AUSTRALIA: A preferred destination for international students

Geoff Maslen06 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

"The most significant feature of the tertiary education landscape in Australia is the large proportion of international students,” says the OECD report Education at a Glance 2013. The land down under is a key destination for students from around the world, hosting more than 6% of its foreign students.

“This figure places Australia as the third most popular destination after the US (16%) and the UK (13%). One in five of the students enrolled in tertiary education in Australia in 2011 were international students, the highest proportion among all OECD countries, against an OECD average of 7%,” the report states.

“The country receives almost 20 times more international students than the number of Australian students who choose to study in tertiary programmes abroad.”

The report notes that Australia’s total expenditure for all levels of education relative to gross domestic product in 2010 was 6%, the same proportion as the OECD average of 6%. Significant increases in government investment between 2008 and 2010 saw Australia’s spending increase by 24% – or more than four times the OECD average increase of 5%.

“In 2010, Australia devoted about US$10,825 per student each year at all levels from primary to tertiary education, compared with the OECD average of US$ 9.313 per student,” the report says. “In 2010, 74% of Australia’s total expenditure on educational institutions came from public sources, lower than the OECD average of 84%.

“In fact, at 26%, Australia has the sixth largest proportion of private expenditure in the OECD for all levels of education compared with an OECD average of 16%. At the tertiary level, 54% of all spending came from private sources, again much higher than the OECD average of 32%.”

The report says educational attainment is high in Australia, where 74% of 25- to 64-year-olds have at least an upper secondary qualification, compared to the OECD average of 76%. The proportion of adults completing upper secondary education has increased significantly across generations, with 84% of 25- to 34-year-olds holding an upper secondary qualification compared to 61% among 55- to 64-year-olds.

Overall, tertiary attainment rates are well above the OECD average: 38% of the working age population holds a university degree, when the OECD average is 32%. This proportion rises to 45% among 25- to 34-year-olds compared to the OECD average of 39%.

But the OECD statisticians do not take account of the fact that a significant number of university graduates are from overseas and not Australian residents or immigrants. It is their presence that inflates the 45% figure, when the proportion of Australian citizens or migrants is about the OECD average.

But the report does mention that international students have a marked impact on estimated graduation rates and that because of the high proportion graduation rates are artificially inflated.

“For example, when international students are excluded from consideration, Australia’s graduation rates for first-time tertiary-type A (theoretical university-based programmes) courses drop by 17 percentage points, and first-time tertiary-type B (shorter , more vocationally oriented programmes) graduation rates drop by 3 percentage points.”
 

GLOBAL: Rankings and accountability in higher education

29 June 2013 Issue No:278

 

UNESCO has released a new publication, Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education: Uses and misuses, which debates the pros and cons of classifying universities. A UNESCO release says the book brings together “the people behind university rankings and their critics to debate the uses and misuses of existing rankings”.

The book arose from the “Global Forum Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education: Uses and misuses”, the first global consultation on the subject, organised by UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank in May 2011. This brought together researchers, academics, policy analysts, students and institutional leaders.

The release says the book develops many of the issues addressed during that landmark consultation and is the first in a new UNESCO series, Education on the Move, aimed at bringing the latest thinking in education to specialists worldwide.

The book features comments from people on five continents to provide a comprehensive overview of current thinking on the subject and sets out alternative approaches and complementary tools for a new era of transparent and informed use of higher education ranking tables.

It presents two sides to the debate:

1: Rankings purport to measure higher education quality, but:

• There are more than 16,000 higher education institutions in the world, and global rankings focus attention on the performance of less than 100 – or less than 1%. The pervasiveness of focusing on the top institutions obscures the fact that the majority of students attend non-elite institutions.
  
• Rankings throw no light on how a nation’s higher education system educates all its students and citizens.
  
• Rankings encourage nations to focus disproportionately on a handful of elites, which could undermine national or regionally strategic priorities and capacity for the knowledge society.
  
• Focus should be on ensuring the system is world class rather than on the performance of the individual ‘world-class university’.
  
• Aligning national priorities to meet the criteria of rankings is an abdication of national sovereignty.
  
• Because national budgets are a zero-sum-game (spending in one area means taking from somewhere else), governments risk subverting other policy objectives in order to conform to indicators designed by others for other purposes.
  
• Disproportionate emphasis on research can undermine teaching and learning.
  

2: However, rankings can claim achievements in the following areas:

• They have acted as a wake-up call about the value and importance of higher education, especially for nations that may not have been investing sufficiently.
  
• They have placed consideration of higher education quality within a wider comparative and international framework, which has challenged self-perceptions of greatness so there is no more room for self-promotion.
  
• With the onslaught of global rankings, the higher education world has become more competitive but also multi-polar. Many more countries are making a contribution to knowledge creation and dissemination.
  
• While rankings do not measure what is meaningful about the quality of higher education, they have drawn our attention to the importance of good quality comparative information about performance and productivity, value for money and return on public investment.
  
• Good quality, international comparative information is essential for underpinning strategic leadership and decision-making at the national and institutional levels.
  
• Comparable information on institutions, teaching and research makes it easier for students and researchers to make informed choices on where and what to study and where to work.
  
• Improved data-based or evidence-based decision-making can prompt discussions about what constitutes success and encourage benchmarking to identify and share best practices.
  

 

EUROPE: Challenges facing doctoral education

Bianka Siwinska29 June 2013 Issue No:278

 

Some 200 university leaders, senior managers, researchers and policy-makers gathered at the University of Warsaw earlier in June for the sixth annual meeting of the European University Association’s (EUA) Council for Doctoral Education.

These meetings give all stakeholders working with doctoral education platforms to discuss current trends and future developments in European and global doctoral education. The theme of this year’s event was: “From student to researcher; are we on the right track?”

Discussions focused on the extent to which European doctoral education has been on the “right track” after a decade of structural changes. The past decade has seen major changes, with universities introducing doctoral schools and structured programmes.

The schools monitor the progress of doctoral candidates and the quality of supervision and research in doctoral programmes, said Lesley Wilson, EUA secretary general. At the same time, new legislation is being drafted or implemented in many countries, providing new requirements and challenges facing those responsible for doctoral education, while agencies for quality assurance and research assessment are showing more interest in the area.

The need to maintain the quality of doctoral education during a time of massification appears to be one of the most important challenges. In recent years, the number of doctoral students in Poland had almost doubled – to 40,000 – said Professor Marta Kiciska-Habior, vice-rector for student affairs and quality of teaching and learning at the University of Warsaw.

“We are still struggling with the outcomes of the process and are trying to improve the internal system of quality assurances. One of the problems is that there are no rules or guidelines on PhD supervision specified in the university regulations,” Kiciska-Habior said. “We do not have efficient tools to check or encourage the involvement of the supervisor.”

A newly completed Accountable Research Environments for Doctoral Education, or ARDE, project (led by the EUA) was demonstrated during the conference and confirmed that universities across the Europe were not yet fully satisfied with the procedures regarding supervision.

The meeting sought to take stock of the reforms and to determine if national legal frameworks as well as universities were ‘on the right track’ in transforming students into researchers. The participants generally agreed doctoral education was on the ‘right track’, said Thomas Jorgensten, EUA head of the unit responsible for the EUA Council for Doctoral Education.

Keynote speaker Francesc Xavier Grau, rector of Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain, highlighted how the establishment of doctoral schools had enabled universities to increase their capacity in terms of research output and outreach to other sectors. Doctoral candidates were particularly good at bridging the gap between basic research and innovation, Xavier said.

But several speakers warned that the large expansion in the number of doctoral candidates in many countries could potentially lead to overall lower quality. They called for safeguarding research excellence.

The conference discussions revealed that considerable differences existed across Europe in terms of approaches and challenges facing doctoral education. “There is a good common European dialogue on doctoral education, but there is also an opportunity to do more in terms of creating a shared vision on good practices in the future,” Jorgensten said.

* The EUA Council for Doctoral Education is an integral part of the EUA and was established in 2008. Its mission is to contribute to the development, advancement and improvement of doctoral education and research training in Europe.

FRANCE: High spending, low fees – And lower salaries

Jane Marshall06 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

France scores well in its expenditure on higher education students, in the proportion of its population who are graduates and in the number of international students who choose to study there, according to the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2013. But the financial advantages a degree confers on employees are lower for French graduates than for their peers across the OECD, especially women.

From 2005 to 2010, the amount France spent on each primary, secondary and non-tertiary post-secondary pupil increased by only 5% compared to an OECD average of 10%. Spending on each higher education student, however, rose by 15% to an average of US$15,067, says the OECD country note on France.

This was more than the overall OECD average of US$13,528, but less than Canada, Denmark, the US, Sweden and Switzerland, which all spent more than US$18,000 per student.

French higher education receives relatively little funding from the private sector, which contributes 18% of finance compared to 32% in the OECD as a whole. In spite of France’s relatively high spending on higher education, student fees remain low compared to many other OECD countries.

For the 2012-13 year, university fees in France are €181 (US$236) for a licence (bachelor degree equivalent) and €250 for a masters course. In a third of the other countries surveyed, annual student fees were more than US$1,500.

The proportion of the French population with degrees has risen significantly during the past 30 years, where they represent 43% of 25- to 34-year-olds, compared to 19% of 55- to 64-year-olds. OECD averages are 39% and 24% respectively, but France scores below Korea, Japan, Canada and the Russian Federation, where more than 55% of today’s young adults are graduates of higher education.

More than 75% of French students who start a first degree course finish it, on a par with Australia, Denmark, Finland, Japan and Spain; and better than Hungary, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the US, where fewer than 60% of students succeed, says the note.

