Global Education: Bringing the World to Your Classroom.
I love to travel. In my eight years of teaching, I have seized several (free) opportunities to see the world. Travel has enriched my teaching, allowing me to bring international experiences directly back to my students.
This year I participated in the Teachers for Global Classrooms fellowship, a program of the U.S. State Department.
I joined 64 teachers from around the country in completing an online course on best practices in global education. In February, we attended a global education symposium in Washington, D.C., accompanied by administrators from our schools.
And I just returned from an eye-opening trip to Brazil with 10 other TGC teachers. We spent two weeks observing and co-teaching in schools (both public and private). Other teachers in the program traveled to India, Ghana, Indonesia, Morocco, and Ukraine.
One takeaway from my fellowship experience is a clearer understanding of what teaching global competencies might look like in practice. The Asia Society and the Council of Chief State School Officers have produced a series of global competence matrices (PDF). I started using these matrices this year as a way to evaluate my own curriculum. Recently, I've been embedding competencies into my student assessment rubrics.
The four main elements of the global competence matrix are:
• Investigate the world.
• Recognize perspectives.
• Communicate ideas.
• Take action.
We should be teaching our students these skills, and of course, mastering the competencies ourselves. They probably sound familiar: Some call them 21st-century skills, and others refer to them as the new basics. Students need to go beyond their comfort zones and actively learn from (not just about) people who have different worldviews.
This is not a call to throw out the curricula that we are currently using. On the contrary, it's an opportunity to enhance our practice and create a more rigorous and meaningful learning environment for our students.
In teaching U.S. history this past school year, I have worked with colleagues to revise our Progressive Era and Great Depression units, incorporating more opportunities for students to develop global competencies.
Investigate the World and Recognize Perspectives
Progressive Era unit: After a look at Teddy Roosevelt and the creation of the national parks system, students learned about differing views on the management of public lands a hundred years ago (focusing on John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Richard Ballinger). Students analyzed and debated the decision to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite. We tried to push students to recognize their own perspectives within the spectrum of preservationist, conservationist, and laissez-faire attitudes.
Great Depression unit: We redesigned our Great Depression unit to follow an arc that led to a study of the Great Recession of 2007-09. We began by looking at the causes of the 1929 stock market crash and the widespread bank failures that followed. Then we moved on to study the "alphabet soup" of New Deal programs and the impact of the depression on people's everyday lives. Next, we compared different economic perspectives on the causes of and responses to the Depression, including a theoretical comparison of capitalism and communism.
Communicate Ideas / Taking Action
Progressive Era unit: We finished the unit by turning to the present. Students studied the current debate over the Keystone Pipeline project. After role-playing a town hall meeting on the pipeline issue, students wrote letters to President Obama that showed an understanding of multiple perspectives and incorporated the history of American conservationism and environmentalism. We hope that the President will be impressed by the level of global competence in the 100 letters, especially the act of sending them.
Great Depression unit: Similarly, we ended the Great Depression unit in the present. We looked at the recent economic recession, focusing on the collapse of the housing bubble, and the growing income inequality gap. Students debated three perspectives on economic policy:
• The call for a "New New Deal" and increased taxation of the wealthiest Americans.
• A focus on deficit reduction and tax cuts.
• A call for a new, more just system altogether.
Background materials included rhetoric from the Obama campaign, the Republican Party's economic platform, and the Occupy Movement. We hope that students take action by personally engaging with these important issues, and that those who are eligible voters will feel informed enough to participate in this November’s presidential election.
But you don't have to be a social studies teacher to incorporate the global competencies—the matrices address numerous content areas.
And you don't have to take students across international borders. You can help your students practice the skills of recognizing different perspectives and communicating ideas effectively in your own classroom, engaging the diverse perspectives found in your own community and school.
There are also easy ways to connect with classrooms around the world. You can start by simple class-to-class communication and then advance to collaborating with classes in other countries on specific projects. (I've listed some of my favorite resources below.)
