JENESYS 2016 Home-Stay Program for Young Cambodia Government Officials in OSAKI City

Japan (5-6 November 2016): It was my great pleasure and privilege to attend the homestay program organized by the JICE in Osaki City and Miyagi Prefecture. I and two other colleagues, Mr. Sun Sokhet and Va Vannak, from the Royal School of Administration had stayed with a Japanese family, Mr. Aoki Akira and Mrs. Aoki. Mr. Akira is retired high school teacher and a member of the BoD of the Non Profit Organization (NPO) in Osaki. 

During our stay with their family, we have learned a lot about Japanese cultures, living styles, and other routine activities. The most remembered activities are playing with autism children, walking around the village, farming some vegetables, and practicing mediation (concentration). Our sincere thanks go to their family who accepted us to stay in their house and treated us very well.

#JENESYS 2016
#JICE
#CAMBODIA

Young Cambodian Government Officials attended JENSYS 2016 (2nd Batch, Politics)

Japan (November 17, 2016): Twenty-five participants from the Royal School of Administration attended the Japan-East Asia Network of Exchange for Students and Youths (JENESYS 2016) that had been organized by the Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE) on the Theme of Politics from November 1, 2016, to November 2016. This program aims to provide good cooperation and understanding of Japanese culture and society to strengthen the spirit of solidarity with Asia through youth exchange activities.

Out of 550 students in the Royal School of Administration, I was selected to attend this crucial program among other 24 participants in Japan. I have obtained new knowledge and experiences of Japanese culture, public administration, national infrastructure, modernization, and people. I have attended one lecture on "National Public Employees in Japan" offered by Associate Professor Watanabe Yasuyuki, from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), Japan. I have learned a lot from his perspectives and experiences on how to reform the civil services in the country. Also, he mainly focused on the professional code ethics of the civil servants or national public employees and other regulations. Japan is a good model country in terms of transparency and accountability. I also visited the National Diet of Japan (the House of Councillors), and the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

Most interestingly, I visited the region of MINAMI SANRIKU which was destroyed by Sunami on March 11, 2011. The counselor has shared experiences on how to manage the national disasters and restore this region.

Moreover, I experienced two days of a homestay program with a Japanese family in Osaki City. I have learned Onseb Somuries at the Sebsyokan Hotel.

Taking in this blogger, I would like to express my profound thanks to the JICE and the Japanese government that provided me golden opportunities to explore Japanese culture, politics, and people. 

China’s Back Yard Cambodia

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/09/05/the-push-and-pull-of-chinas-orbit/

CHINA: Foreign student scholarships spark anger as fees rise

Yojana Sharma24 October 2014 Issue No:340

 

 A new plan to lure foreign students with generous scholarships by China’s eastern Jiangsu province, host to a number of foreign branch campuses, has sparked anger in the province over resources being directed towards “wealthy foreigners” while Chinese students struggle with a rising fee burden.

Resentment has also grown as foreign students are provided with what is seen as far superior accommodation to that available for local students.

In mid-August, the province’s education bureau launched a ‘Study in Jiangsu’ programme to develop the province into a major destination for foreign students. Under the programme, annual scholarships of 50,000 to 90,000 yuan (US$8,200 to US$14,700) will be made available to applicants from overseas wanting to study at universities, including joint overseas ventures such as Duke Kunshan University and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.

Another 50 publicly funded universities in Jiangsu, many in the popular student cities of Nanjing and Suzhou are permitted to take foreign students.

Yang Shubing, director of publicity at the Jiangsu education bureau said the province had some 18,700 foreign students by the end of last year. “To encourage more such students, the provincial scholarship total has reached 15 million yuan each year,” he was quoted in official media as saying.

But the plan has sparked outrage, with local residents criticising the scheme on China’s microblog site Weibo, in particular because it was announced at a time when universities in at least nine Chinese provinces were introducing steep tuition fees rises for local students this year.

In some cases fee rises for locals will be as much as 50% compared to last year or even 75%, as was reported for Ningxia Autonomous Region – a poorer region in western China.

Scholarships and grants for local students have not risen in line with these sharp increases, angering students and families, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported in August.

Fees burden

University tuition fees for local students remained at around 5,000 yuan (US$817) a year since 2006, when the government imposed a five-year moratorium on raising university fees.

Education commentator Bing Qi said 5,000 yuan today was around 18% of urban residents' per capita disposable income and 56% of rural residents’.