And while the French drop-out rate overall is lower than the OECD average, 14% of French students who abandon their university studies successfully switch to more technical courses.

The proportion of young people with doctorates in France equals the OECD average: 1.6% in 2011. As in Chile and Israel, more than 35% of doctorate holders in France specialise in a ‘hard’ science, compared to 23% across OECD countries. Furthermore, says the note, about a third of doctorate holders in France are from abroad, “which can indicate both the attractiveness of its courses for foreign students and a fear among national students to commit themselves”.

It also means a low rate of young postgraduates studying after the age of 25. While on average in OECD countries the percentage of young postgraduates aged 25-29 and still in education is 18%, in France it is only 7%. This compares badly with Austria, Denmark, Italy and Sweden, where the proportion is more than 25%.

A higher education qualification means higher salaries in the job market, and French graduates earn on average 47% more than non-graduates. But this is less than their peers in other OECD countries, whose degrees give them a financial advantage averaging 57%.

The situation is worse for French women graduates, who can expect a net advantage during their career of only 8.9%, against an OECD average of 11.5%, while French men gain 10.1%, compared to 13% across the OECD.

One profession where French graduates fare financially poorly is teaching. Primary and secondary schoolteachers’ statutory salaries are lower than the OECD average whether they are beginners or have up to 15 years’ experience. Only those at the top of the salary scale earn more than the OECD average – and teachers need to have 34 years of service to reach this level, compared to 24 years on average in other OECD countries.

During the past 30 years the number of students studying in a country other than their own has risen from 800,000 in 1975 to 4.3 million in 2011, notes the report. France remains an attractive country for foreign students and they represent nearly 12% of all students in France.

Indeed, France is among the top five destinations for international students, equal third with Australia and Germany, each with 6%, after the US at 17% and Britain at 13%.

UNITED STATES: What’s driving the new professional doctorates?

Ami Zusman06 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

In the past 10 to 15 years, new kinds of doctorate degrees – in fields that had never had doctorates before – have burst onto the higher education scene in the United States. These new ‘professional practice doctorate’, or PPD, degrees have emerged in at least a dozen fields, ranging from physical therapy to bioethics.

Some of these newly created doctorate degrees are now required for a person to enter a professional practice. In other fields, although they are not (or not yet) required, these doctorates have become the normative degree.

Nor is this just a US phenomenon: new professional doctorate degrees have been created and programmes for them are growing rapidly in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and elsewhere.

Professional practice doctorates differ from PhDs in several ways; most are shorter than PhDs – in some cases, only slightly longer than the masters programmes they replace. In the US, most do not require original research, but they do include a clinical component.

Beyond this, there is little agreement on what they are or should be. Yet, like PhDs, they use the title ‘doctorate’, require at least some study beyond the masters level and are intended to confirm the highest level of achievement.

Phenomenal growth

The growth of newly created professional practice doctorates in the US has been phenomenal.

Programmes for them skyrocketed from nearly zero a decade ago to more than 500 programmes in at least a dozen fields today, with over 10,000 degrees awarded just in 2012. For example, doctor of nursing practice programmes increased from just two in 2002 to 217 in 2012; nearly 100 more programmes are in the planning stage. What’s driving this growth?

Supporters of the new doctorates state that they are needed to respond to the growing complexity of professionals’ work environments, rapid expansion of knowledge underlying practice, and increases in technological interventions. While there are some indications of these factors, in most fields the evidence is limited.

For example, the difference between masters and doctoral programmes in physical therapy is on average just 12 weeks, and doctorate holders do not have higher licensure pass rates; if increased labour market complexity were the main reason to require doctorates, one would expect greater differentiation between masters and doctoral degrees and greater student success.

Overall, it is not evident that these doctorates have led to higher salaries or career advancement for professionals or significantly better outcomes for clients, although it may be too soon to determine outcomes. Rather, based on my research, I conclude that in most fields professional associations’ and practitioners’ pursuit of greater status, autonomy and control has been the main factor driving the creation of new doctorate credentials.

Once these doctorate degrees are established, institutions have felt pressured to offer doctoral programmes either because accreditation mandated it or because they felt they would be less competitive otherwise. For many formerly non-doctoral institutions, these new doctorates also provided an opportunity to take a long-desired step into doctoral work.

It is important to note that situations do differ among fields, programmes and institutions. Nevertheless, much of the adoption of these doctorate degrees seems driven by credential creep, followed in many cases by mission creep.

Why the growth of PPD degrees matters

The resource implications of the professional practice doctorates are substantial.

First, there seems to be a domino effect in health fields, with the PPD becoming the required or normative degree for entering practice in one field after another. Second, while most new growth in the US has been in health fields, new types of PPDs have been started in a variety of fields.

Third, many of the new programmes are expensive, so even limited expansion requires more resources. At a time when most institutions face shrinking resources, this means either redistribution of resources from other programmes or institutions, a higher workload burden on faculty, or higher tuition fees and higher foregone income burdens on students.

Indeed, partly because of public disinvestment in higher education, students are bearing the brunt of increased programme costs. For example, median total tuition and fee costs for doctor of physical therapy programmes in US public institutions were 63% higher than for masters programmes in 2010; in private institutions, they were 14% higher.

Higher tuition and longer periods of study will likely increase student debt and may reduce access into the profession, especially since financial support for these programmes is meagre in most cases.

PPDs also raise unresolved questions.

For example, what should a ‘doctorate’ mean? Should profession-specific accrediting bodies – which play important roles in setting standards for programme effectiveness – also determine which degrees institutions offer in these fields? Finally, the fundamental issue for public policy is the ultimate impact of new PPDs on clients, organisations and communities. New requirements could lead to fewer professionals, especially in already under-served communities.

On the other hand, if PPD training enables professionals to serve their clients more effectively, meet new and more complex needs and, in the words of advocates, transform the organisations and settings in which they work – and do so without reducing access to services – the added resource costs to individuals and the public may well be worthwhile.

Those outcomes are still unknown.

* Ami Zusman is a visiting scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of California, Berkeley. She formerly directed graduate and professional education planning and student outcomes assessment for the University of California system. This commentary is based on her paper, “Degrees of Change: How new kinds of professional doctorates are changing higher education institutions”, published online as part of UC Berkeley CSHE’s Research and Occasional Paper Series.

CHINA: Media coverage of higher education – From propaganda to watchdog

Qiang Zha and Xiaoyang Wang06 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

In many senses, the media is still state controlled in China and does not enjoy genuine freedom of speech. Yet the relationship between the media and higher education is multi-faceted, highlighting changing roles, focuses and approaches.

Roughly, three stages can be discerned.

In the first stage, from the 1950s through to the early 1980s, media coverage of higher education basically served the state propaganda agenda, showcasing government directives and opinions and how success was achieved by following government policy.

When China adopted its reform policy in the early 1980s, a market economy emerged as well as divergent interests. The media was then gradually used for communicating ideas and opinions in order to build a normative base on which further reform initiatives could be carried out efficiently and effectively.

This function of media coverage of higher education could be observed, for example, when the Chinese government was set to charge tuition fees to university students, to dramatically expand higher education enrolment and to invest in a small number of selected universities with the aim of heightening their status around the world.

Since the dawn of the 21st century, with a market economy in place and an increasingly democratised Chinese society, the media has been playing the role of a watchdog of higher education. Notably, this last stage runs more or less parallel to the process of higher education expansion.

Different focuses and approaches

These three stages feature different focuses on higher education and different approaches to covering it.

Media coverage of higher education used to be always descriptive and positive, portraying how successfully universities and colleges served the human resource needs of the socialist government within the framework of a planned economy – perhaps with a few exceptions during such political movements as the Hundred Flowers Campaign and Cultural Revolution, when there were leadership tensions.

In the reform era, the media started to be analytical and critical when a divergence of interests became the norm. Thus, over time, the media has played a changing role, moving from a purely government propaganda vehicle to a social voice and a position as watchdog of the higher education sector.

In this process, the media has shifted its focus on higher education, from telling the stories of its achievements, to focusing on debates and controversies as well as mistakes that have been made and failures.

The media is now equipped to raise the hot issues concerning higher education – for instance, those relating to the national university entrance examination (gaokao) and university graduate unemployment, combining them with other problems linked to the recent expansion of higher education (for instance, a deterioration in quality and equity) and analysing them in an increasingly critical manner.

Most recently a Hunan television programme – literally titled “Questioning gaokao in God’s name”, available here, applied an extremely critical approach to the brutal reality of the gaokao, and even challenged the necessity of its existence.

In this programme, the gaokao was portrayed as inhuman – in a couple of cases entrants were not even informed of the death of their parents so that they could do the exam without distractions, because it is deemed to be so important and to make such a difference to their future – and as a vehicle for exacerbating social inequity – entrants in Beijing and Shanghai are 40 to 50 times more likely to have access to China’s top universities compared to their peers in Anhui and Hunan, with the former two places representing China’s developed regions and the latter two more underdeveloped regions.

The media’s critical coverage extends to many other issues and problems pertaining to higher education, including the mental health of university students (an increasing number are committing suicide), the commercialisation of higher education (financial pressure is more and more shifted onto students' families), widespread plagiarism and misconduct among faculty and students, and the ‘diploma mill’ scenario in an environment of increasing private and transnational institutions and programmes.

Academic fraud

The media can take credit for its coverage of the growing problem of academic misconduct among faculty and students. Only a decade or so ago, the Chinese public and even academic communities were not fully aware that such misconduct needed to be dealt with seriously.

Viewed as a bourgeois characteristic, intellectual property did not take root in China in the revolutionary period so it was not really respected.