The time to take global education seriously is now. Whether you believe we need to prepare students to compete economically with students from other nations or that graduates need to have the skills to collaborate with others to solve complex problems, the global competencies are critical.
Read more at http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2012/07/03/tln_zeichner.html?tkn=NXVDqq2alkusePtHLnERebzr7NQfrwDKMPu0&intc=es
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Showing posts with label US. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US. Show all posts
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
Half Of New Graduates Find They Are Jobless Or Underemployed
Half of new graduates are jobless or underemployed.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
STORY: Economists' outlook brightens
An analysis of government data conducted for the Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.
Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.
While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.
Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
"I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.
Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he has received financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said.
His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having a long-lasting financial impact.
"You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it's not true for everybody," says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If you're not sure what you're going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."
Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. "Simply put, we're failing kids coming out of college," he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. "We're going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow."
By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed — roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.
On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.
The figures are based on an analysis of the 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor's degrees who were "underemployed."
About 1.5 million, or 53.6%, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41%, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.
Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.
In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).
According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.
College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.
In Nevada, where unemployment is the highest in the nation, Class of 2012 college seniors recently expressed feelings ranging from anxiety and fear to cautious optimism about what lies ahead.
With the state's economy languishing in an extended housing bust, a lot of young graduates have shown up at job placement centers in tears. Many have been squeezed out of jobs by more experienced workers, job counselors said, and are now having to explain to prospective employers the time gaps in their resumes.
"It's kind of scary," said Cameron Bawden, 22, who is graduating from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in December with a business degree. His family has warned him for years about the job market, so he has been building his resume by working part time on the Las Vegas Strip as a food runner and doing a marketing internship with a local airline.
Bawden said his friends who have graduated are either unemployed or working along the Vegas Strip in service jobs that don't require degrees. "There are so few jobs and it's a small city," he said. "It's all about who you know."
Any job gains are going mostly to workers at the top and bottom of the wage scale, at the expense of middle-income jobs commonly held by bachelor's degree holders. By some studies, up to 95% of positions lost during the economic recovery occurred in middle-income occupations such as bank tellers, the type of job not expected to return in a more high-tech age.
David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, said a bachelor's degree can have benefits that aren't fully reflected in the government's labor data. He said even for lower-skilled jobs such as waitress or cashier, employers tend to value bachelor's degree-holders more highly than high-school graduates, paying them more for the same work and offering promotions.
In addition, U.S. workers increasingly may need to consider their position in a global economy, where they must compete with educated foreign-born residents for jobs. Longer-term government projections also may fail to consider "degree inflation," a growing ubiquity of bachelor's degrees that could make them more commonplace in lower-wage jobs but inadequate for higher-wage ones.
That future may be now for Kelman Edwards Jr., 24, of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who is waiting to see the returns on his college education.
After earning a biology degree last May, the only job he could find was as a construction worker for five months before he quit to focus on finding a job in his academic field. He applied for positions in laboratories but was told they were looking for people with specialized certifications.
"I thought that me having a biology degree was a gold ticket for me getting into places, but every other job wants you to have previous history in the field," he said. Edwards, who has about $5,500 in student debt, recently met with a career counselor at Middle Tennessee State University. The counselor's main advice: Pursue further education.
"Everyone is always telling you, 'Go to college,'" Edwards said. "But when you graduate, it's kind of an empty cliff."
Read more at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-04-22/college-grads-jobless/54473426/1
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
STORY: Economists' outlook brightens
An analysis of government data conducted for the Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.
Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.
While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.
Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
"I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.
Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he has received financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said.
His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having a long-lasting financial impact.
"You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it's not true for everybody," says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If you're not sure what you're going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."
Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. "Simply put, we're failing kids coming out of college," he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. "We're going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow."
By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed — roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.
On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.
The figures are based on an analysis of the 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor's degrees who were "underemployed."
About 1.5 million, or 53.6%, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41%, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.
Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.
In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).
According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.
College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.
In Nevada, where unemployment is the highest in the nation, Class of 2012 college seniors recently expressed feelings ranging from anxiety and fear to cautious optimism about what lies ahead.
With the state's economy languishing in an extended housing bust, a lot of young graduates have shown up at job placement centers in tears. Many have been squeezed out of jobs by more experienced workers, job counselors said, and are now having to explain to prospective employers the time gaps in their resumes.
"It's kind of scary," said Cameron Bawden, 22, who is graduating from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in December with a business degree. His family has warned him for years about the job market, so he has been building his resume by working part time on the Las Vegas Strip as a food runner and doing a marketing internship with a local airline.
Bawden said his friends who have graduated are either unemployed or working along the Vegas Strip in service jobs that don't require degrees. "There are so few jobs and it's a small city," he said. "It's all about who you know."
Any job gains are going mostly to workers at the top and bottom of the wage scale, at the expense of middle-income jobs commonly held by bachelor's degree holders. By some studies, up to 95% of positions lost during the economic recovery occurred in middle-income occupations such as bank tellers, the type of job not expected to return in a more high-tech age.
David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, said a bachelor's degree can have benefits that aren't fully reflected in the government's labor data. He said even for lower-skilled jobs such as waitress or cashier, employers tend to value bachelor's degree-holders more highly than high-school graduates, paying them more for the same work and offering promotions.
In addition, U.S. workers increasingly may need to consider their position in a global economy, where they must compete with educated foreign-born residents for jobs. Longer-term government projections also may fail to consider "degree inflation," a growing ubiquity of bachelor's degrees that could make them more commonplace in lower-wage jobs but inadequate for higher-wage ones.
That future may be now for Kelman Edwards Jr., 24, of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who is waiting to see the returns on his college education.
After earning a biology degree last May, the only job he could find was as a construction worker for five months before he quit to focus on finding a job in his academic field. He applied for positions in laboratories but was told they were looking for people with specialized certifications.
"I thought that me having a biology degree was a gold ticket for me getting into places, but every other job wants you to have previous history in the field," he said. Edwards, who has about $5,500 in student debt, recently met with a career counselor at Middle Tennessee State University. The counselor's main advice: Pursue further education.
"Everyone is always telling you, 'Go to college,'" Edwards said. "But when you graduate, it's kind of an empty cliff."
Read more at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-04-22/college-grads-jobless/54473426/1
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Asian Students Pressured to Cheat on US College Applications
Asian Students Pressured to Cheat on US College Applications.
As American colleges remain the premier destination for the academic elite in Asia, many students are feeling pressured into resorting into drastic cheating measures to get their highly sought after places, writes Patrick Winn at the Global Post.
Depending on the degree of assistance, students and their families can expect to pay between $5,000 and $15,000 for ghostwritten essays in flawless English, fake awards, manipulated transcripts and even imposters to sit as the applicant for SAT exams, all arranged by college prep agencies.
According to a recent survey by Zinch China, as many as 90 percent of recommendation letters to foreign colleges are faked, 70 percent of college essays are ghostwritten and 50 percent of high school transcripts are falsified.
Tom Melcher, chairman of Zinch China says:
“For the right price, the agent will either fabricate it or work with the school to get a different transcript issued.”
And it’s a lucrative business. For every admission into a top 10 or top 30 school, these agencies are set to receive bonuses between $3,000 and $10,000.
To put that into context, there are currently nearly 158,000 Chinese students are enrolled in US colleges at any given time, making up more than one in five foreign students studying in the country.
“International students are seen as a source of revenue … and the trend has exploded in the past two years,” said Dale Gough, international education director for AACRAO, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
While America has ceded manufacturing power and foreign influence to China, an American degree remains the gold standard of educational prestige, writes Winn.
“The allure of America’s universities, and the pressure-cooker drive to succeed among Asia’s expanding upper class, will continue to propel Asian students into American schools.”