“Therefore, tuition fees should be reduced, not increased,” Bing said, adding in a commentary in Beijing Youth Daily that “the burden on households remains high despite rising incomes in recent years”.

Official figures show that in 2013, the overall value of scholarships totalled 57.41 billion yuan (US$9.38 billion) for 2.65 million Chinese students – or around 1500 yuan (US$245) per student.

“Contrast this figure with the sum Jiangsu is prepared to grant foreign students and it does appear that the concern about ‘discrimination’ or ‘double standards’ is not entirely misplaced,” Shanghai Daily commented.

Jiangsu’s “quest for a leading position in the global education landscape was justified only if it did not come at a cost to locals”, the paper added.

Citizens vented their anger online saying if the government had money for education scholarships it should not be spent on ‘foreign elites’ when many students in poor rural areas were unable to afford fees.

Boosting foreign student numbers

Jiangsu is not alone, however: Shanghai is aiming to attract 70,000 foreign students by 2015, up from 40,000 this year and will increase the number of scholarships for those on longer degree programmes.

Some will be worth 200,000 yuan or US$32,700 over four years of study, including accommodation costs – a huge sum compared to loans and grants for local students, even when taking account of the higher accommodation costs for foreigners.

The Beijing government is actively trying to attract more foreign students and has said it will provide scholarships for as many as 50,000 international students by 2015. Some 18,000 scholarships have been made available for students from Africa since 2013.

Although the majority of foreign students in China are currently from the US and South Korea, Liu Jinghui, secretary-general of the China Scholarship Council, has said Chinese higher education would be promoted more strongly in Europe. Liu said he hoped to increase the 1,087 scholarships provided to European students last year.

As the barrage of online criticism against funds being “diverted” to foreign students rose, the China Development Bank last month announced 14 billion yuan of “new loans” for local students this year through the state loan scheme that benefits some 2.5 million students.

The bank said the cap on the loan amount would be increased by 33% to 8,000 yuan (US$1,300), up from 6,000 yuan previously for each undergraduate applicant. Graduate students will receive up to 12,000 yuan.

The increase of 2,000 yuan per undergraduate student is the first such increase since 2002, with official inflation running at an annual rate of 5 to 6% in recent years. Students in some provinces, including Hainan, held protests last year about the rise in fees and other costs, including canteen food.

"The previous [loan] standard was implemented for more than a dozen years, and many students with financial difficulties said it was far from enough," said Zhang Guangming, director of the China National Centre for Student Financial Aid under the Education Ministry.

FRANCE: Low fees but jobs needed to meet costs

Jane Marshall24 October 2014 Issue No:340

 

Students in French universities pay among the lowest fees in Europe. But although education ministers claim that, despite austerity, funding for student benefits has kept up with purchasing power, student organisations say the cost of starting the new academic year for students is up to 2% higher than last year.

The government has not gone down the route of charging students high sums for university studies, and fixes the modest rates by decree. For the 2014-15 academic year, enrolment fees have increased by 0.7%, to €184 (US$236) annually for a three-year licence (bachelor equivalent) course, €256 for a masters, €391 for a doctorate and €610 for an engineering diploma.

But while students do not have to worry about high fees, they need money to live on during the university year. In its inquiry La Vie Étudiante: Repères, the Observatoire de la Vie Étudiante, or OVE, identified the main sources of student income.

The most common was family support, accounting for 30% of student resources and paying an average of €308 a month. This was followed closely by wages from paid work, at 29%, providing €618 on average; then public benefits such as those from the government and from local and regional authorities, representing 25%, and an average of €307 monthly.

Other sources, each representing 6% or less of student income, included contributions from a spouse or partner, savings, and, at a bare 1%, student loans, which are available from some banks under government guarantee.

Nearly one in two students did paid work during the university year, according to OVE, which found that 20% who had a job considered it had a ‘negative impact’ on their studies. More than half considered their employment essential for survival.

OVE reported that a third of the students lived with one or both parents, a third in rented accommodation either alone or in a couple with or without children, and 12% were in private rentals shared with others. Only 11% lived in subsidised university housing. Rents averaged €426 across the country, and were highest in Paris at €597.

The 2015 budget allocated €2.5 billion (US$3.2 billion) for ‘student life’, an increase of €42 million, or 1.7%, over last year.

In September, marking the start of the university year, the Minister for Education, Higher Education and Research, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, and State Secretary for Higher Education and Research, Geneviève Fioraso, stressed their first priority was to ensure academic success for the greatest number of students, with more help for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Among measures they announced were increased grants for more students, continuation of an intensive student housing construction plan and government rental guarantees for those looking for accommodation in the private sector.