Some scholars thought copying the ideas and work of someone else showed they agreed with and approved of his or her perspective, and growing numbers became opportunists, taking advantage of such ‘shortcuts’ to achieve better productivity.

A turning point came in the early 2000s, when a US-trained Chinese scholar Fang Shimin – better known by his pen name Fang Zhouzi – launched his fraud-busting website New Threads, established in 2001. The website detects and discloses cases of plagiarism and other academic misconduct by Chinese researchers, and it increased interest in academic integrity.

As of 2010, Fang’s website had listed over 900 instances of academic fraud, including fraud by presidents of universities and nationally known researchers. His crusade to expose fraud in China’s scientific and academic communities soon received widespread media coverage.

At that time, there was no official body or procedure for handling complaints or examining allegations of fraud in China, and Fang started the website as an unofficial platform to expose the problem.

In 2006, a series of accusations and counter-accusations on Fang’s website led to significant media attention, criticism of the investigations conducted by Chinese universities and greater involvement by such government authorities as the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China in investigating allegations.

Thanks to intense media attention, in 2012 Fang was named one of the two inaugural winners of the John Maddox Prize, given by Nature and the Kohn Foundation, which said: “[H]e has opened a forum for criticism and debate in a community that is otherwise devoid of it”. Indeed, Fang fights his crusade with the full involvement of the media.

Critical coverage

Despite continuing state control, the Chinese media increasingly plays the role of watchdog and assists in holding the higher education sector accountable.

There are various reasons for this interest. One is the tremendous social attention and value attached to higher education. It is simply too important. The other is the fact that, although public universities and colleges in China always suffered from bureaucracy, they are not as authoritarian as government departments and are unlikely to block the media from exposing their problems, mistakes and failures.

Nevertheless, media coverage of higher education is still trammelled to some extent, for instance by a consumerist approach that uses criticism as a strategy to increase sales. Often such critical coverage appears to be shallow and superficial, even if the problems are real, and turns out to be a less constructive way of addressing issues. Most recently, some university leaders complained about the media’s tendency to demonise universities.

Another example is that media coverage of issues and problems is mostly limited to the higher education sector, as if the problems do not relate to the rest of society.

In contrast, when covering the issues and constraints facing Chinese higher education, international media – for instance The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, University World News and Inside Higher Education – often embed them in the socioeconomic and political contexts in which the universities and colleges operate, stressing that only when higher education genuinely plays a leading role in China’s social development will it break through its institutionalised constraints and transform itself.

* Qiang Zha is an associate professor in the faculty of education at York University. His research interests include Chinese and East Asian higher education, international academic relations, global brain circulation, internationalisation of higher education, globalisation and education, differentiation and diversity in higher education, knowledge transfer and commercialisation, and international migration and development. His most recent books include the co-authored Portraits of 21st Century Chinese Universities: In the move to mass higher education (with Ruth Hayhoe et al. 2011), and two edited volumes Education and Global Cultural Dialogue (with Karen Mundy 2012) and Education in China: Educational history, models, and initiatives (2013). In 2012-13, Qiang Zha is also a Wei Lun Scholar at Tsinghua University.

* Xiaoyang Wang is an associate professor and director of the Higher Educational Research Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was a visiting scholar to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004. From 2005-09, he was appointed as a second secretary in the education office at the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC.
 

AUSTRALIA: Political upheaval holds hope for universities

Geoff Maslen04 July 2013 Issue No:279

 

When Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, was deposed as head of government last month by the man she had forced from office three years previously almost to the day, it not only gave Kevin Rudd a second shot as PM but also raised the hopes of the nation’s vice-chancellors.

One of Rudd’s first decisions, following the palace coup and the resignations of half of Gillard’s former cabinet, was to reappoint Senator Kim Carr as minister for innovation, industry, science and research – a role he had formerly held but resigned from when Rudd lost office.

Rudd also elevated him to minister for higher education, which gives Carr almost unlimited power over the sector.

The new minister gained some plaudits when he intimated to Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper that Gillard’s plan to slash A$3.8 billion (US$3.5 billion) from spending on universities and student support might be reviewed and that the student demand-based system she had introduced could be re-capped.

Under this system, any student applying for university is admitted if the institution believes she or he is capable. This has led to a sharp fall in the marks a school-leaver requires to gain admittance and allowed an additional 190,000 students to undertake higher education courses.

Carr expressed concern that many of the newcomers were probably unprepared for university study.

In an editorial last week, The Australian endorsed the idea of re-capping enrolments and claimed that the demand-based system had compromised “academic rigour” – this from a paper that had agitated continually against the Gillard government using its leader and news pages unashamedly to disparage her and almost every decision she made.

Murdoch’s News Corporation owns 70% of Australia’s metropolitan newspapers and he uses them constantly to further his own interests. With an election due sometime in the next few months, all of his papers had been backing the conservative Opposition and attacking Gillard.

They have mostly adopted a muted response to Rudd taking over, while Australia’s main higher education lobby groups have welcomed his and especially Carr’s return. Universities Australia Chief Executive Belinda Robinson applauded Carr’s track record on supporting science and research.

Referring to the A$3.8 billion “worth of higher education savings” announced by the Gillard government over the past eight months – and the failure of the Opposition to reject them – Robinson called for a review of the budget measures that have yet to be legislated.

“The eight out of 10 Australians who believe that budget cuts to higher education threaten Australia’s future will be looking to Mr Rudd and Senator Carr to reconsider these short-sighted decisions,” she said.

“We look forward to Senator Carr revisiting and renewing his visionary agenda.” And, in a reference to the influx of students from poorer families: “We also look forward to working with him to make sure that all children who aspire to a world-class university education will have the opportunity to do so, regardless of their background, post code, or socioeconomic circumstances.”

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) likewise warmly greeted Carr’s appointment, with its president, Jeannie Rea, noting he had “a demonstrated track record of deep knowledge and commitment to the key role of universities in education, research and innovation”.

Rea said the government had justified the planned cuts to university spending by claiming that the budget faced a A$480 million shortfall as a result of the unexpected rise in enrolments under the demand-driven system. She said it was unreasonable for already heavily overworked university staff to be asked to bear the costs because of inefficient budget forecasting.

“What NTEU members find even more unfair is that some of the most disadvantaged students have been targeted by the latest cuts. The government will save A$1.2 billion by abolishing the student start-up scholarships, which provided support for the most financially disadvantaged students in receipt of income support.”

The chair of the Group of Eight research-intensive universities, Professor Fred Hilmer, similarly praised Carr for his previous work in boosting indirect funding for research and for establishing the research quality assessment framework.

“The senator’s efforts in the past have also been largely credited with fostering investments in bigger and better state-of-the-art research facilities,” Hilmer said. “We are confident that he understands the imperative for Australia to keep pace with the world leaders...[and are] also encouraged by his indication to revisit the May cuts to higher education.”

Other vice-chancellors backed retention of the demand-driven system.

The chair of the Innovative Research Universities group, Professor Barney Glover, said the challenge of effective funding of Australia’s universities would not to be tackled by “retreating to a system of allocating universities a limited numbers of university places.

“Demand-driven funding works. Let’s not ruin it. The system was a major reform of the government and one of the few accepted by both sides of politics. There is no sense undermining it to address a funding pressure that is now almost past,” Glover said.

Most universities had already started drawing up plans to cope with the proposed funding cuts.

The Australian National University (ANU) caused dismay among its staff and students by announcing last week that it faced a A$51 million fall in income over the next two years and would have to slash the number of professional staff by at least 10%, with up to 250 jobs to go before the end of the year.

The education union said staff over the age of 55, “the longest-serving members of the university”, would be among the first to be targeted. “The loss of corporate knowledge will be devastating,” said Deborah Veness, the union’s branch president.

But ANU Vice-chancellor Professor Ian Young said the package of cuts had been “shaped by staff and student input” and would deal with the immediate financial challenge while also setting the university on a path to renewal and growth.

“This budget package will return the university to a balanced budget position by 2015,” Young said.

Veness said the cuts would mean a reduced workforce, staff members compelled to take accumulated leave, an increase in student numbers and the implementation of new systems that would put unreasonable pressure on remaining staff.

“The union deplores the cuts to funding for the higher education sector that have forced the ANU to make these drastic decisions,” she said.

“The consequences for students and staff are ominous. The ANU prepares graduates to be future custodians of disciplinary knowledge within the academy, where they go on to become researchers or university teachers, or to take their disciplinary knowledge into the workplace to solve the problems of industry, government, and society.”

បទ​វិភាគ៖ តើ​បក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច​អាច​រក្សា​អាសនៈ​សភា​៩០​កៅអី​បាន​ឬ​ទេ?

 ដោយ វណ្ណ វិចារ

ចាប់​ពី​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​ឆ្នាំ​១៩៩៣ មក គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា បាន​ចូល​រួម​ដឹក​នាំ​រដ្ឋាភិបាល​អស់ ៤​អាណត្តិ​ទៅ​ហើយ ​បើ​ទោះ​បី​បក្ស​នេះ​ចាញ់​ឆ្នោត​កាល​ពី​ការ​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​លើក​ដំបូង​ក្ដី។ គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា កើន​​អាសនៈ​ជា​លំដាប់​ពី ៦៦ នៅ​ឆ្នាំ​១៩៩៨ បន្ទាប់​មក ៧២ នៅ​ឆ្នាំ​២០០៣ និង​រហូត​ដល់ ៩០​អាសនៈ នៅ​ឆ្នាំ​២០០៨។

តើ​នៅ​ក្នុង​ការ​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​ជ្រើស​តាំង​តំណាង​រាស្ត្រ​អាណត្តិ​ទី​៥ នៅ​ឆ្នាំ​២០១៣ នេះ​គណបក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច​អាច​បង្កើន​ចំនួន​អាសនៈ​ជា​បន្ត​ទៀត ឬ​យ៉ាង​ណា?

