NACAC Board Approves Statement on Incentive-based Compensation for International Student Recruitment

The Board of Directors of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) has approved a statement on the use of Incentive-based Compensation for International Student Recruitment. (read the full statement here) While the statement does not oppose the use of agents by institutions for international recruitment, it maintains the Association's stance against incentive-based compensation of agents, in the following words.

The Board of Directors and the Admission Practices Committee affirm NACAC will not abandon the principle that payment of commissions based on the number of students recruited or enrolled is fraught with problems and stimulates behavior that is against the interests of students and the profession.

SUNY Korea to Open in Songdo

It is now official.   As reported earlier in the Korean press, State University of New York Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher and Stony Brook University President Samuel L. Stanley Jr., MD, announced that the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology in South Korea has approved the establishment of SUNY Korea, a partnership in Songdo, South Korea, that will be operated by SUNY Korea, LLC.  The official announcement can be read in full on the SUNY website.
SUNY Korea, LLC is funded by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, the Incheon Free Economic Zone, and the Metropolitan City of Incheon and will offer graduate degrees – with a strong focus on research – in Computer Science, Information Systems, and Technology Systems Management.
The SUNY Korea partnership has been awarded funding under a Ministry of Knowledge Economy grant entitled “Fostering Premium IT Professionals.” The total grant is for approximately $50 million for 10 years, and SUNY Korea will work with the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), a top-notch engineering university in Hyoja, for a 20 percent allocation of the grant.

Big Firms and Banks Hire More High School Graduates

As a follow-up to the previous post on academic inflation in Korea, it only seems appropriate to note another Joongang Daily article, entitled "Big Firms, Banks Hire More High School Graduates." The accompanying graphic provides some numbers. In addition, the country’s banking sector recently announced it will hire 2,700 employees with only a high school diploma for the upcoming three years as part of efforts to help bring down the overall unemployment rate and resolve the country’s so-called academic inflation. The Korea Federation of Banks said last Thursday that the country’s 18 banks plan to recruit 12 percent of their employees with high school graduates.
Sohn Kyung-shik, chairman of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, urged that companies should support high school graduate employees so that they can carry on their academic aspirations.
“Around 80 percent of students attending vocational schools are interested in attending universities,” Sohn said. “There should be measures to help high school graduates carry on their studies while at work.” The KCCI is currently urging companies to establish in-company universities.

Academic Inflation Bedevils Korea

The Joongang Daily has an interesting account of "academic inflation" in South Korea. “Academic inflation occurs when university graduates take up work that was not formerly done by graduates of a certain level. The minimum job requirements have been inflated academically for low-level jobs in Korea,” said Park Jae-hwan, who teaches business administration at Chung-Ang University. “Worsening academic inflation creates inefficiency in both society and economy.”
In Korea, where more than 80 percent of high school graduates go on to university, academic inflation, which refers to depreciation of degrees, has been a chronic social problem.
Government data show that the number of four-year universities in Korea nearly doubled from 108 in 1995 to 196 this year. Accordingly, the number of four-year university graduates surged from 330,000 in 1995 to 560,000 in 2008. On top of that, the number of people who obtained doctorate degrees last year topped 10,000.

With the local job market flooded with advanced degree holders, a growing number of college graduates are competing with high-school graduates for such menial service jobs as cleaning the streets, cracking down on parking violators and manning the bank counters.

Another New English Test to Enter South Korean Market

As reported in The Korea Times, another English test is preparing to enter the South Korean market.  It is the PTE Academic test, developed by Pearson. According to the article, PTE Academic is a test similar to existing English proficiency tests but with several unique features. The test boasts of its strengths in speed of results, flexible test dates and fully automatic scoring process.

A representative of Pearson's stressed that the new test is more likely to encourage the development of real language skills as it is unpredictable just as real life conversation is.

“If you put enough effort into some tests, you can work out how to get a good mark on that item. People eventually get very good at test taking skills but it doesn’t generalize into real English,” said Mary Jane Hogan. “I think the risk of that with PTE Academic is less because all the test preparations that we put out are focused on developing skills, not just on doing the items well.”

The test is focused on real time processing, which means that students must respond spontaneously to answers and cannot go back to change them.