However, the government has this year discontinued merit grants, previously awarded to about 7,000 new students each year for three years, in favour of increasing grants paid according to social criteria.

In spite of more generous benefits, students and their families face stiff cost-of-living increases at the start of this academic year, according to the Fédération des Associations Générales Étudiantes, or FAGE, and the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France, or UNEF.

FAGE calculated a student had to spend an average of €2,525 to start the university year, 1.5% more than last year while UNEF reckoned the increase was 2%, “four times the rate of inflation for the past year”. The main causes were higher rents, and increases in unavoidable expenses such as enrolment fees, university meals and social security payments.

While previous reforms had improved the purchasing power of 160,000 students by cutting their study costs by 7.4%, the remainder faced substantial increases of 5.5% for those on grants, and 3.6% for the others, claimed UNEF.

The union said grants reform was “still far from the promise of a student autonomy allowance” made by François Hollande during his presidential campaign, and it urged further benefit increases and widened access for more students.

FAGE asserted that 28% of students had to take paid work to get by, and that there was a 50% risk of academic failure for those who worked more than 12 hours a week. It called for the government to open urgently a “comprehensive and ambitious plan for students’ living conditions”. 

SINGAPORE: Rising fees cloud international hub status

Emilia Tan24 October 2014 Issue No:340

 

Rising university fees for international students are casting a cloud over Singapore’s future as an Asian regional hub for international students – particularly from the rest of Asia. This is despite many parents in the region believing that paying for education is a good investment.

A report by the HSBC Bank The Value of Education found that families in Asia were willing to pay high fees, but recent developments in the city state have shown that tolerance levels for high fees are being reached.

Singapore is now one of the most expensive countries globally to obtain an undergraduate degree once the high cost of living in the city state is taken into account. Foreign student numbers have fallen as fees have been rising – and at a much faster rate than those for locals.

At Singapore’s top-ranked public universities, undergraduate fees for foreign students are around S$15,300 (US$12,000) for humanities and social science degrees, an increase over last year of more than 11%, compared with an 8.6% increase for Singaporeans.

The cost of a business degree or management degree has risen in the past year by as much as 15% for foreign students – to S$31,200 (US$24,500), compared with a 6% increase for Singaporeans that allows them to obtain the same degree for S$9,250 (US$7,200).

Fees for undergraduate law degrees have risen by an eye-watering 17% in the past year compared with 8% for Singaporeans, according to official figures. The fees rise coupled with high living costs has been exacerbated by a strengthening of the Singaporean currency, HSBC notes.

With undergraduate tuition fees and living costs per year combined, Singapore is second only to Australia in terms of cost among 15 major higher education destinations for foreign students.

HSBC puts Singapore at US$39,229 a year compared with US$42,000 in Australia. Comparable amounts for the US and UK are US$36,500 and US$35,000 respectively.

Drop in numbers

Despite higher fee rises for foreign students and the indication that their enrolments had dropped, Singapore’s Education Minister Heng Swee Keat noted that the amount collected in tuition fees from international students had barely increased between 2012 and 2013.

In 2013, the amount was S$176 million (US$138 million) compared with S$172 million (US$135 million) in 2012 – after jumping significantly from S$158 million (US$124 million) in 2011.

Immigration authority figures show that some 75,000 foreign student pass holders were issued in July, compared with 84,000 two years ago. The number will be even lower for university students as these figures include those attending secondary schools in Singapore.

Singapore had set itself the headline target of attracting 150,000 foreign university students by 2015 compared with about 30,000 a decade ago. But it is now clear it will fall well short of its ambitions.

The education ministry announced a drop from 18% to 15% in the proportion of places for foreign students overall in Singapore. Nonetheless, in some institutions such as the National University of Singapore, the proportion of foreign students at around 35% of the intake, has not changed since 2011.

The Economic Development Board, which has been promoting Singapore as a hub, declined to comment on whether the 2015 target of attracting 150,000 foreign students had been abandoned.

Jobs situation

Foreign students hoping to stay on after graduation also say that finding a job in Singapore has become more difficult, making it harder to justify the increased costs. Singapore has offered generous scholarships to foreign students but public funding of such scholarships has recently been questioned.

The government revealed earlier this year that foreign graduates who receive Singapore government scholarships and are bound to work in the city on graduation, were taking longer to find jobs. This had led to ‘repayment holidays’ that weigh on the public purse.