ធាតុ​ពិត​ការ​កើន​ឡើង​នៃ​ចំនួន​អាសនៈ​សភា​របស់​គណបក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច មិន​មែន​បាន​មក​ដោយ​ការ​ប្រជែង​ផ្នែក​ផ្សព្វផ្សាយ​គោលនយោបាយ​ឡើយ ​តែ​ជា​លទ្ធផល​ដែល​បាន​មក​ពី​ការ​ប៉ែង​ជើង​គូប្រជែង ឬ​ដៃគូ​រដ្ឋាភិបាល​ចម្រុះ គឺ​គណបក្ស​ហ្វ៊ុនស៊ិនប៉ិច​ប៉ុណ្ណោះ។ គណបក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច មិន​អាច​ទាញ​សំឡេង​ឆ្នោត​ពី​បក្ស​ប្រឆាំង​បាន​ទេ ដោយសារ​តែ​បក្ស​ប្រឆាំង​ក៏​កើន​សំឡេង​គាំទ្រ​ដែរ ពី​មួយ​អាណត្តិ​ទៅ​មួយ​អាណត្តិ។

គេ​នៅ​ចាំ​បាន​ថា ​កាល​ពី​ការ​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​ឆ្នាំ​១៩៩៨ គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា យក​ឈ្នះ​គណបក្ស​ហ្វ៊ុនស៊ិនប៉ិច​បាន ដោយសារ​ហ្វ៊ុនស៊ិនប៉ិច បែក​រង្គោះរង្គើ ​និង​ចាញ់​ការ​ប្រយុទ្ធ​បង្ហូរ​ឈាម​កណ្តាល​ទីក្រុង​ភ្នំពេញ​ ក្នុង​ព្រឹត្តិការណ៍​ថ្ងៃ​ទី​៥ ទី​៦ ខែ​កក្កដា ឆ្នាំ​១៩៩៧។

មន្ត្រី​គណបក្ស​ហ្វ៊ុនស៊ិនប៉ិច មួយ​ចំនួន បាន​ស្លាប់ ហើយ​ខ្លះ​ទៀត​ក៏​ចុះ​ចូល​នឹង​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា អម​ទៅ​ដោយ​អ្នក​គាំទ្រ​ទៅ​ជា​មួយ​ផង។ មិន​តែ​ប៉ុណ្ណោះ គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា ក៏​បាន​ទទួល​ឥស្សរជន​មួយ​ចំនួន​ពី​គណបក្ស​សេរី​និយម​ព្រះពុទ្ធ​សាសនា​របស់​ លោក សឺន សាន ដែរ។

កាល​ឆ្នាំ​នោះ​ដែរ លោក ហ៊ុន សែន មាន​ប្រជាប្រិយភាព​ខ្លាំង ដោយសារ​បង្កើត​នយោបាយ ឈ្នះ ឈ្នះ នាំ​ខ្មែរ​ក្រហម​ចូល​ស្រុក និង​បាន​មេដាយ​សន្តិភាព​ជា​លើក​ដំបូង ការ​សាងសង់​សាលារៀន​ស្ទើរ​គ្រប់​ទី​កន្លែង​ជា​ដើម។ រី​ឯ​គូ​ប្រកួត​របស់​លោក ហ៊ុន សែន កាល​នោះ គឺ​សម្ដេច​ក្រុមព្រះ នរោត្តម រណឫទ្ធិ ហាក់​មិន​សូវ​មាន​ប្រជាប្រិយភាព និង​ថ្វី​មាត់​ដូច​លោក ហ៊ុន សែន ឡើយ។

លុះ​ដល់​ឆ្នាំ​២០០៣ គូប្រជែង​របស់​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា នៅ​តែ​ជា​គណបក្ស​ហ៊្វុនស៊ិនប៉ិច ដដែល។ ហ៊្វុនស៊ិនប៉ិច កាល​នោះ​ចុះ​ខ្សោយ​ចាញ់​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា ដោយសារ​តែ​វិបត្តិ​ជម្លោះ​ផ្ទៃ​ក្នុង។ មន្ត្រី​ធំៗ មាន​ឥទ្ធិពល​មួយ​ចំនួន​ បាន​ចុះ​ចូល​គណបក្ស​ប្រឆាំង សម រង្ស៉ី​ និង​អ្នក​ខ្លះ​បន្ត​ចូល​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា ទាំង​ចំហ និង​សម្ងាត់។ អ្នក​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​ក៏​បែក​សំឡេង អ្នក​ខ្លះ​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​ឲ្យ​គណបក្ស សម រង្ស៉ី ​អ្នក​ខ្លះ​បន្ត​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​ឲ្យ​ហ៊្វុនស៊ិនប៉ិច ​និង​អ្នក​ខ្លះ​ទៀត បោះ​ឆ្នោត​ឲ្យ​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន។

កាល​នោះ​បើ​គណបក្ស​ហ៊្វុនស៊ិនប៉ិច រួម​បញ្ចូល​គ្នា​នឹង​គណបក្ស សម រង្ស៉ី ក៏​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា ​មិន​អាច​បាន​កៅអី​សភា​ដល់​ទៅ ៧២​អាសនៈ​ដែរ ​នេះ​បើ​ផ្អែក​តាម​រូបមន្ត​បែង​ចែក​អាសនៈ​សភា។ អ្នក​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​កាល​ពី​ឆ្នាំ​២០០៣ ក៏​មើល​មិន​សូវ​ឃើញ​ពី​ចំណុច​អវិជ្ជមាន​របស់​មន្ត្រី​រដ្ឋាភិបាល ដែល​ដឹក​នាំ​ដោយ​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា​ទេ។

រហូត​ដល់​ឆ្នាំ​២០០៨ គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា ឈ្នះ​ឆ្នោត​គគ្រឹកគគ្រេង​សំបើម​ណាស់។ ការ​ឈ្នះ​ឆ្នោត​នេះ មិន​មែន​ជា​រឿង​ចៃដន្យ​ទេ តែ​ជា​សន្លឹក​ឆ្នោត​ដ៏​ច្រើន​សន្ធឹក​ដែល​បាន​មក​ពី​ការ​បែកបាក់​គណបក្ស​ ហ៊្វុនស៊ិនប៉ិច ​ជា​ពីរ។ ម្ខាង​ជា​គណបក្ស​ជាតិ​និយម​ដឹកនាំ​ដោយ​សម្រេច​ក្រុម​ព្រះ នរោត្តម រណឫទ្ធិ និង​ម្ខាង​ទៀត​ជា​គណបក្ស​ហ៊្វុនស៊ិនប៉ិច ដែល​ដឹក​នាំ​ដោយ​លោក ញឹក ប៊ុនឆៃ។

នៅ​ឆ្នាំ​២០០៨ នោះ លោក កឹម សុខា ដែល​ធ្លាប់​កាន់​ការ​ជា​អ្នក​តំណាងរាស្ត្រ​គណបក្ស​សេរី​និយម​ព្រះពុទ្ធ​ សាសនា​របស់​លោក សឺន សាន នោះ ក៏​ឆ្លៀត​ឱកាស​បង្កើត​គណបក្ស​សិទ្ធិ​មនុស្ស​បាន​ចំណេញ ៣​កៅអី​នឹង​គេ​ដែរ។ ឆ្នាំ​២០០៨ ក៏​ជា​ឆ្នាំ​ដែល​សេដ្ឋកិច្ច​ឡើង​ខ្ពស់ លោក ហ៊ុន សែន ក៏​ប្រើ​យុទ្ធសាស្ត្រ​រុញ​ទូក​បណ្ដោយ​ទឹក ថ្លែង​ថា លោក​គ្រប់​គ្រង​បាន​ល្អ បោះ​ឆ្នោត​ឲ្យ​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន ដី​នៅ​តែ​ឡើង​ថ្លៃ​ជាដើម។ ម្យ៉ាង ថៃ​លើក​ទ័ព​ចូល​ប្រាសាទ​ព្រះវិហារ ជា​មូល​ហេតុ​មួយ​នាំ​ពលរដ្ឋ​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​ឲ្យ​លោក ហ៊ុន សែន ដែរ។ ម្ចាស់​ឆ្នោត​ភាគ​ច្រើន​ជឿ​ថា ក្នុង​ចំណោម​បេក្ខជន​នាយក​រដ្ឋមន្ត្រី​ពី​គណបក្ស​ធំៗ មាន​តែ​លោក ហ៊ុន សែន ទេ ដែល​មាន​ជំនាញ​ប្រើ​ទ័ព និង​ថ្នឹក​ខាង​ចម្បាំង​ដែល​អាច​រំដោះ​ប្រាសាទ​ព្រះវិហារ ពី​ការ​ឈ្លាន​ពាន​របស់​កង​ទ័ព​ថៃ​បាន។