How can it be stopped? Many believe interviewing all Chinese students via online video chats, conducting spot tests in English, and hiring a mainland Chinese staffer in the college’s home office will help slow the trend down.
But Melcher believes that as long as the risks are low and the rewards are so high this culture of cheating will continue.
“Frankly, I feel really bad for Chinese families who are trying to be honest,” he said.
“They’re driving 55 while everyone’s zooming past them. After a while, they throw up their hands and say, ‘Fine, I’ll speed up.’”
Read more at http://www.educationnews.org/international-uk/asian-students-pressured-to-cheat-on-us-college-applications/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
As American colleges remain the premier destination for the academic elite in Asia, many students are feeling pressured into resorting into drastic cheating measures to get their highly sought after places, writes Patrick Winn at the Global Post.
Depending on the degree of assistance, students and their families can expect to pay between $5,000 and $15,000 for ghostwritten essays in flawless English, fake awards, manipulated transcripts and even imposters to sit as the applicant for SAT exams, all arranged by college prep agencies.
According to a recent survey by Zinch China, as many as 90 percent of recommendation letters to foreign colleges are faked, 70 percent of college essays are ghostwritten and 50 percent of high school transcripts are falsified.
Tom Melcher, chairman of Zinch China says:
“For the right price, the agent will either fabricate it or work with the school to get a different transcript issued.”
And it’s a lucrative business. For every admission into a top 10 or top 30 school, these agencies are set to receive bonuses between $3,000 and $10,000.
To put that into context, there are currently nearly 158,000 Chinese students are enrolled in US colleges at any given time, making up more than one in five foreign students studying in the country.
“International students are seen as a source of revenue … and the trend has exploded in the past two years,” said Dale Gough, international education director for AACRAO, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
While America has ceded manufacturing power and foreign influence to China, an American degree remains the gold standard of educational prestige, writes Winn.
“The allure of America’s universities, and the pressure-cooker drive to succeed among Asia’s expanding upper class, will continue to propel Asian students into American schools.”
How can it be stopped? Many believe interviewing all Chinese students via online video chats, conducting spot tests in English, and hiring a mainland Chinese staffer in the college’s home office will help slow the trend down.
But Melcher believes that as long as the risks are low and the rewards are so high this culture of cheating will continue.
“Frankly, I feel really bad for Chinese families who are trying to be honest,” he said.
“They’re driving 55 while everyone’s zooming past them. After a while, they throw up their hands and say, ‘Fine, I’ll speed up.’”
Read more at http://www.educationnews.org/international-uk/asian-students-pressured-to-cheat-on-us-college-applications/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Monday, May 7, 2012
United States And Indonesia Partnering for Higher Education
United States And Indonesia Partnering for Higher Education.
Nearly a year after the Obama administration set a priority of improving higher education exchanges with Indonesia, the U.S. is increasing its ‘commitment to cultural diplomacy’, writes Sara Schonhardt at Voice of America.
As part of the outreach, the administration aims to double the number of Indonesian students studying in the U.S., which officials say will help the U.S. economy and improve relations with the rapidly developing Muslim-majority nation.
Last June, to support university partnerships and student exchange programs, the Obama administration earmarked $165 million over five years. This would support subjects such as agriculture, business and information technology.
The U.S. is continuing to reach out to fast-growing economies like Indonesia and Vietnam as potential new markets for U.S. goods and services. International students injected nearly $19 billion into the U.S. economy last year, and Indonesia’s rising middle class could open new opportunities for U.S. universities to bring in more tuition dollars.
The U.S. says, in an attempt to improve understanding between the two countries, it also wants to send more American students to Indonesia. U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Scot Marciel said student exchanges create a “personal basis for better relations.”
But to entice more Indonesians to American schools, Marciel said the U.S. must research and market better:
“We have to do a much better job of A, marketing our universities, which are the best in the world; and B, changing this terrible perception that you can’t get a student visa. So I’m literally almost out on the streets grabbing people as they walk by saying, ‘hey, we’ll give you a visa if you go study in America.’”
