though, are good financial-aid programmes. Fees will be an even bigger worry this year as the subprime（主要的）mess savages family finances. And lenders are now unable to raise cash in uneasy debt markets. Even federally guaranteed student loans may become less accessible: Sallie Mae, the largest lender, has just announced that it will charge fees for loan applications.

Some congressmen want the government to buy up（全部买下） securities backed by student debt, and the federal education department may step in（干涉） as a lender of last resort. Even so, outside the top tiers, the big winners in this year's competition for applicants will be the ones who cause students least anxiety about how they are going to pay for all that learning.

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C

University rankings

Measuring mortarboards

A new sort of higher education guide for very discerning customers

Nov 15th 2007 | From The Economist print edition

WORKING out exactly what students and taxpayers get for the money they spend on universities is a tricky business. Now the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based think-tank（智囊团） for rich countries, is planning to make the task a bit easier, by producing the first international comparison of how successfully universities teach.

That marks a breakthrough. At the moment, just two institutions make annual attempts to compare universities round the world. Shanghai's Jiao Tong University has been doing it since 2003, and the Times Higher Education Supplement, a British weekly, started a similar exercise in 2004. But both these indices, which are closely watched by participants in a fickle（易变的） and fast-expanding global education market (see chart), reflect “inputs” such as the number and quality of staff, as well as how many prizes they win and how many articles they publish. The new idea is to look at the end result—how much knowledge is really being imparted.

“Rather than assuming that because a university spends more it must be better, or using other proxy measures（间接测定） for quality, we will look at learning outcomes,” explains Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research. Just as the OECD assesses primary and secondary education by testing randomly chosen groups of youngsters from each country in reading and mathematics, it will sample university students to see what they have learned. Once enough universities are taking part, it may publish league tables showing where each country stands, just as it now does for compulsory education. That may produce a fairer assessment than the two established rankings, though the British one does try to broaden its inquiry by taking opinions from academics and employers.

There is much to be said for the OECD's approach. Of course a Nobel laureate's view on where to study may be worth hearing, but dons（大学导师） may be so busy writing and researching that they spend little or no time teaching—a big weakness at America's famous universities. And changes in methodology can bring startling（令人震惊的） shifts. The high-flying London School of Economics, for example, tumbled（倒下） from 17th to 59th in the British rankings published last week, primarily because it got less credit than in previous years for the impressive number of foreign students it had managed to attract.

The OECD plan awaits approval from an education ministers' meeting in January. The first rankings are planned by 2010. They will be of interest not just as a guide for shoppers in the global market, but also as indicators of performance in domestic markets. They will help academics wondering whether to stay put（原位不动） or switch jobs, students choosing where to spend their time and money, and ambitious university bosses who want a sharper competitive edge（竞争优势） for their institution.

The task the OECD has set itself is formidable（令人惧怕的）. In many subjects, such as literature and history, the syllabus varies hugely from one country, and even one campus, to another. But OECD researchers think that problem can be overcome by concentrating on the transferable skills that employers value, such as critical thinking and analysis, and testing subject knowledge only in fields like economics and engineering, with a big common core.

Moreover, says Mr Schleicher, it is a job worth doing. Today's rankings, he believes, do not help governments assess whether they get a return on the money they give universities to teach their undergraduates. Students overlook second-rank institutions in favour of big names, even though the less grand may be better at teaching. Worst of all, ranking by reputation allows famous places to coast along, while making life hard for feisty（争强好胜的） upstarts. “We will not be reflecting a university's history,” says Mr Schleicher, “but asking: what is a global employer looking for?” A fair question, even if not every single student's destiny is to work for a multinational firm.