ចំណែក​នៅ​ឆ្នាំ​២០១៣ នេះ គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា ទំនង​ដូចជា​មិន​បាន​បញ្ចេញ​ឥទ្ធិពល​ណា​មួយ​លេច​ធ្លោ ដែល​អាច​ឲ្យ​ចំនួន​អ្នក​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​កើន​ឡើង​សោះ​ឡើយ។ មួយ​អាណត្តិ​ចុង​ក្រោយ​នេះ គណបក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច បាន​ធ្វេសប្រហែស​លើ​បញ្ហា​មួយ​ចំនួន ដូចជា​ការ​ហុច​ដង​ដាវ​ឲ្យ​បក្ស​ប្រឆាំង​កាប់​ផ្ទួនៗ។ ប្រការ​ទាំង​នេះ មាន​ជាអាទិ៍ ការ​ផ្ដល់​ដី​សម្បទាន បង្កើត​ជា​ទំនាស់​ដីធ្លី​គ្រប់​ទី​កន្លែង​មិន​ទាន់​មាន​ដំណោះ​ស្រាយ​សមរម្យ អ្នក​តវ៉ា​ដីធ្លី​ត្រូវ​បាន​បង្ក្រាប​ដោយ​ហិង្សា​ពី​សំណាក់​សមត្ថកិច្ច។ មនុស្ស​ស្លាប់​ជាង ​៣០០​នាក់ នៅ​កោះ​ពេជ្រ ដោយ​មិន​មាន​អ្នក​ទទួល​ខុស​ត្រូវ។

អំពើ​អយុត្តិធម៌​សង្គម ឧទាហរណ៍​ករណី​អ្នកស្រី ​យ៉ោម បុប្ផា និង​ករណី​លោក ឈូក បណ្ឌិត ដែល​បាន​បាញ់​ប្រហារ​កម្មករ​នៅ​បាវិត។ ករណី​ចាប់​ខ្លួន​លោក​ ម៉ម សូណង់ដូ ដាក់​គុក​ជាដើម។ ក្នុង​នោះ​សង្គម​ស៊ីវិល​រក​ឃើញ​ថា ​ម្ចាស់​ដីធ្លី​និង​សកម្មជន​ការពារ​សិទ្ធិមនុស្ស​ជិត ៥០០​នាក់ ត្រូវ​បាន​តុលាការ​ចោទ​ប្រកាន់​ដោយ​អយុត្តិធម៌។

ម្យ៉ាង​វិញ​ទៀត ការ​រីក​ចំរើន​នៃ​បច្ចេកវិទ្យា​ក៏​ជា​មូលហេតុ​ដែល​នាំ​ឲ្យ​គណបក្ស​កាន់​ អំណាច​ធ្លាក់​ប្រជាប្រិយភាព​ដែរ។ អ្នក​ប្រើ​អ៊ីនធឺណិត ដែល​មាន​និន្នាការ​ប្រឆាំង​រដ្ឋាភិបាល ក៏​បាន​គាស់​កកាយ​រូបភាព​រឿងរ៉ាវ​សកម្ម​ផ្សេងៗ​ផ្សព្វផ្សាយ​កាន់​តែ​ច្រើន​ ឡើង។

ព្រឹត្តិការណ៍​ដែល​ឆក់​យក​បេះ​ដូង​យុវវ័យ​ឲ្យ​គិត​ថា រដ្ឋាភិបាល​ដែល​នាំ​ដោយ​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​មិន​ល្អ​ច្រើន​នោះ រួម​មាន​អាជ្ញាធរ​បង្ក្រាប​អ្នក​តវ៉ា​យ៉ាង​ព្រៃផ្សៃ ព្រឹត្តិការណ៍​បាញ់​ប្រហារ​គ្នា​ថ្ងៃ​ទី​៥-​៦ កក្កដា ព្រឹត្តិការណ៍​វាយ​បង្ក្រាប​ហ្វូង​បាតុករ រួម​ទាំង​វាយ​សំពង​លើ​ព្រះ​សង្ឃ​កាល​ពី​ឆ្នាំ​១៩៩៨ ។ល។

ក្រៅ​ពី​នោះ អំពើ​ពុករលួយ​ក៏​ជា​មូលហេតុ​ចម្បង​ដែល​នាំ​ឲ្យ​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា បាត់​បង់​ជំនឿ​ចិត្ត​ពី​សាធារណជន​ដែរ។ បើ​តាម​តួលេខ​ស្រាវជ្រាវ ​កម្ពុជា​នៅ​តែ​ជាប់​ជា​ប្រទេស​មាន​អំពើ​ពុករលួយ​លំដាប់​លេខ​រៀង​ទី​១៥៧ ក្នុង​ចំណោម​ប្រទេស​ជាង ១៧០ ទូទាំង​ពិភពលោក។ គ្រាន់​តែ​ភ្ញាក់​ពី​ដេក​ក្រឡេក​មើល​ផ្លូវ​ថ្នល់​ដែល​សង់​មិន​បាន​មួយ​ឆ្នាំ ​ឡើង​រលួយ​វល់​នោះ​ ក៏​គេ​គិត​ថា ពុក​រលួយ​បាត់​ហើយ គេ​មិន​ចាំ​បាច់​គិត​ដល់​ជីវភាព​ដ៏​ធូរធារ​របស់​មន្ត្រី​ធំៗ ដែល​ជិះ​ឡាន​ទំនើប ចាយ​វាយ​សុទ្ធតែ​ ដុល្លារ តែ​ប្រាក់​ខែ​ត្រឹម​មួយ​លាន​ពីរ​លាន​រៀល​នោះ​ទេ។

ទន្ទឹម​នឹង​នោះ​ការ​រឹង​មាំ​នៃ​កម្លាំង​ប្រមូល​ផ្តុំ​របស់​គណបក្ស​ ប្រឆាំង ក៏​ជា​មូលហេតុ​នាំ​ឲ្យ​បក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច​ចុះ​អន់​ថយ​ដែរ។ បក្ស​ប្រឆាំង​បាន​បង្ហាញ​គោលនយោបាយ ៧​ចំណុច គួរ​ឲ្យ​ទាក់​ទាញ​សម្រាប់​អ្នក​ក្រ និង​មន្ត្រី​រាជការ​ដែល​មាន​ប្រាក់​ខែ​ទាប និង​មិន​មាន​ឱកាស​ប្រព្រឹត្ត​ពុករលួយ។ ចង់​មិន​ចង់​កម្លាំង​ប៉ូលិស ទាហាន គ្រូ​បង្រៀន ដែល​មាន​ប្រាក់​ខែ​ចាយ សល់​ថ្ងៃ​ផង​នោះ ក៏​គង់​គិត​ថា តើ​គាត់​គួរ​យក​ប្រាក់​ខែ​ច្រើន ឬ​ធ្វើ​ការ​ក្រោម​ឥទ្ធិពល​អំពើ​ពុក​រលួយ​តទៅ​ទៀត?

កាល​ពី​ពេល​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​មុនៗ ឲ្យ​តែ​ជិត​ដល់​ពេល​ឃោសនា​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា តែង​ប្រារព្ធ​ពិធី​បញ្ចូល​សមាជិក​បក្ស​ថ្មី កន្លែង​ខ្លះ​បញ្ចូល​រហូត​ដល់​រាប់​ពាន់​នាក់ តែ​ឥឡូវ​ហាក់​ដូច​ជា​ស្ងាត់​ទៅ​វិញ។មួយ​វិញ​ទៀត គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា មិន​បាន​បង្ហាញ​គោលនយោបាយ ឬ​កម្មវិធី​កំណែ​ទម្រង់​ណា​ថ្មី​ប្លែក ​គួរ​ជា​ទី​ទាក់​ទាញ​ម្ចាស់​ឆ្នោត​ទេ។ ពលរដ្ឋ​ភាគ​ច្រើន​ចង់​បាន​តុលាការ​យុត្តិធម៌ ចង់​បាន​ការងារ​ធ្វើ​សម​រម្យ​អ្នក​ធ្វើ​ការងារ​រដ្ឋ​ចង់​បាន​ប្រាក់​ហូប​ ឆ្អែត​ជា​ដើម។

តែ​គណបក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច​ឃោសនា​តែ​រឿង​ដដែល ​ដូច​ជា​ការ​លើក​សរសើរ​សមិទ្ធផល​ដែល​ធ្វើ​រួច មាន​ស្ពាន ផ្លូវ សាលារៀន​ជាដើម។ គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​ប្រហែល​ជា​ភ្លេច​គិត​ហើយ​មើល​ទៅ​ថា សមិទ្ធផល​ដែល​រដ្ឋាភិបាល​សាងសង់​មួយ​ចំនួន​មិន​សូវ​មាន​គុណភាព​នោះ​ឡើយ។

ទោះ​យ៉ាង​ណា​ក៏ដោយ បក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច​បាន​លេង​ល្បិច​ជា​ច្រើន ដូច​ជា​ការ​ចាក់​បំបែក​មេ​បក្ស​ប្រឆាំង សម រង្ស៉ី និង​លោក កឹម សុខា តាម​រយៈ​អាយ៉ៃ​ឆ្លើយឆ្លង។ ការ​បង្កើត​ច្បាប់​ប្រឆាំង​អ្នក​ដែល​មិន​ទទួល​ស្គាល់​របប​ខ្មែរ​ក្រហម។ បាតុកម្ម​ប្រឆាំង​លោក កឹម សុខា ដែល​ដឹក​នាំ​ដោយ​អ្នក​គាំទ្រ​គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា លោក ជុំ ម៉ី ព្រម​ទាំង​បណ្ដឹង​ពីរ​ប្រឆាំង​លោក កឹម សុខា ដែល​មជ្ឈដ្ឋាន​មួយ​ចំនួន​ចាត់​ទុក​ថា ជា​រឿង​នយោបាយ។ ប៉ុន្តែ​បក្ស​ប្រឆាំង​នៅ​តែ​ដើរ​ឆ្ពោះ​ទៅ​មុខ​មិន​ថយ​ក្រោយ​ ទេ។