The number of Indonesians studying in the U.S. has fallen steadily over the last decade because the Asian financial crisis curtailed some families’ resources to send their kids to study in America. Visa issues also contributed to the drop in numbers, and it is still to rebound fully. Fewer than 7,000 Indonesians studied in the United States in 2010, down about eight percent from 2009.
With improvements in universities in Australia, Singapore and Malaysia, more Indonesians are choosing to study at cheaper options closer to home.
There is, however, the undeniable lure of quality: the U.S. is home to many of the world’s most prestigious universities and research institutions. Many Indonesians who have studied abroad say the combination of strong academics and unique life experience from study in the United States is invaluable.
American officials say that improving educational opportunity is crucial to the economic growth and political stability of a key ally, writes Karin Fischer at the Chronicle.
“We can’t change the rainfall”, says Cameron R. Hume, the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia. “But we can change people. We can improve opportunity for a generation of young people”.
For Education Minister Mohammad Nur, the exchange is a part of enhanced cultural diplomacy that will help develop Indonesia and strengthen bilateral friendship, writes Schonhardt.
“There is a lot of history behind Indonesia’s relationship with America, he said. That is why it needs to be strengthened. But Indonesia also wants to strengthen ties with Europe and other countries that can give it new insights.”
Some students, at the education fair, said it does not matter which country they study in, as long as they can afford it. Others said they want to experience life in the United States, as long as there are good scholarship opportunities, writes Schonhardt.
Read more at http://www.educationnews.org/higher-education/us-indonesia-partnering-for-higher-education/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Nearly a year after the Obama administration set a priority of improving higher education exchanges with Indonesia, the U.S. is increasing its ‘commitment to cultural diplomacy’, writes Sara Schonhardt at Voice of America.
As part of the outreach, the administration aims to double the number of Indonesian students studying in the U.S., which officials say will help the U.S. economy and improve relations with the rapidly developing Muslim-majority nation.
Last June, to support university partnerships and student exchange programs, the Obama administration earmarked $165 million over five years. This would support subjects such as agriculture, business and information technology.
The U.S. is continuing to reach out to fast-growing economies like Indonesia and Vietnam as potential new markets for U.S. goods and services. International students injected nearly $19 billion into the U.S. economy last year, and Indonesia’s rising middle class could open new opportunities for U.S. universities to bring in more tuition dollars.
The U.S. says, in an attempt to improve understanding between the two countries, it also wants to send more American students to Indonesia. U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Scot Marciel said student exchanges create a “personal basis for better relations.”
But to entice more Indonesians to American schools, Marciel said the U.S. must research and market better:
“We have to do a much better job of A, marketing our universities, which are the best in the world; and B, changing this terrible perception that you can’t get a student visa. So I’m literally almost out on the streets grabbing people as they walk by saying, ‘hey, we’ll give you a visa if you go study in America.’”
The number of Indonesians studying in the U.S. has fallen steadily over the last decade because the Asian financial crisis curtailed some families’ resources to send their kids to study in America. Visa issues also contributed to the drop in numbers, and it is still to rebound fully. Fewer than 7,000 Indonesians studied in the United States in 2010, down about eight percent from 2009.
With improvements in universities in Australia, Singapore and Malaysia, more Indonesians are choosing to study at cheaper options closer to home.
There is, however, the undeniable lure of quality: the U.S. is home to many of the world’s most prestigious universities and research institutions. Many Indonesians who have studied abroad say the combination of strong academics and unique life experience from study in the United States is invaluable.
American officials say that improving educational opportunity is crucial to the economic growth and political stability of a key ally, writes Karin Fischer at the Chronicle.
“We can’t change the rainfall”, says Cameron R. Hume, the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia. “But we can change people. We can improve opportunity for a generation of young people”.
