I thought it might be useful and interesting to excerpt from Barack Obama’s inauguration speech those passages that related most strongly to foreign policy:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort – even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

So by now I hope we’ve established that graduate school provides something unique, and that investing in it makes occasional sense for businesses or nations.

But let’s get down to brass tacks.  Are there actual examples of graduate education producing leaders who create change?

Heck, yes!

I’m not going to mess around here.  Let’s be aggressive and look at three examples – one ancient, one modern, one current, in which a graduate experience has shaped a leader in significant ways.

You may of heard of a gentleman by the name of Alexander the Great.  What you probably don’t realize is that he may be the first world leader who benefited from what we might call “graduate-level” education.  OK, yes, you got me, there was no such thing as “graduate school” when Alexander walked the earth.  But studying extensively and intensively with the greatest mind of his time surely was the closest thing available at the time.  More pertinent to our last point, the historian Plutarch claims that Alexander’s time with Aristotle inspired him a love of learning that persisted throughout his life:

[H]is violent thirst after and passion for learning, which were once implanted, still grew up with him, and never decayed.

After his schooling, Alexander was also what you might call “succesful” as a leader.

Moving to modern times, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known to most of us simply as “Gandhi,” began his academic life with no indication of the success he was later to acheive:

At his middle school in Porbandar and high school in Rajkot, Gandhi remained an average student academically. He passed the matriculation exam for Samaldas College at Bhavnagar, Gujarat with some difficulty.

What changed him from an average student into one of the most inspiring leaders of the 20th Century?  Although that answer is undeniably complex, surely it didn’t hurt that he went abroad to study law:

On 4 September 1888, less than a month shy of his nineteenth birthday, Gandhi traveled to London, England, to study law at University College London and to train as a barrister.

Sticklers among you may object that this wasn’t exactly “graduate school” either.  Fair enough.  Regardless, his time abroad seemed to play a central role in much of his later thought:

Some of the vegetarians he met were members of the Theosophical Society, which had been founded in 1875 to further universal brotherhood, and which was devoted to the study of Buddhist and Hindu literature. They encouraged Gandhi to read the Bhagavad Gita. Not having shown a particular interest in religion before, he read works of and about Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and other religions.

And as for recent times, how about Mikheil Saakashvili? After completing his undergraduate education in Ukraine, he received a Graduate  Fellowship:

[He received] a fellowship from the United States State Department (via the Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program). He received an LL.M. from Columbia Law School in 1994 and took classes at The George Washington University Law School the following year. In 1995, he also received a diploma from the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

I think it’s fair to assume that his education abroad helped him be an effective leader of, first, an opposition; and then of a government.

Those are just three of many, many examples.  (The list of alumni of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School contains many more examples).

Now, here we may anticipate two examples:

First, you may object to the ends to which the above leaders (or other leaders) dedicated their leadership (or you may not).  “All that graduate education just helped them accomplish things that I think are terrible!”  That is a political and ethical discussion that deserves its own series of blog posts.  All I’ll say here is that my position is that advanced education clearly provides individuals with tools to be more effective leaders, managers, influence-makers, inspirational figures, strategists, etc.  Like any set of tools, these tools are morally neutral, it seems to me, and can be directed to ends that we may or may not consider worthwhile.  I am concerned merely with their effectiveness, which I consider to be beyond question.

Second, and more importantly, you may object that there’s no way to be certain that it was the educational process that made these leaders into who they are.  After all, there are many examples of great leaders who possessed virtually no education at all (Joan of Arc, as just one example).  Who’s to say that Alexander wouldn’t have been just as Great without Aristotle and all of his babble about metaphysics?

Here you’ve got me.  The real “impact” of higher education is notoriously difficult to measure.  In  an earlier post I cited a report by the Center for Global Development that addresses this very issue:

Researchers have found it exceedingly difficult to get a good grip on two critical output measures – how to measure quality in higher education and how to determine the value added by higher education over and beyond the student’s innate abilities.

Tomorrow we’ll glance very briefly at what else this report has to say about the issue, and ask ourselves, aside from individual examples of “great leaders” who benefitted from education, are there data that suggest that, overall, higher education is effective in creating societal change?

Other posts in this series:

• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Part Six
• Part Seven
• Part Eight
• Part Nine
• Part Ten
• Part Eleven
• Part Twelve
• Part Thirteen
• Part Fourteen
• Conclusion

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest New Yorker piece offers a fascinating analysis of one of the biggest problems facing every educational system:  the recruitment of quality teachers.  Gladwell’s basic point is that it’s very difficult to hire teachers because there’s no way to predict how they will perform in the classroom.  In this, Gladwell argues, they’re like professional athletes (the specific comparison he uses is quarterbacks in professional American football, but his analysis would hold if you changed the sport and the position).  Take goalkeepers in “football” (the non-American kind).  Football teams spend hordes of money scouting potential goalkeepers, trying to evaluate how they’ll perform as a professional.  The problem is, there’s no way to know for certain that the skills a player demonstrates versus weaker competition will translate to a situation in which the game is much more advanced.  Similarly, a teacher’s performance in university, or in a teacher-training program, doesn’t tell us much about how that teacher will perform when faced with real students in a real school. Or so Gladwell says:

If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.

Anyone who is interested in the performance of educational systems should read this piece.