នៅ​ដំណាក់កាល​ឃោសនា​បោះ​ឆ្នោត​នេះ គណបក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច​បាន​បញ្ជា​ឲ្យ​រដ្ឋមន្ត្រី​ស្ដីទី​ក្រសួង​ព័ត៌មាន ចេញ​លិខិត​មួយ​ហាម​ឃាត់ ​មិន​ឲ្យ​វិទ្យុ FM ក្នុង​ស្រុក​ផ្សាយ​បន្ត​នូវ​កម្មវិធី​ផ្សាយ​របស់​វិទ្យុ​អន្តរជាតិ​ទេ។ បម្រាម​នេះ ​ធ្វើ​ឲ្យ​មាន​ការ​ខឹងសម្បា​យ៉ាង​ខ្លាំង​ពី​ស្រទាប់​មហាជន​ទូទៅ​អ្នក​កាន់​ ជើង​បក្ស​ប្រឆាំង និង​អ្នក​កាន់​ជើង​បក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច​រហូត​ដល់​អ្នក​ខ្លះ​ចង់​ធ្វើ​បាតុកម្ម​ ថែម​ទៀត។ ស្រប​គ្នា​នោះ សង្គម​ស៊ីវិល​ជាតិ និង​អន្តរជាតិ ព្រម​ទាំង​សហរដ្ឋអាមេរិក​ផង​នោះ ក៏​ផ្ទុះ​ប្រតិកម្ម​ដៀល​ថា រាជរដ្ឋាភិបាល​ជាន់​ឈ្លី​រដ្ឋធម្មនុញ្ញ និង​រំលោភ​បំពាន​សិទ្ធិ​ពលរដ្ឋ​ដែរ។ ដោយ​ឃើញ​សភាពការណ៍​មិន​ស្រួល ក្រសួង​ព័ត៌មាន​ក៏​ចេញ​លិខិត​មួយ​លុប​ចោល​បម្រាម​នេះ​យ៉ាង​តក់ក្រហល់​ដែរ។ តាម​រយៈ ​បម្រាម​របស់​ក្រសួង​ព័ត៌មាន​នេះ ក៏​កាន់​តែ​ធ្វើ​ឲ្យ​បក្ស​ប្រឆាំង​កើន​ប្រជាប្រិយភាព​ថែម​ទៀត។

មូលហេតុ​ចុង​ក្រោយ​មួយ​ទៀត​ គឺ​ការ​រួម​បញ្ចូល​គ្នា​របស់​គណបក្ស​រាជា​និយម​ហ៊្វុនស៊ិនប៉ិច និង​បក្ស​ជាតិ​និយម ការ​រួម​បញ្ចូល​គ្នា​រវាង​គណបក្ស សម រង្ស៉ី និង​គណបក្ស​សិទ្ធិ​មនុស្ស​នោះ ក៏​ត្រូវ​បាន​សង្គម​ស៊ីវិល​បញ្ជាក់​ថា ចំនួន​អាសនៈ​សភា​របស់​គណបក្ស​ទាំង​នោះ មាន​ការ​កើន​ឡើង ដោយ​ផ្អែក​តាម​រូបមន្ត​គណនា​រក​កៅអី​សភា​ដែរ។

ប្រការ​ទាំង​អស់​នេះ​ហើយ ​ដែល​ធ្វើ​ឲ្យ​គេ​ពិបាក​ជឿ​ជាក់​ថា គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា នឹង​ឈ្នះ​ឆ្នោត​រហូត​ដល់ ៩០​កៅអី ដូច​អាណត្តិ​មុន​ណាស់។ តែ​គណបក្ស​កាន់​អំណាច ទំនង​ជា​នឹង​ឈ្នះ​ឆ្នោត​ដដែល ហើយ​មិន​ច្រើន​ទេ ​គឺ​អាច​ប្រដំប្រសងគ្នា​នឹង​បក្ស​ប្រឆាំង​ប៉ុណ្ណោះ។ ម្យ៉ាង​ទៀត បើ​សិន​ជា​មិន​មាន​ការ​កែ​ទម្រង់​នយោបាយ​ក្រសោប​ចិត្ត​រាស្ត្រ​ឲ្យ​បាន​ទេ​ នោះ គណបក្ស​ប្រជាជន​កម្ពុជា អាច​នឹង​បាត់​បង់​អំណាច​នៅ​អាណត្តិ​បន្ទាប់​ក៏​អាច​ថា​បាន៕

In Search of Votes, CNRP Turns to Youth and Beauty

By Alex Willemyns - June 24, 2013

Lacking the funds and an expansive network of volunteers the ruling CPP has behind its well-oiled election campaign, the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) is turning to a resource it now boasts in increasingly large numbers: young women.

On Thursday, as the CNRP ramped up preparations for July’s national election, young volunteers flocked to the party’s headquarters in Phnom Penh. Among them were fashionable women who were frantically assembling party-branded flags. 

Volunteers prepare promotional flags bearing the logo of the Cambodia National Rescue Party at the party’s headquarters in Phnom Penh, in this photo released online by a campaigner on Thursday.

As they sat hard at work, a party member took photographs of them and before long had posted a collage of images to a popular CNRP-affiliated Facebook page.

“We are women ready for the rescue of the Khmer nation this July 28, 2013. And you, are you ready for the nation’s rescue yet?” read a message alongside the image, which showed young women clad in CNRP clothing and memorabilia.

The photo, which carried the caption, “It is known that the young National Rescue girls are beautiful and gentle when you meet them,” has received more than 700 “likes” on Facebook and has been shared more than 135 times on the social networking site.

With elections now just over a month away, the CNRP is hoping to gain some leverage from integrating young, smart—and attractive—women into its campaign. In a country where more than half the population is below the age of 30, the CNRP is also trying to compete with the ruling party’s own hugely successful youth movement.

CNRP Phnom Penh campaign director Ly Sovichea, who posted the images of the CNRP’s latest female recruits last week, said since the post went online the party had drawn a substantial number of new recruits to its campaign.

“A beautiful woman, she always has a lot of friends—especially boys— studying with her. And I told them: ‘You have to bring your friends to come to join us, okay?” said Mr. Sovichea, adding that since his post went up on Thursday the party had seen roughly 200 young male members join the party as volunteers.

In a country where more than half the population is below the age of 30, the CNRP is also trying to compete with the ruling party’s own hugely successful youth movement.

CNRP Phnom Penh campaign director Ly Sovichea, who posted the images of the CNRP’s latest female recruits last week, said that since the post went online the party had drawn a substantial number of new recruits to its campaign.

“A beautiful woman, she always has a lot of friends—especially boys—studying with her. And I told them: ‘You have to bring your friends to come to join us, okay?” said Mr. Sovichea, adding that since his post went up on Thursday, the party had seen roughly 200 young male members join as volunteers.

On Saturday, the CNRP’s headquarters was a site of industriousness, with young men hard at work cutting and stripping bamboo poles in the building’s basement, while upstairs, groups of professionally-dressed young men and women painstakingly nailed policy posters to the bamboo.

The volunteers stopped only to smack each other playfully with the campaign materials, collect drink orders delivered from a nearby restaurant, and pose as Mr. Sovichea took more photos with his smartphone.

While attracting more men to the cause is one benefit of promoting young, female party members, CNRP candidate Mu Sochua, who was Cambodia’s Minister of Women’s Affairs between 1998 and 2004, said such campaigning was also part of an effort to empower young women throughout the country.

“Usually it takes a lot more for women to come out and campaign, so when the men see them engaged, they…come out too,” she said. “Usually, it is the other way around,” with men driving election campaigns, “but now with social media, women can come out without being afraid.”

Ms. Sochua also noted the opposition’s work during last year’s commune elections, when the opposition SRP attempted to mobilize more young people in its campaign and saw an unprecedented increase in young women coming to join the party.

“Young women, when they campaign, she will take the party’s message serious…. She will work 10 to 12 hours a day,” Ms. Sochua said.

In one of the photos posted online is 18-year-old high school student Thy Vantha.

She said that she was more than happy to be photographed campaigning if it meant she was helping attract new members to the party.

“Sometimes they post my photograph on Facebook, and then more people come because they see that I am not afraid,” Ms. Vantha said Friday. “They see I am only a high school student, but even I am not afraid.”

“I think they see that I am young, and I am brave to come here to help, so they have to take their time and show that they are brave,” she added.

Kim Sophea, secretary of the CNRP’s executive campaign committee, said showing pictures of young, female party members was less about attracting male voters and more about highlighting the general appeal of the party to the country’s youth.

“Some people, especially the men, they say: ‘Wow, they are very beautiful ladies. Pretty ladies go with the CNRP. Should we go and see those ladies in the headquarters?’” he explained. “The main thing is that the youth are willing,” to join the CNRP, he added.

Branom Kalyaney, a first-year university student who is also involved in the CNRP’s campaign preparations, signed up one of her friends to the opposition party on Saturday.

“I think if we have more women, then men want to join,” she said.

The push to promote young women within the opposition’s campaign has not gone without criticism. According to Mr. Sovichea, the party campaigner, the CNRP’s Phnom Penh campaign director has already been accused by CPP members of using underhanded methods, and even of paying young women to turn up at the CNRP’s campaign headquarters.

The strategy does not appear unique to the CNRP, with a Facbook page attributed to the Phnom Penh branch of the CPP-affiliated Union of Youth Federations of Cambodia also displaying photographs of its events attended in large numbers by young women.

However, Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan said Sunday that the posting of such images was not a strategy of the CPP, and any photos on Facebook of attractive women attending party-sponsored events were the result of its young members’ choices.

“It’s not in the guidelines of the party. We don’t work for young and beauty, we work for youth and principle,” he said.

Mr. Siphan said that he was not worried that pictures of attractive women campaigning for the CNRP might steal young members away from the CPP, as the majority of the country’s young people simply do not approve of such tactics.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to have young pretty girls to promote the party,” he said. “It doesn’t help that party [the CNRP] because the youth of Cambodia is still very conservative. On Facebook, the youth always raise the national issues, they don’t go on how people look.”

© 2013, The Cambodia Daily. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced in print, electronically, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without written permission.

Hun Sen Says Change Is a Dangerous Game

By Kuch Naren - June 22, 2013

You may have to flee your homes. That was the latest pre-election warning message from Prime Minister Hun Sen to the people of Banteay Meanchey province on Friday, where he once again raised the specter of a near-apocalyptic scenario should he not be re-elected on July 28. 

Continuing his slew of public speeches peppered with warnings of civil war and near societal collapse should his long-ruling CPP be defeated in the election, Mr. Hun Sen had a simpler yet no less ominous message for the public: “Change is not a game.”

“Voting for the CPP means you are voting for yourself: Voting for peace, political stability and development for yourself,” in terms of roads, schools, hospitals and pagodas, Mr. Hun Sen said.

To vote for someone else, he added, is to gamble with the possibility of receiving such infrastructure, and it might even mean that people “face fleeing.”

The prime minister did not explain what the public might have to flee from, but presented a history lesson of the dangers of changing leaders in Cambodia; a lesson that ultimately focused on the rise of the Khmer Rouge and mass killing in Cambodia.

“Change is not a game,” Mr. Hun Sen said. “After changing Lon Nol to the Pol Pot regime, the genocide occurred,” he said.

He also warned the public to treat the national election with more importance than last year’s commune election, which had no impact on political parties—only local government services, he said.

“Voting in the upcoming election is to vote for political parties and for the prime minister’s position, which involves the turning upside down of domestic and international policies, which could mean destruction,” he said.

Addressing an audience of thousands who turned out for his speech in Poipet City at the inauguration of a new road, Mr. Hun Sen implored the public to return him to office.

“In the near future, we hope people will again vote for the Cambodian People’s Party,” he said, noting that 67.7 percent of the voters in Banteay Meanchey voted for the ruling party at last year’s commune election.

“So, I would like to appeal to people, if they have seen the correct leadership policy of the Cambodian People’s Party, and my right leadership…if you love, like and sympathize…and trust Hun Sen, vote for the Cambodian People’s Party.”

Yem Ponhearith, spokesman for the Cambodia National Rescue Party, the main election challenger to the CPP, said Mr. Hun Sen’s constant reference to war and instability should there be an election upset amounted to psychological pressure on voters.

“Change is not bad. Why don’t they look at change after elections in Thailand, the United States, France, Singapore and so on? It doesn’t bring instability and chaos for countries,” Mr. Pon­hearith said.

Changing the leadership to improve development in the country should be done freely and fairly, he added.

Mr. Hun Sen on Friday also said that he expected more votes in Banteay Meanchey thanks to his student volunteer land-titling project, which had distributed 23,186 individual titles to 13,718 families covering more than 44,000 hectares of land.

Congratulating himself on bringing peace and development to border regions in Banteay Meanchey, including a $72 million road linking the cities of Poipet, Battambang and Pailin, Mr. Hun Sen said that such success depended on political stability.

“Development cannot be started with the instability or war. [We] will try to protect the peace and political stability that we have struggled hard to achieve,” he said.

UNITED STATES Affirmative threat to private-sector admissions

John Aubrey Douglass22 June 2013 Issue No:277

 

Once again, the United States Supreme Court will soon pass judgment on affirmative action as a factor in admissions in America’s most selective universities and colleges.

As in previous cases, a Euro-American student filed a lawsuit against a highly selective public university, in this case the University of Texas at Austin (UT). The plaintiff, Abigail Noel Fisher, claims overt racial discrimination when UT rejected her freshman application in 2008.

Her lawyers filed the case that same year, and it wound its way to a district court where Texas prevailed. Fisher appealed and the Supreme Court decided to review the case and began deliberations last October. This court is decidedly more conservative than in the past and seemingly more sympathetic to simply ending affirmative action.

There has been much attention on one or two perceived swing voters. Because Justice Kagan recused herself due to her former position as US solicitor general, which generated an earlier brief in support of UT in the case, eight of the nine justices will decide the case.

A four-to-four vote, a real possibility, leaves the lower court's decision in the case intact and binding – in this case, the ruling in favour of UT.

With Kagan out of the mix, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Roberts, it seems, would vote in favour of Fisher’s argument.

Most pundits assume that Justice Kennedy will decide the case. In earlier decisions, Kennedy has seemingly supported narrowly tailored race-conscious admissions policies. But he voted on the minority side in one earlier case, arguing that the University of Michigan’s law school had used “numerical goals indistinguishable from quotas”.

Kennedy indicated his predilections in his give-and-take with UT’s lawyers when he questioned the inclusion of upper-income African Americans and Hispanics as meeting affirmative action racial criteria.

Others suggest that Kennedy might reject UT’s particular use of race, specifically the seeming favouritism towards upper-income minorities, but uphold the basic tenets of 1978 Bakke and 2003 Grutter decisions that race could be one factor among many in admissions decisions.

We will see whether Kennedy’s views will ultimately decide the case, or if we are surprised once again – as we were in the Obamacare law ruling – by Chief Justice John G Roberts.

Ivy league

There may be another factor that will influence the justices’ decision.

All of the court’s justices are products of Eastern elite private educations – each with law degrees either from Harvard or Yale. How the case might ultimately influence or, to be more exact, interfere in the admissions decisions of the Ivy League and similar institutions, may emerge as a concern for one or more of the conservative block of justices.

Thus far, selective private colleges and universities have avoided scrutiny in their admissions practices. They have rarely been open about how they make their decisions.

Most private institutions, for example, have policies that favour children of alumni or benefactors – a major factor for selective private institutions, such as Harvard, where over 20% of the students are ‘legacy’ admits. But this is not clearly articulated to the general public or, specifically, to prospective students.

At the same time, selective private, non-profit universities and colleges are clearly quasi-public institutions: they rely on student financial aid supplied by federal and, in some cases, state governments, and they claim a large percentage of federal research dollars and must meet federal rules and guidelines such as Title IX.

These institutions also claim, and serve, a larger public purpose beyond their origins as largely sectarian entities, serving a defined and limited population. At the same time, selective public universities are becoming increasingly quasi-private as public funding plummets. The dividing line between these selective private and public institutions in terms of public purpose is increasingly grey, to say the least.

Why should private institutions play by one set of alternative universe rules in admissions? Could a decisive ruling in favour of Fisher lead to a court-induced foray into limiting admissions practices at private institutions as well?

Previous Supreme Court decisions, including Bakke, have stated that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act making racial discrimination illegal does extend to private universities that receive federal financial support.

Private sector concerns

Worries over the possible Supreme Court ban on using race is one reason that Columbia University and Fordham University, in association with a group of Catholic institutions, filed separate friend-of-the-court briefs in support of UT.

An overturning of Bakke and Grutter would, it appears, spawn new lawsuits against selective private institutions, and possibly open the door for an eventual Executive Order via the White House to regulate their admissions practices – an event more likely under a conservative Republican president, with none on the immediate horizon.

Of course, this is pure conjecture and a bit cynical.

But perhaps the issue looms in the back of the minds of a group of justices, even if this is a notion not fully articulated. A fear of venturing into the admissions practices and prerogatives of private entities (whatever they be) might, in the end, actually preserve what is now nearly four decades of precedent in US law.

There are other, more important reasons why the court should rule against Fisher, in my view.

To a degree unmatched by any other single institution in the US, or by any other nation in the world until recently, America’s public universities were conceived, funded and developed as tools of socioeconomic engineering – an observation perhaps uncomfortable for those who view markets and the rugged individual as the hallmark of the nation’s development.

The goal was not simply to benefit the individual, but to support socioeconomic mobility and integration within a nation of immigrants, to shape a more progressive and productive society.

Any decision on affirmative action needs to keep this American vision viable by providing our universities and colleges, public and private, the autonomy to shape their incoming pool of students.

* John Aubrey Douglass is senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), and the author of The Conditions for Admissions: Access, equity and the social contract of public universities. Stanford University Press, 2007. This article reflects a longer essay, "Affirmative Action, the Fisher Case and the Supreme Court" published online as part of the CSHE, University of California Berkeley’s Research and Occasional Paper Series.
 

UNITED STATES: Fixing a broken international policy

Mitch Leventhal22 June 2013 Issue No:277

 

After 15 months of deliberations, the United States’ National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) Commission on International Student Recruitment has all but agreed that commission-based recruitment is permissible – but its report only feebly addressed what comes next.

Its recommendation that commission-based international student recruitment be tolerated is severely tempered by its incomplete coverage of developments on the ground, and its supplemental recommendations, which appear to pander to a variety of vested interests.

Further, the general tenor appears to be designed to slow down the legitimate efforts of colleges and universities, and their private sector marketing partners. Perhaps we could not have expected more from a commission with such divergent views.

But the reality is that the outcome reflects a much deeper existential malaise within NACAC, as well as a lack of coherence in US policy. If we all open our eyes, we will see the elephant in the room: NACAC’s exercise is not really about the future of commission-based recruitment. Rather, it is all about the future role of NACAC itself, an organisation that has largely remained at the margins of international recruitment in the past and is now struggling to regain the centre during an era of unprecedented change in international recruitment.

