We’ve covered a lot of ground, and all that remains is to talk about the “abroad” part of the title of this series.  The literature about the benefits of studying or working abroad is vast, and deserves a blog series in and of itself.  I will focus only on those benefits that will accrue to the society to which an individual returns from his or her exchange experience.  I will furthermore focus on so-called “developing” countries.

Domestic institutions of higher education in these countries, due to a host of limitations, often fail to produce the elite leadership required to implement the most needed institutional reforms. In addition, graduates of such institutions are often unaware of the latest technological trends internationally, and therefore unable to play a role in importing and adapting applicable foreign technologies.

It is here that graduate fellowship programs – particularly those that include an exchange with another country – have a small but absolutely vital role to play. Such programs, provided that they place students at high-quality institutions, confer high-quality knowledge and, crucially, the opportunity to witness how that knowledge is applied in the country where it is developed. The latter is essential if the goal is to adapt and then transfer that knowledge to a distinct cultural setting. Returning to their country of origin, alumni have a disproportionate impact through their ability to create institutional reform and their ability to apply knowledge and technology to domestic situations.  These are all things that we’ve spoken about in the course of this series.

So, we’ve reached the end.  And so let me pose a question I asked near the beginning.

Let’s say that a distant relative, of whom you’ve never heard, sadly passes away and leaves you $1 million in his or her will.  There is a condition, however.  In order to claim the inheritance, you must immediately give half of it ($500,000) away to the education of your nations’ citizens.  That education can be at any level, at any institution, in any country, so long as it goes directly to providing student learning.

How much of that $500,000 will you give to sponsor graduate students, if any?  And of that amount, how much will you provide to sponsor graduate students at “elite” foreign universities?

My hope is that, while you certainly wouldn’t use the whole $500,000 to sponsor graduate fellowships abroad, you would devote a substantial amount to that end.

If not, let me know why not!

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

We began this entire series with the promise to defend the following hypothesis:

The education of future economic and political leaders abroad in graduate-level programs is a necessary (but not sufficient) step in any country’s continued economic and political development.

Have we defended it?  I believe so.  How?

We showed that institutions do in fact provide graduate-level programs to employees.  We investigated the reasons behind these decisions, and came to the conclusion that graduate programs provide certain “management” skills that are unique.  We compared these skills to other, more “technical” skills, and come to the conclusion that both sets of skills are important.  We then asked if graduate programs were the only way to impart such “management” skills, and concluded that, though there are other, cheaper ways to provide employees with these skills, graduate school is unique in the depth of knowledge it provides.  We looked at examples of leaders that have benefited from advanced training, and have then used that training to effectively lead their societies.  We then looked at some recent data about the impact of higher education on societies; and, finally, we saw that such impacts are relevant to so-called “developing” countries.

In short, we have shown that, while providing graduate education should in no way be a nation’s sole priority, it should absolutely be part of a nation’s educational strategy, along with the other components we briefly passed by in the course of the series:  primary and secondary education, undergraduate education, and short-term trainings.  How large a role it should play is a question of a nation’s specific circumstances – but that it has a role to play is now undoubtedly clear.  Without highly-qualified managers and leaders – without products of quality graduate programs – a nation will struggle to effectively deploy its resources, including the very human capital it has developed by focusing on other aspects of its educational system.

The only task remaining is to ask whether there is something special about graduate programs abroad.  And this we will do tomorrow, in the concluding post of the series.

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

I ended yesterday’s post with the following:

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 benefited from education, are there data that suggest that, overall, higher education is effective in creating societal change?

So what does the report say?  And are there other sources of data?

The list of information and other sources is important enough that I’ll quote it at length here:

A growing body of literature suggests that the conventional estimates of the returns to education do not accurately reflect the social value added by tertiary education, including job creation, good economic and political governance, increased entrepreneurship, and increased intergenerational mobility . . . For example, a study in Taiwan found that a 1 percent rise in higher education stock (as defined as those who had completed higher education, including junior college, college, university, or graduate school) led to a 0.35 per cent rise in industrial output, while a 1 percent rise in the number of graduates from engineering or natural sciences led to a 0.15 percent increase in agricultural output . . .[Another report] found a positive and statistically significant correlation between higher education enrollment rates and governance indicators, including corruption, rule of law, ethnic tensions, and bureaucratic quality. . . [Another report]found that individuals with higher education levels were more likely to engage in entrepreneurial activity, and more educated entrepreneurs created larger numbers of jobs than less-educated entrepreneurs. . . [Finally, r]esearch in the United States indicates that the social return to higher education includes increased tax revenues, increased intergenerational mobility, lower welfare costs and increased income for non-college graduates . . .

So, as you can see, the idea that higher education can create societal change is not mere speculation.  There are data to back that suggestion up.