For Education Minister Mohammad Nur, the exchange is a part of enhanced cultural diplomacy that will help develop Indonesia and strengthen bilateral friendship, writes Schonhardt.
“There is a lot of history behind Indonesia’s relationship with America, he said. That is why it needs to be strengthened. But Indonesia also wants to strengthen ties with Europe and other countries that can give it new insights.”
Some students, at the education fair, said it does not matter which country they study in, as long as they can afford it. Others said they want to experience life in the United States, as long as there are good scholarship opportunities, writes Schonhardt.
Read more at http://www.educationnews.org/higher-education/us-indonesia-partnering-for-higher-education/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Despite More College Grads US Workforce Needs Even More
Despite more college grads, U.S. workforce needs even more.
The number of adult Americans who have earned college degrees has been increasing, but not fast enough to keep up with workforce demands, according to a report released Monday.
At the current rate, employers in 2025 will need about 23 million more degree-holders than the nation's colleges and universities will have produced.
"We are nowhere near at the pace that we need to be says," Jamie Merisotis, president of the non-profit Lumina Foundation, which released the report. "Look at it as an alarm, an urgent call to action."
The foundation wants to increase the percentage of working-age Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60% in 2025 — a goal similar to one set by President Obama in 2009. Obama said he wants the United States to reclaim its position as the world leader in the proportion of college graduates by 2020. If the current pace continues, that figure will reach just 46.5% by 2025, the Lumina report says.
The Lumina Foundation report released Monday, based on 2010 Census data, found a positive overall trend: 38.3% of Americans ages 25 to 64 had at least an associate's degree in 2010, up from 38.1% in 2009 and 37.9% in 2008.
Last month, the Census Bureau noted a historic high in the number of adults with at least a bachelor's degree. That figure, 30%, represented an "important milestone," said Kurt Bauman, the chair of the Census Bureau's education branch.
Yet Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the USA has slipped, to 16th, in the share of adults ages 25 to 34 holding college degrees. South Korea, Canada and Japan are the top three.
The Lumina report's analysis of attainment rates for the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas, where about two-thirds of all Americans live, also reveals differences by region. Completion rates are among the lowest for working-age adults in fast-growing metropolitan areas in the South and West.
Read more at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-03-26/college-degrees-adults/53793160/1
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
The number of adult Americans who have earned college degrees has been increasing, but not fast enough to keep up with workforce demands, according to a report released Monday.
At the current rate, employers in 2025 will need about 23 million more degree-holders than the nation's colleges and universities will have produced.
"We are nowhere near at the pace that we need to be says," Jamie Merisotis, president of the non-profit Lumina Foundation, which released the report. "Look at it as an alarm, an urgent call to action."
The foundation wants to increase the percentage of working-age Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60% in 2025 — a goal similar to one set by President Obama in 2009. Obama said he wants the United States to reclaim its position as the world leader in the proportion of college graduates by 2020. If the current pace continues, that figure will reach just 46.5% by 2025, the Lumina report says.
The Lumina Foundation report released Monday, based on 2010 Census data, found a positive overall trend: 38.3% of Americans ages 25 to 64 had at least an associate's degree in 2010, up from 38.1% in 2009 and 37.9% in 2008.
Last month, the Census Bureau noted a historic high in the number of adults with at least a bachelor's degree. That figure, 30%, represented an "important milestone," said Kurt Bauman, the chair of the Census Bureau's education branch.
Yet Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the USA has slipped, to 16th, in the share of adults ages 25 to 34 holding college degrees. South Korea, Canada and Japan are the top three.
The Lumina report's analysis of attainment rates for the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas, where about two-thirds of all Americans live, also reveals differences by region. Completion rates are among the lowest for working-age adults in fast-growing metropolitan areas in the South and West.
Read more at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-03-26/college-degrees-adults/53793160/1
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Sunday, April 8, 2012
A Cambodian American Who Can Never Go Home
A Cambodian American who can never go home.