Just when it looked like the impacts of the current financial crisis on education couldn’t get any worse, along came Bernard Madoff.    Now a leading educational foundation, which gave millions to MIT, among other places, is closing its doors.

Barbara Picower, who along with her husband, Jeffry, established the Picower Foundation in 1989, said in a statement on Friday that the foundation’s grant-making would cease “effective immediately” and that it would “close its doors in the coming months.”

She wrote in the statement that Madoff’s “act of fraud has had a devastating impact on tens and thousands of lives as well as numerous philanthropic foundations and nonprofit organizations.”

The foundation’s assets were valued at one billion dollars just one year ago.  And then – poof! – nothing.

That’s $50 million in educational giving per year that was just wiped off the map.

Oy!

Since its inception in early September, the KAEF blog has officially had one hundred posts.  Over that time, we’ve had 3,655 visitors to the blog.  We are proud to have shared with our readers information regarding the KAEF program and the US system of graduate education.

For those of you who are new to the blog, we thought this would be a good time to review what we’ve covered, and to provide you with some information about how you can become a part of the next 100 posts.  For those of you who are regular readers, please – share this post with your friends or colleagues.

So, since September, the KAEF blog has:

• profiled the experiences of KAEF alumni and current Fellows Seb Bytyçi, Edona Pacarada, Fortuna Haxhikadrija, Nita Gojani, Luan Dalipi, and Emira Talovic.
• provided extensive tips on how to do well in a professional or academic interview, including posts on confidence, preparation, correct answers to interview questions, interview “dos and dont’s”, the process interviewers use to construct their questions, paying attention to the small details of an interview (such as dress, manner of speaking, etc.), common interview formats, and the purpose of the interview in a selection process.
• shared resources for improving your standardized testing scores and writing a winning resume and personal statement.
• passed on information about getting into graduate or scholarship programs (not only KAEF), with posts on why graduate schools care about professional experience, graduate school rankings, the structure of the U.S. university system, the financial benefits of getting an advanced degree, a report of the number of Kosovars studying in the U.S., the impacts of the financial crisis on international student aid, and information about the life of graduate students; along with tons of links to useful sites.
• listed some valuable books and websites, including the best American business books and the best U.S. political websites.
• opened a small window onto American culture, with posts on a variety of subjects, including Columbus Day, A Prairie Home Companion (one of America’s most popular radio programs), American football’s ties to the university system, the baseball playoffs, and America’s vaunted research institutes.
• given valuable information about applying to the KAEF program, including a detailed application timeline and tips for getting your application in on time.

In short, we’re working extremely hard to provide you with as much information as possible about opportunities for you to increase your education in the U.S.  And we’re sharing some information about America while we’re at it.  If you’re new to the blog or have questions about how best to use it, check out our post, “How to use the KAEF Blog.”

Thanks to all of our readers for a fantastic first three months.  We are confident that the audience and usefulness of the blog will grow with time!

A fascinating new website allows you to see the level of education attained by U.S. residents (ages 25-34) by state or even by county.

In addition, you can look at the different levels of education attainment by states and select nations on this page.

What countries rank highest?  Canada, Korea and Japan.  Which countries (of those ranked) are lowest?  Mexico and Germany.  The state with the best level of educational attainment is Massachusetts.  The state with the worst level?  Nevada.

My own county – Alexandria City in Virginia?  63.4% of us have a college degree.  An astounding 35% have a graduate degree.  Yikes!  I better find a graduate school to apply to!

President-elect Barack Obama has published the outline of his plan for reforming American education on his transition team’s website, change.gov.  Here’s the part about higher education:

• Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit: Obama and Biden will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This universal and fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition completely free for most students. Recipients of the credit will be required to conduct 100 hours of community service.
• Simplify the Application Process for Financial Aid: Obama and Biden will streamline the financial aid process by eliminating the current federal financial aid application and enabling families to apply simply by checking a box on their tax form, authorizing their tax information to be used, and eliminating the need for a separate application.

Obama is also asking for input.  So if you have an idea for American higher education, let him know via this link.

For those of you wanting to experience the life of a grad. student, now you can.  There’s a new text-only video game called Violet in which you get to be – drum roll please – a graduate student.   Here’s the review:

It’s noon and you’ve still got 1,000 words to type. That might not seem like much, but it’s been months since you’ve last worked on your dissertation and distractions are plentiful. To make matters worse, your girlfriend, Violet, says she’s out the door and flying back to Australia if you don’t finish the paper by the end of the day.

What’s your next move?

Sounds almost too good to be true, right?

For those of you who haven’t heard about or tried Pandora, the online radio station that plays songs similar to an artist or song that you name – try it.

Here is an incredibly useful – albeit cruel – tool for all of those students out there struggling to start a paper (or an application to graduate school):  Write or Die.

It’s a free web-based application that asks you to set goals – the amount of time you want to spend, or the amount of words you want to write – and then uses negative reinforcement to “force” you to meet those goals.

You really have to try it to believe it.  If you don’t meet your goals, then the program starts to bother you – by, for example, playing a particularly annoying song, sure to get stuck in your head – or, at the most extreme levels, by actually ERASING what you’ve already written.

Not sure how much of the appeal is the sheer novelty of the thing, but I can  assure you that, for the first few times you use it at least, it MAKES YOU WRITE.

Ahh, I just stopped typing for a few seconds, and it started playing “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley! Man, that program is cruel!