Of course, the above refers to an entire system of education, not merely to graduate programs.  But graduate programs, for all the reasons I’ve laid out throughout this series, have an important role to play, and are surely part of the success captured in the above research.

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

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

Yesterday we spoke at some length about the unique aspects of a graduate-level education that are difficult to replicate in other, shorter-term training formats.  I mentioned three aspects of graduate programs – the ability to network with peers, the distance of the program from your “everyday” life, and the ability of grad. school to educate students about methodology as well as content – that give them an advantage.  You may be able to think of other aspects of graduate programs that are uniquely beneficial (I’m sure there are many, and my list was in no way intended to be exhaustive).

But let’s consider a counterargument.   You may think that, while graduate school does indeed possess all of the attributes I mentioned, short-term trainings might as well.  The difference, you might say, is not one of kind, but of degree.  Both graduate school and short-term trainings produce x kind of learning, you might say, and yes, of course, graduate school produces more of it, because graduate school lasts longer.  But shorter-term trainings also produce x, in smaller amounts, to be sure, due to their shorter duration.  And you might even go on to argue that, while longer programs produce more x, the rate at which they produce it diminishes over time – so, really, shorter-term programs are more effective. After all,  you might say, graduate schools themselves exhibit this reasoning when they limit a program to 2 or 3 years, as opposed to 10.

Then the question becomes a simple one:  what is the ideal length of a training program, in which x is created in the most efficient manner?

In response, I would say a few things:

First, I think graduate programs do offer learning that is of a different kind than short-term training programs – particularly to the extent that they encourage interactive, student-based learning that encourages individuals to understand methodology instead of just content.

Putting that aside, no matter how inefficient an educational system is at producing x, so long as more education equals even slightly more x, there will always be a situation when it is worth paying for the extra education to get the extra x. For example, let’s say that you are going to have invasive brain surgery.  You have a choice between two doctors:  one studied for ten years at University X, and one for twenty at University Y.  You’ve read a lot about both universities and have discovered that the 10 years of education Doctor #1 obtained at X is “worth” 95% of the education that Doctor #2 obtained at Y.  What doctor do you choose to operate on your brain?  Of course Doctor #2!  The “inefficiency” of the last ten years of University Y’s program don’t interest you so much as the quality of the eventual product:  the doctor who’s going to cut open your brain!

Another example:  if you are a resident of the state of Utah, the University of Utah’s tuition for one year is about $5,200.  For the same student to go to Harvard, it would cost about $32,000.  Would anyone suggest that the education Harvard provides is six times better than that produced by Utah?  If you know of such a person, please let them know I have an iceberg I’d like to sell them.  The reason people pay six times more to go to Harvard isn’t that the education is six times better – it’s that, no matter how much better it is, it is better, and if you have the resources, that’s all that matters.

So again we’re back to the question of limited resources.  And given that any businesses’ resources are limited, of course there will be situations when investing in an employee’s short-term training will make abundantly more sense than investing in their long-term (and incredibly expensive) graduate-level education.  My only point is that there are certain circumstances (those in which quality is by far the most important criteria) in which the long-term option makes more sense, despite its high cost.

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

In our last post, we concluded that, for nations or businesses,  financing some form of “management” or “advanced” training was desirable, even at the cost of sacrificing some level of more “technical” or basic education.  I have made the claim that the most expensive kind of advanced training – post-graduate programs at foreign universities – is a good option.  But might there be other, more cost-effective ways to provide the same training?

One might, for example, identify the specific skills that constitute such advanced training, and design shorter, intensive training programs for those specific skills.  Leadership is a good example.  In every country you can find organizations that offer short leadership courses for a very reasonable price.  An organization could pay for fifty of its employees (possibly more)  to undergo such courses for the same price that it would take to send one employee to a foreign business school.  So, is that a better deal?

In certain cases, yes.  But I would like to suggest three areas in which the longer-term (and more expensive) trainings have a clear advantage.

• Networking. A large part of graduate school is learning from and with peers who share your interests, and who have unique approaches to problems.  Establishing the kind of long-term, productive relationships that provide real payoffs in a business sense takes time – lots of time.  Shorter trainings are unlikely to provide this benefit.
• Method. Shorter term trainings are, well, short.  They are designed to provide you with an overview of the conventional wisdom on a particular question, and perhaps suggest some ways you might apply that conventional wisdom in your day-to-day activities.  But what if – or perhaps we should say, when – the conventional wisdom changes?  What happens when the techniques you learned at such a training become obsolete or outdated?  And what if, even from the start, they don’t precisely apply to your situation?  What then?  A strength of graduate programs is their ability not only to teach you content, but also methodology. Someone who benefits from a graduate program will not only know the “conventional wisdom,” but also who is responsible for it, how they arrived at it, what its limitations are, and under what conditions it might change.  What’s more, there’s a fairly good chance that, with the depth of their understanding, they might be involved in changing it themselves. In this sense a graduate education, though costly, can be a better investment, because it enables individuals to create and adapt to new paradigms, rather than having to be re-trained each time a new idea hits the market.
• Distance.  When you are forced to take a break from your daily activities, and look back at them from a distance, you will generally be more capable of evaluating them objectively and identifying strengths and weaknesses in your approach.  Graduate school generally forces you to do this.  By the very act of leaving your work and becoming a full-time student, you are stepping outside of your “normal” routines.  Short-term seminars do not include this component – in fact, they’re often specifically designed to cause minimal disturbance to your routine.  I would suggest that the less a learning process causes you to separate yourself, both emotionally and physically, from what you’ve become used to, the less chance it has of producing any genuine change in the way you evaluate and react to the world.