Immigrants taken to the US by their parents as young children grow up as Americans - but on paper they remain foreigners. This means they can be deported if they commit a crime, and condemned to a life of permanent exile.
Sam's first memory is riding a sledge in the snow on the way to primary school in New Hampshire.
His favourite film is Scarface and in breaks during our conversation, he raps Tupac lyrics. He loves skateboarding and going to the gym.
There are millions of American 20-somethings just like Sam but unlike them, Sam can never set foot in the US again.
Two-and-a-half years ago, Sam was deported from the US to Cambodia, a country he had never even visited before. A land of chaotic traffic, fermented fish and endemic corruption.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime, the US granted asylum to thousands of Cambodians fleeing the anarchy in their home country.
They set up home in places like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, California. They got jobs, went to school, learned the language and became, in all but name, Americans.
Given permanent resident status, many never thought of applying for citizenship but in March 2002, in the wake of 9/11, the US and Cambodia signed an agreement allowing any non-citizen refugees who had committed felonies to be deported back to Cambodia.
Since then several hundred have been returned. Today they are stranded and lost, a long way from home.
I first met Sam in Phnom Penh 2010, just a few months after he'd arrived in Cambodia. Since then we have met several times to talk about what has happened to him.
Born in a refugee camp in Thailand, he arrived in the US one month old, with his mother, brother and sister.
Sam is proud of his childhood. Thrust into a bewildering, new world, things were not easy but he still talks happily of how he and the few other Khmer kids stuck together. And even though they were smaller than the rest, they would look out for each other and hold their own in fights.
After high school, Sam did a range of jobs, mainly factory work. He had a stint in juvenile detention for refusing to help a police investigation and a couple of other short stays in prison, including one for stealing a car radio and speakers.
But by 2009 he was working, living with his girlfriend and caring for his young son. That was when the immigration authorities took him in.
His earlier robbery of the car stereo made him liable for deportation at any time. After several months in detention, he was forced on a plane to Cambodia.
Last week, as we sat in a cafe Sam told me about what it was like arriving in the country.
"First day I get off the flight, officials surround me like vultures, because they think I got money. I got no money? They were talking to me in Cambodian, but I couldn't' understand."
Rubbing his head intently, as though still unable to process his experience, he continued: "Then we get out and it is hot. Hot! And all I've got is the clothes on my back and 28 cents in an envelope. And I was like, 'What the hell am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do?'"
Fortunately for Sam, the organisation RISC, which helps new returnees, picked him up from immigration at the airport and gave him a bed for a few nights. But this support is unusual. Most Cambodians have not warmed to the returnees.
"People die every day to try and go to America and for you to come back here? They think you're some kind of terrible person," Sam says.
Being a returnee is not something that's easy to hide. Sam has spent a long time in the gym in the US, he's twice the size of most Cambodian men, he has tattoos and speaks the language with a strong American twang. Blending in is not a possibility.
At first he spent a lot of his time with fellow returnees. Now he says he doesn't want to - that it doesn't help him settle in.
Many, already suffering from drug dependencies and untreated mental illnesses, find themselves drawn back into crime. It is not uncommon for returnees to end up trapped in Cambodia's bewildering and brutal penal system.
Sam has tried to get work but in a country where the average monthly salary is considerably under $50 (£32) a month it's not easy to find a job to support himself. Whenever we talk he tells me he feels like he's in a "daze", a feeling that he can't shake, a sense of bemusement. Although he knows it to be true, he can't accept that America has shunned him so completely. That it won't forgive him. Ever.
In the two years since I first met him, things have got a little better. He has joined a church which seems to provide him with a sense of belonging, his Khmer language skills have improved and with the help of friends and family in the States he can afford to rent an apartment.
But when I ask him if he might ever feel at home in Cambodia, he is adamant: "NO! Never! Definitely. Never ever! No matter how long I'm here. The feeling of being home is when you're really home. I'll never have that feeling again."