Korean Cram Schools Profit from Special University Admissions

The press in Seoul are taking note that the special college admission program for those who graduated from high school in foreign schools is providing big business for cram schools here.   An article in The Chosun Ilbo was entitled "Special University Admissions Mean Big Business for Crammers."   The article notes that crammers are doing lively business offering crash courses for students who want to apply to Korean universities through a special entrance scheme for those who were educated abroad. A comprehensive package of classes on Korean, English, math and essay writing costs nearly W1 million (US$1=W1,052) a month.
A TOEFL class alone costs around W700,000-800,000 a month. Some crammers charge students W1.8 million for a four-week SAT course, which could earn them extra points when applying to universities through the special scheme. "Because these students tend to have only their summer vacation to take crash courses, the schedule is tight and the fees are high," one crammer staffer said.
An earlier article in The Chosun Ilbo noted that In 2008, the competition in these special exams was 9.36:1 at Korea University, which recruits 74 freshmen through the system every year, but last year that had risen to 11.56:1.
The ratio at Ewha Womans University rose from 6.85:1 in 2009 to 9.78:1 in 2010, and at Sookmyung Women's University, which recruits 45, it rose from 6.67:1 to 14.1:1.
When Konkuk University recently closed applications for the next year academic year, it found that 1,610 students applied for 60 vacancies, producing a record-high competition ratio of 26.83:1, more than double the 11.07:1 in 2009, a spokesman said on Sunday.
But the reason is not so much that many more parents are going overseas to work but that an increasing number of students go abroad to finish high school so they can avoid much fiercer competition in the general college entrance examination at home.

A New Survey Sheds Light on the Use of Recruitment Agents

More on the use of commercial recruitment agents in a survey reported by InsideHigherEd.  The survey, published in The Journal of College Admission,  a publication of the National Association for College Admission Counseling had its limitations. It was based on a survey of more than 300 Chinese undergraduates at four colleges and universities in the United States -- three of which do not pay agents to act on their behalf. And yet just under 60 percent of the students said that they used agents to help in the visa and application process.
NACAC's board has just recommended that the association strengthen its stance against the use of commission-paid agents, saying that their use "introduces an incentive for recruiters to ignore the student interest in the transition to postsecondary education, and invites complications involving misrepresentation, conflict of interest, and fraud at the expense of the student." The Journal of College Admission published a note stating that the survey article was submitted and accepted for publication before the decision of NACAC's board.

Video: California and Illinois Students Spend Semester in Korea

YouTube has established itself as the primary web-based source of information about study abroad.  This morning my alerts brought me a link to the following video that describes the experience of a small group of U.S. students who spent Spring Semester 2011 in Korea.

Virtual Reality and Educational Exchange

This morning's alerts brought me an interesting story entitled "Virtual Reality Could be the Future of Condo Buying" in IT World Canada.  Of course it could, and it probably will become so in some form.
My point in this post is to underscore that virtual reality has a huge, unexplored and as yet untested role to play in educational exchange.  Virtual study fairs and social networks have already begun to transform the world of international student recruitment and will change it even more dramatically as technology approves.
As one small example, in this world of Facebook offering free video chatting via Skype, there is no longer a good reason for colleges or university in the U.S. to trust a TOEFL or IELTS score alone as evidence of English fluency.   These new digital channels offer new ways to screen and select students, with a far greater degree of direct involvement by the student and parents.
College tours, not that many years ago, were offered on videotape.  Then many schools switched over to CDs, DVDs or USB keys as the technology changed.   Today, such video content is on the web and virtual reality applications offer enhanced options for presenting campus tours and related information about a particular institution.  Some of the forthcoming software and content services could be very informative, as well as involving and even entertaining.   In this latter area, Korea's strong online game industry may be able to make a true contribution to global educational exchange. (see my Korea Information Society blog post today on Nexon's entry into the global market.

The "English Interface" in Japan and Korea

Yesterday morning on my way to work a Korean language advertising poster on the side of a bus stop caught my attention.  The headline, translated literally into English, read "Get rid of English torture!"   For decades now, many Koreans have been part of a national campaign to learn English, and for many of them the process must have seemed like torture.  For the record, it is sometimes similar for English speakers attempting to learn Korean!
Along these lines, there is a very interesting article in yesterday's Japan Times entitled "'English Interface' could be Key to Japan's Revival." The author suggests that there are many reasons for Japan's declining competitiveness. He focuses on one: Japanese business' failure to develop a "user-friendly interface" to the world. Furthermore, he uses South Korea as a contrasting example, in the following words.
"Look at South Korea. Korean culture is as different from its Western trading partners' cultures as Japan's, and the Hermit Kingdom's mind-set may in some ways be even more closed. Yet South Korea has systematically built an effective interface to the world in the form of armies of managers and executives holding undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, business and law from American and other foreign universities who confidently speak serviceable English."
While I agree with the main argument made in the Japan Times piece, a word of caution for non-Korean companies and organizations is in order.  In general, localization of messages and adaptation to the Korean culture and tastes is still essential for success in marketing goods or services, including education, in the South Korean market.

Korea Leads the World in Digital Literacy

As mentioned in an earlier post about "smart education" in Korea, this nation leads the world in digital literacy, according to a recent OECD survey. The 2009 OECD PISA survey tested how 15-year olds use computers and the Internet to learn. Students On Line tasked students with evaluating information on the Internet, assessing its credibility and navigating webpages to test their digital reading performance. After Korea, the next best performers were New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Hong-Kong China and Iceland.
I thought readers might be interested in seeing some of the survey data, so I've included a graphic published by the OECD (click on it to see a full size version).