All of this is not to say that there isn’t a place for short-term trainings.  To the contrary, it seems that for certain goals, short-term trainings are a much better answer than long, expensive graduate programs.  But I would suggest that short-term trainings, along with other, compressed training programs, do not provide the depth of learning and understanding that, at times, companies and nations ought to invest in.

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

Two days ago, we started a thought experiment in which we oversee a medium-sized computer company.

[L]et’s assume that our yearly budget has $5,000,000 set aside for employee training.  Each June we sit down and determine the employee training programs we will offer for the next fiscal year.  Each year we invite two consultants – Tim the Technology Consultant and Mark the Management Consultant – to give us presentations about the proper distribution of these training funds between technical workers and managers.  Tim always recommends spending 100% of training funds on technical workers; Mark always advocates 100% spending on managers.

What kind of arguments do you suppose Tim and Mark will make to bolster their case?

Today, Mark the Management Consultant speaks to us about the need for management training.  What are his main arguments?

• Quality is not all-important. Although it’s obviously true that a high-quality product is desirable, that’s not the only thing that matters.  We operate in a complicated world with a variety of competitors.  We need to identify opportunities and risks and take appropriate steps to maximize our ability to compete.  We need to advertise aggressively based on the products that we have, and design new products based on changing conditions.
• Adaptability. If we could confidently predict that we would be making the exact same widgets one hundred years from now as we are today, technical training would undoubtedly be the way to go.  But who’s to say that we won’t need to completely overhaul our products a few years from now, in which case all the money we spent on specialized training would prove to have been wasted?  It’s better to maintain adaptability, even at the expense of high-quality technical training.
• The necessity of institutions. It won’t matter how good our widgets are if the institutions designed to market and sell them aren’t well-developed.  You need highly-trained managers to maintain the quality of those institutions.
• Success isn’t always measurable. It’s true that management training programs are difficult to manage.  There’s no hard-and-fast indicator that will show you how “well” something is being managed, because of the complexity of the task.  For example, we could be managing our advertising very well but still not produce results (in terms of widgets sold) because another company has produced a better or less costly widget.  But just because the results of a process aren’t suited to measurement does not mean that such a process is not valuable.

These are strong reasons to prefer management training.

Now that we’ve heard from Tim and Mark, what decision will we make?  How much of our $5,000,000 will we devote to technical training, and how much to management training?

Other posts in this series:

• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Part Six
• Part Seven
• Part Eight

Yesterday, we started a thought experiment in which we oversee a medium-sized computer company.

[L]et’s assume that our yearly budget has $5,000,000 set aside for employee training.  Each June we sit down and determine the employee training programs we will offer for the next fiscal year.  Each year we invite two consultants – Tim the Technology Consultant and Mark the Management Consultant – to give us presentations about the proper distribution of these training funds between technical workers and managers.  Tim always recommends spending 100% of training funds on technical workers; Mark always advocates 100% spending on managers.

What kind of arguments do you suppose Tim and Mark will make to bolster their case?

Today, Tim the Technology Consultant speaks to us about the need for technical training.  What are his main arguments?

• Quality of your product. Widgets are what you sell.  They are the source of all of your revenue.  Therefore, the workers who are most instrumental to your success are the widget-makers.  If they are well-trained and do a good job, you have a good product that is easy to sell.  If they are poorly-trained and do a poor job, you have a poor product that is harder to sell.
• Increased efficiency. The more training you provide to your workers, the more likely they are to avoid harmful, inefficient practices and to pursue beneficial, efficient practices.  This will reduce your costs and enable you to compete more effectively with other widget-makers.
• Measurability. You can measure the success of your training dollars.  Widget-making is easy enough to track.  Say it takes your employees 5 minutes to produce a widget.  After training, you can expect that time to go down; or, if it doesn’t, you can change training methodologies.  This allows for more effective training programs.

These are strong reasons to prefer technical training programs.  But do they necessarily eliminate the need for management training?  We’ll see tomorrow.