The climate has changed in the past two years and now there is rising local hostility towards immigration as jobs have become harder to find, in part due to slowing economic growth. According to official figures, overall graduate unemployment rose from 3.3% to 3.6% in the first half of 2013, higher than the average unemployment rate in Singapore of around 2%.

While no longer speaking of targets, Heng told Parliament in March only that Singapore welcomed foreign students and that it was good for local students to mix with foreign peers.

Fewer places

As part of Singapore’s desire to promote itself as an international hub for education, a number of top overseas universities have been drawn to its shores in the past decade. Almost a dozen foreign branch campuses have been established along with a large number of joint degree partnerships with international institutions.

For example, some 23 Australian institutions are offering courses in Singapore – the largest number offered by foreign universities. Around a third of the intake is comprised of foreign students.

Bringing in foreign students was one of the stated aims of Singapore’s Global Schoolhouse initiative that started in 2002 and included start-up loans and subsidies to foreign institutions to set up branch campuses.

But a tightening of regulations on foreign institutions has led to a number of international institutions shutting down, while others have abandoned Singapore, finding their operations unviable once Singaporean subsidies ended. Local Singaporean students also found the fees too high compared with local universities and overseas students failed to arrive in the numbers hoped for.

The University of New South Wales closed its Singapore branch in 2007 after just one semester after it attracted far fewer students than predicted. In July this year, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business announced it was pulling out of Singapore in favour of Hong Kong.

In November last year, Tisch Asia, New York University’s arts school, shut its Singapore branch, reportedly because of huge deficits due to high running costs, while a joint law course with NYU failed to attract enough students, even after offering scholarships.

Against these mini-disasters, the long-planned Yale-NUS, a liberal arts college, opened its doors last year and a new joint medical school with Imperial College London has come on stream, both charging high fees to international students. 

MALAYSIA: Loan defaulters barred from leaving

Emilia Tan24 October 2014 Issue No:340

 

With the cost of university education rising faster than inflation and increasing sums taken out in loans, more and more students are defaulting on their loan repayments. For some, this means being barred from leaving the country.

In fact, almost 85,000 recipients of student loans from the government’s low-interest National Higher Education Fund Corporation have to date been stopped because of loan arrears. They join criminals, tax dodgers and pension fund defaulters in facing departure bans.

Rising costs affect even students from middle-income families who are now graduating with a large debt after a three-year undergraduate degree that costs more than RM60,000 (US$18,000).

The outlay is much higher at a private university or a foreign branch campus. In a public university, a medical degree can cost as much as RM300,000 (US$92,000) whereas private colleges charge three times that much.

Generally, private sector costs have increased by 20% to 25% in the past five years where there are now more than 100 colleges and foreign branch campuses. HSBC Bank estimates the total annual cost of an undergraduate degree, including living expenses, at around US$13,000.

Earlier this year, Yemen’s higher education and scientific research ministry said it would end new government scholarships for its students to enrol in private Malaysian universities because of “poor educational quality and high costs”. Some 9,000 Yemeni students are enrolled in Malaysia, 4,000 of them in private universities.

Although the Yemeni case is unusual, the decision attracted wide publicity and dented the government’s attempts to portray Malaysia as a low-cost alternative to universities in the West and in Singapore.

Loans

While students are able to get low-interest government loans – loans for private university courses are about a third of all government-backed loans – these do not cover the whole cost at private institutions. Yet more and more students are enrolling in the private sector because of a lack of places in the top public universities.

Overall cost of living rises are also putting financial pressure on families. The Keadilan Youth or KeADILan, the youth wing of the National Justice Party of Malaysia or PKR, said that with low starting salaries, Malaysian graduates “cannot make ends meet”.

“Many local graduates have the added burden of repaying their PTPTN [National Higher Education Fund Corporation] education loans and this can cost up to RM300 a month," the group said in a statement.

PTPTN chief executive officer Agos Cholan said the corporation had to resort to barring the defaulters from leaving Malaysia because they had ignored repeated reminders to repay their loans. To have the ban lifted, Agos said defaulters would need to make some payments immediately, depending on their income, and would need to sign papers committing them to pay monthly sums.

Rapidly shrinking fund

Although the number facing bans is unacceptably high, it is down from some 130,000 in 2007 after the government converted some loans to grants for top performing students. More than 14,000 blacklisted PTPTN borrowers paid back their loans in 2013 compared with some 10,000 the year before.