And there is no hiding the fact that NACAC is deeply divided on how to address this change.

The NACAC commission’s report is a strange hodgepodge of fact, wishful thinking, evasive manoeuvres, procrastination and, sadly, obfuscation.

The one point upon which the majority of the commission apparently agreed was that member institutions engaged in commission-based recruitment should not be punished. This concession must have resulted from their growing awareness that hundreds of NACAC members, of all stripes and including Ivy League institutions, are engaged in this practice to some degree.

Thus, the commission opted to avoid recommending a policy that would have immediate negative consequences for NACAC, such as the expulsion of a substantial number of member institutions, or an irreparable schism within the organisation.

So it punted what Commission Chair Philip Ballinger referred to as recommendations “of an interim nature”. These are not sufficient. Not for NACAC, and not for American higher education. The commission’s most momentous recommendation came down to changing the word "will" to "should": institutions should not pay commissions to agents. Thus the commission managed to nod and shake its head simultaneously, perhaps hoping that dissenting parties would each read into it only what they want to see.

The NACAC commission recommended additional actions around the usual buzzwords about which everyone agrees – best practice, accountability, transparency and integrity. But oddly, it carefully avoided addressing the most significant recent industry developments in those very areas, once again appearing to make progress without actually recommending any real action.

It is important to remember that the industry developments to which I refer resulted from the need of colleges and universities for assistance in the absence of NACAC leadership in the area of international recruitment practice.

Questionable assertions

Stranger still, although unrelated to the central question of agency compensation, the NACAC commission went out of its way to uncritically praise the State Department’s EducationUSA advising network, even advocating that it should be the very first stop for any institution’s international recruitment strategy.

As if, by virtue of being operated by a federal department jointly with its prime educational contractor, the Institute of International Education (IIE), EducationUSA sui generis reflects best practice and industry standards.

This assumption is highly questionable. At a minimum, greater transparency regarding EducationUSA is needed. After all, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

But it goes deeper. One alarming example is the recent arrest for bribery and visa selling of consular officer Michael T Sestak – the face of EducationUSA in Vietnam. How can we know whether this case represents a lone wolf, or is emblematic of a broader problem with student visa operations? What is being done to repair America’s reputation overseas?

Many institutional recruitment officers have stories about unusual or unexpected visa denials and approvals from around the world. What can be done to assure institutions that everything possible has been done within consular affairs and EducationUSA to improve access to American higher education by international students?

IIE would like to be viewed as a venerable and unbiased party to this debate. In reality, the federal government provides 60% of its operating revenue for managing EducationUSA, along with other initiatives.

Marginalisation

As for industry standards and best practices; if the NACAC commission was so concerned with these, why then did it studiously avoid any discussion of the most significant development in this area (to which I alluded earlier) – the work of the American International Recruitment Council, or AIRC?

The commission’s report dedicated a scant three paragraphs to AIRC – out of 65 pages! This deliberate marginalisation of AIRC is self-destructive. NACAC and its members would be better served if they took a hard and honest look at what has been achieved by AIRC.

AIRC is a registered standard-development organisation founded by US accredited post-secondary institutions in 2008. AIRC’s industry-developed standards for recruitment agencies and best practices for institutions were derived and extended from the best practices that had already emerged in Australia, the UK and other parts of the world.

The agency certification process developed by AIRC is the first enforceable standards process binding on international recruitment agencies, wherever they are in the world. In its five years of existence, AIRC has grown to more than 200 US accredited institutional members, including top-echelon schools. Forty-eight AIRC-certified agencies are operating in 88 countries through hundreds of branch offices.

Ironically, the very countries cited by the commission as leaders in agency recruitment are now looking closely at the AIRC process to determine whether it may, in fact, represent the next stage of international collaboration around industry standards and regulation, since its framework clearly surpasses the London Statement in terms of rigour and enforceability.

These same countries wonder why the US government is unable to engage in meaningful multi-lateral dialogue about recruitment industry standards, even as other countries forge ahead.

Given these facts, AIRC’s achievements should have been a central focus on both the NACAC commission report and its recommendations. Yet, the commission scrupulously avoided inflaming NACAC stalwarts who appear to be threatened by the development of enforceable industry standards by an organisation not their own.

The NACAC commission report once again exposed profound disagreement among federal departments, with the Department of State deploring the practice of agency recruitment, the Department of Homeland Security participating in agency trade shows and sponsoring agency events, and the Department of Commerce actively brokering (for a fee) introductions between institutions and agents around the world.

Even among federal departments there appears to be no agreement on best practices. In this no-man’s land where everybody wants to be king, the NACAC commission has missed another opportunity to lead. So what is to be done? Here are my suggestions:

• To all institutions engaged in commission-based recruitment, in the name of transparency and of the protection of students, come out of the closet. Publicly disclose your agency relationships and engage with appropriate standards-development organisations and professional bodies.
  
  
• To the NACAC board, if you truly want to break out of your organisational malaise, then go beyond the commission’s minimalist recommendations. Officially join as a partner with AIRC in the continuing development of best practices and standards, and encourage your own members to do so as well.
  
  Establish a liaison committee with AIRC to ensure that NACAC’s concerns are integrated into the AIRC standards-setting process. Partner with AIRC to create global recruitment events that build upon NACAC’s domestic recruitment expertise and AIRC’s regulatory approach to global recruitment.
  
  If the NACAC board proposes this, and if the membership consents, then NACAC will have a chance to participate in the effort to establish standards and best practice in international student recruitment, and will regain credibility and respect. If NACAC limps forward as it currently is – and as the commission recommends – then its relevance in the international arena will continue to erode.
  
  
• To President Barack Obama, recognise that American international education policy is profoundly broken, and that this is harming our global competitiveness – both in attracting global talent and in earning foreign exchange.
  

Colleges and universities are deeply hampered by the contradictory policies among competing federal departments, and a generally non-consultative approach vis-à-vis the higher education industry.

This federal disharmony also harms those states that have economic development strategies that are, in part, tied to their public higher education institutions effectively recruiting talent and deriving revenue from around the world.

Two years ago, in a commentary published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I described other failures of policy and vision and argued for the creation of a federally mandated national higher education export council to transcend competing agendas, break down misconceptions, and forge a coherent national strategy.

I argued then that such a council should include key higher education associations and leaders from institutions and the private sector. In 2011, this call was met largely with indifference. President Obama, please take action now.

* Mitch Leventhal is vice-chancellor for global affairs at the State University of New York.
 

GLOBAL: Strategy, media and international student integration

Katherine Forestier 22 June 2013 Issue No:277

 

As universities recruit more international students, they need to work out their media messaging about the benefits for local and national communities, as well as their campuses, the “Worldviews 2013” conference in Toronto heard.

Views differed as to whether universities should sell the economic benefits, or use the media to promote wider cultural and social advantages. Both could help or hinder the integration of international students.

Teboho Moja, clinical professor of higher education at New York University, said: “Media reporting of the economic benefits is over-emphasised.” The result was insufficient awareness of what international students could contribute.

This reflected attitudes within universities, which were not doing enough to promote integration both on campus and with their wider local communities, she told a session on “International Students and Campus Integration: Institutional strategies and media representations”.

In the United States, international student offices focused on practicalities such as visa issues, rather than intercultural learning, Moja said. Orientation programmes brought groups of international students together, but rarely involved domestic students.

“I would like to see programmes for everybody. Everybody needs to be a part of it,” she stressed, adding that faculty also needed orientation programmes for working in an internationalised institution.

She urged universities to make better use of the “cultural and social capital” that international students brought with them, such as promoting language exchange, rather than one-way English language development for those from overseas, and getting more domestic students to participate in study-abroad programmes.

“Too often integration is seen as an event, rather than a process for the whole time students are there,” she said.

Money, money, money?

Shaun Curtis, director of 'International Exeter' at Exeter University in the UK, said the economic argument was important for winning political as well as local community acceptance for the presence of large numbers of international students – particularly when cutting immigration was high on his country’s political agenda.

Research commissioned by Exeter had demonstrated that international students pumped £88 million (US$136 million) a year into the local economy, contributed 2%-3% to GDP and underpinned around 3,000 jobs, he said.

“Local media is not interested in the cultural and educational benefits. They are interested in jobs and investment.”

However, while this message was important, he warned of the dangers of international recruitment merely being portrayed as a cash cow, especially if reported back to the students themselves.

“We want them because we want to be a leading international university, with the best and brightest on campus,” he said.

“Integration strategies need to be conditioned by the local context, focused beyond students to the local community. We need to deliver messages to multiple audiences, and need media to help with that.”

His university tried to promote integration by diversifying its international recruitment beyond the “easy win” countries such as China, and capping numbers. Too many students from one country resulted in “autonomous populations” that did not mix.

Once students arrived, student unions and sport played key roles in integration. Campus design that helped bring people together in open spaces was also important.

Jane Ngobia, director of the human rights and equity office at the University of Guelph in Canada, said: “The media focuses on the mobility aspects of international education – the numbers – rather than the human aspects.”

On campus, those working in student affairs needed better training to support students from different cultures, religions and ways of life.

Maria Mathai, director of MM Advisory Services in India, said she could not find any media coverage at the national level in India on the issue of integrating home and overseas students. “They talk about India as a source country, not about all the international students there,” she said.

Moja said that, in South Africa, the focus was on recruiting international students to support the development of the whole region, not on income. Five per cent of places were reserved for students from the Southern African Development Community, and they were charged the same fees as local students.