Other posts in this series:

• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Part Six
• Part Seven
• Part Eight

We ended yesterday’s post with the following promise:  “Over the next few days we’ll investigate this crucial issue of how higher education provides value, and whether such value can, in fact, be measured.”

In order to do this, let’s conduct a thought experiment.  Let’s pretend that we own a medium-sized computer company.  We manufacture wonderful devices (which we will refer to as “widgets”) that make any computer faster, better, smarter, etc.  The majority of our workforce (95%) are involved in the manufacturing, packaging, and shipping of those widgets.  They work in factories producing the various materials for the widgets, and then pack and ship those widgets to buyers.  These tasks are not particularly easy, but they are technical in nature – that is to say, based upon a defined set of skills or ideas, mastery of which allows one to perform the particular task.

The other 5% of our workforce are involved in the administration and management of our company.  They handle human resources, finance, marketing, research and development, etc.  The skills employed by these workers are management skills.  Notably, they are not based upon a defined set of skills or ideas.  One skill set is required in certain situations, another skill set in different situations – and the situations (and therefore the skill sets) are constantly changing.

(QUICK NOTE:  I realize that this thought-experiment is over-simplified and indeed quite unrealistic; the point is not to be realistic but to investigate the relationship between technical and management skills in as “pure” a context as can be imagined).

Now, let’s assume that our yearly budget has $5,000,000 set aside for employee training.  Each June we sit down and determine the employee training programs we will offer for the next fiscal year.  Each year we invite two consultants – Tim the Technology Consultant and Mark the Management Consultant – to give us presentations about the proper distribution of these training funds between technical workers and managers.  Tim always recommends spending 100% of training funds on technical workers; Mark always advocates 100% spending on managers.

What kind of arguments do you suppose Tim and Mark will make to bolster their case?

Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow we will hear from both of them.  Before we do, however, let’s ask ourselves this question:  how would we divide the training money at first glance – that is, before any detailed analysis?  Do we think that the technical side is important enough to demand 100% of our training funds?  Or do we prefer to fund management training?  Or do we feel that both are deserving of funding, in some mix (and what is that mix)?

Jot down your own, personal opinions.  We’ll return to the subject tomorrow.

Other posts in this series:

• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Part Six
• Part Seven
• Part Eight

Readers of the first three posts of this series may be getting impatient.  Yes, you may say, Graduate school is a beneficial thing.  Tell us something we don’t know.

The real question isn’t whether providing a graduate school education to its employees or citizens can help a business or a nation.  We all agree, I think, that it can.  The real question is whether providing such an education can help as much as doing other things, like spending money on more basic educational and training programs that are a lot, lot cheaper.

This is the main challenge to the idea that nations and / or companies should spend a significant amount of resources to send citizens and / or employees to graduate programs.  As such, I’ll spend today’s post fleshing it out.

I found the following information in a Working Paper by Megan Crowley and Devesh Kapur of the Center for Global Development:

Tertiary education has received short shrift in the international development community stemming from the belief that it yields lower social returns relative to other investments, especially primary and secondary education and therefore should receive fewer public resources. Investments in tertiary education are often considered regressive, reproducing existing social and economic inequalities.

Crowley and Kapur go on to cite World Bank studies from the past few decades that, among other things, include the following information:

• rates of return for higher education in developing countries were on average 13 percent lower than the returns from basic education
• a review of 98 countries from 1960-1997 found that the typical estimate of the rate of return from primary schooling was 18.9 percent, while for tertiary education the return was just 10.8 percent

In addition, primary education usually provides benefits to citizens across the socio-economic spectrum, whereas higher education programs “seem to be yet another case of misplaced priorities . . . [S]carce public expenditures devoted to it have been decried as yet another case of regressive income transfers benefiting developing country elites.”

In other words, there’s a strong case to be made that higher education, while certainly “nice,” does not produce as many benefits for society as primary or secondary systems of education.

Is there another way of interpreting the data cited above?  Yes, there is, and Crowley and Kapur eventually go on to conclude that higher education does have an important role to play:

While the returns to investment in basic education are visible and nearly immediate, the returns to higher education are far more elusive and difficult to measure.   Re-evaluations of the data suggest that standard estimates of social returns to tertiary education do not accurately reflect the positive public externalities . . .

In other words, higher education is just as important as primary or secondary education, but its positive impacts are harder to define and measure.

To recap briefly:

1. You can make a strong case based on economic data that investments in higher education are not as valuable as investments in primary or secondary education
2. There is a possibility, however, that such data does not accurately capture the true value of higher education

Over the next few days we’ll investigate this crucial issue of how higher education provides value, and whether such value can, in fact, be measured.

Other posts in this series:

• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Part Six
• Part Seven
• Part Eight