In a statement, PTPTN said as many as 500,000 borrowers had defaulted on their loans since the fund was established in 1997. While not all have been barred, it means the amount of money in the fund is rapidly shrinking and affecting the PTPTN’s ability to lend to new students.

Fund chairman Shamsul Anuar Nasarah said the corporation was finding it too difficult to finance new students because of the high number of defaulters and with RM1.2 billion (US$367 million) in unpaid loans outstanding.

The 2015 budget announced this month gives PTPTN borrowers an incentive to make lump sum payments by March next year when they will receive a 20% discount on their loans. Those who pay consis¬tently for 12 months until the end of 2015 will be offered a 10% discount.

But student groups criticised the government for being more concerned about propping up the loan corporation than easing the fees burden on students with more scholarships.

Their criticisms of the government came after Malaysia’s second Education Minister Idris Jusoh said PTPTN loan defaulters stretching back to 1998 could be blacklisted on a bank database used to sanction new loan applications. This would have an effect similar to being declared bankrupt and could affect graduates’ ability to buy a house, for example.

PTPTN has disbursed RM5.3 billion (US$1.62 billion) to more than 990,000 students since 1998.

GLOBAL: Public higher education versus private

24 October 2014 Issue No:340

At the tertiary level, public expenditure per student in both public and private institutions averaged US$9,221 in OECD countries in 2012, the Education at a Glance report says. But the amount varied from about US$2,000 in Chile to more than US$17,000 in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden – the four countries where the share of private spending is small or negligible.

In all countries with available data, except Hungary and Latvia, public expenditure per student is greater for public than private institutions. But patterns in the allocation of public funds to public and private institutions differ, the OECD analysts say.

In Denmark and the Netherlands, at least 90% of students are enrolled in public universities and most public money goes to these institutions. In the two countries, private funds complement public spending to varying degrees although private expenditure is less than 6% of total spending on public and private institutions in Denmark but above 28% in the Netherlands.

In Belgium, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland and Sweden, public expenditure goes to both public and private institutions. Government allocations per student in some private institutions is at least 58% and more than 100% of the level of public spending per student in public universities.

However, these countries also have different participation patterns. In Hungary, Iceland and Sweden, at least 80% of students are enrolled in public universities, whereas in Belgium and Estonia, they are mainly in government-dependent private institutions. In all three first-mentioned nations, the share of expenditure on private tertiary institutions is below the OECD average, while in the remaining two countries, taxpayers’ money goes mainly to private universities.

Public expenditure on tertiary education amounts to nearly one-quarter of total public education spending on average across OECD countries. But in the OECD and partner countries, the percentages range from less than 16% in Korea, to 32% in Finland, 36% in Canada and 38% in Turkey.

Grants and loans to students

OECD research indicates that a robust financial support system is important for ensuring good outcomes for higher education students, and that the type of aid is also critical, the report says. A key question in many OECD countries is whether financial support for students should be provided primarily in the form of grants or loans. Advocates of student loans argue that these allow available resources to be spread further.

If the amount spent on grants were used to guarantee or subsidise loans instead, aid would be available to more students, and overall access to higher education would increase. Loans also shift some of the cost of education on to those who benefit most from higher education, namely the individual student, and reflect the high private returns of completing tertiary education.

Opponents argue that student loans are less effective than grants in encouraging low-income students to pursue further education. They also argue that loans may be less efficient than anticipated because of the various types of support provided to borrowers or lenders and the costs of administration and servicing.

Finally, the report notes that a high level of student debt may have adverse effects both for students and for governments if large numbers of students are unable to repay their loans.

Allocations to higher education

OECD countries spend an average of about 22% of their public budgets for tertiary education on support for students “and private entities”. In Australia, Chile, Denmark, Iceland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the UK and the US, government support for students accounts for more than 25% of public spending on tertiary education.

Only Argentina, the Czech Republic and Indonesia spend less than 7% of total public spending on the tertiary sector in supporting their students. In the Czech Republic, subsidies for students’ grants are sent directly to institutions which are responsible for distributing them among students.

A dozen of the 36 countries for which data are available rely exclusively on scholarships, grants and transfer payments to private institutions. Iceland provides only student loans while other countries make a combination of grants and loans available. Both types of support are used extensively in Australia, Chile, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US.

In general, the countries that offer student loans are also those in which public support for students comprises the largest proportion of all public spending on tertiary education. In most cases, these countries also spend an above-average proportion of their tertiary education budgets on grants and scholarships, the report says.