Read more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17527030
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Immigrants taken to the US by their parents as young children grow up as Americans - but on paper they remain foreigners. This means they can be deported if they commit a crime, and condemned to a life of permanent exile.
Sam's first memory is riding a sledge in the snow on the way to primary school in New Hampshire.
His favourite film is Scarface and in breaks during our conversation, he raps Tupac lyrics. He loves skateboarding and going to the gym.
There are millions of American 20-somethings just like Sam but unlike them, Sam can never set foot in the US again.
Two-and-a-half years ago, Sam was deported from the US to Cambodia, a country he had never even visited before. A land of chaotic traffic, fermented fish and endemic corruption.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime, the US granted asylum to thousands of Cambodians fleeing the anarchy in their home country.
They set up home in places like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, California. They got jobs, went to school, learned the language and became, in all but name, Americans.
Given permanent resident status, many never thought of applying for citizenship but in March 2002, in the wake of 9/11, the US and Cambodia signed an agreement allowing any non-citizen refugees who had committed felonies to be deported back to Cambodia.
Since then several hundred have been returned. Today they are stranded and lost, a long way from home.
I first met Sam in Phnom Penh 2010, just a few months after he'd arrived in Cambodia. Since then we have met several times to talk about what has happened to him.
Born in a refugee camp in Thailand, he arrived in the US one month old, with his mother, brother and sister.
Sam is proud of his childhood. Thrust into a bewildering, new world, things were not easy but he still talks happily of how he and the few other Khmer kids stuck together. And even though they were smaller than the rest, they would look out for each other and hold their own in fights.
After high school, Sam did a range of jobs, mainly factory work. He had a stint in juvenile detention for refusing to help a police investigation and a couple of other short stays in prison, including one for stealing a car radio and speakers.
But by 2009 he was working, living with his girlfriend and caring for his young son. That was when the immigration authorities took him in.
His earlier robbery of the car stereo made him liable for deportation at any time. After several months in detention, he was forced on a plane to Cambodia.
Last week, as we sat in a cafe Sam told me about what it was like arriving in the country.
"First day I get off the flight, officials surround me like vultures, because they think I got money. I got no money? They were talking to me in Cambodian, but I couldn't' understand."
Rubbing his head intently, as though still unable to process his experience, he continued: "Then we get out and it is hot. Hot! And all I've got is the clothes on my back and 28 cents in an envelope. And I was like, 'What the hell am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do?'"
Fortunately for Sam, the organisation RISC, which helps new returnees, picked him up from immigration at the airport and gave him a bed for a few nights. But this support is unusual. Most Cambodians have not warmed to the returnees.
"People die every day to try and go to America and for you to come back here? They think you're some kind of terrible person," Sam says.
Being a returnee is not something that's easy to hide. Sam has spent a long time in the gym in the US, he's twice the size of most Cambodian men, he has tattoos and speaks the language with a strong American twang. Blending in is not a possibility.
At first he spent a lot of his time with fellow returnees. Now he says he doesn't want to - that it doesn't help him settle in.
Many, already suffering from drug dependencies and untreated mental illnesses, find themselves drawn back into crime. It is not uncommon for returnees to end up trapped in Cambodia's bewildering and brutal penal system.
Sam has tried to get work but in a country where the average monthly salary is considerably under $50 (£32) a month it's not easy to find a job to support himself. Whenever we talk he tells me he feels like he's in a "daze", a feeling that he can't shake, a sense of bemusement. Although he knows it to be true, he can't accept that America has shunned him so completely. That it won't forgive him. Ever.
In the two years since I first met him, things have got a little better. He has joined a church which seems to provide him with a sense of belonging, his Khmer language skills have improved and with the help of friends and family in the States he can afford to rent an apartment.
But when I ask him if he might ever feel at home in Cambodia, he is adamant: "NO! Never! Definitely. Never ever! No matter how long I'm here. The feeling of being home is when you're really home. I'll never have that feeling again."
Read more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17527030
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
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