Poor English – One Reasons for lack-lustre performance in Academic Research in Non-English Europe

In an article in VOX, Luc Bauwens,Giordano Mion, Jacques-Francois Thisse show that apart from low research budget and poor governance of academic institutions, lack of  proficiency in English is also important factor for the poor performance of European academic research. http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/834. They explain this citing example of the better performance in the European countries where English proficiency is high like Sweden, Netherland and Denmark compared to countries where it is low like Germany, France and Italy. It even goes on to point out that the former English countries like Australia,Canada,New Zealand, Singapore,Israel Ireland etc. performed much higher when measured in terms of Highly Cited Research (HCR) counts per million. Of course this study is based more on the Thomson Database only. But seems the researchers are quite right in their assumptions.

As usual there is no mention about Indian  or Chinese research capabilities. But a look at the site based on which the data is derived shows India has only 9 HCRs while Chinese have around 19 HCRs of which most of them are from Hong Kong (another former English Colony).

For the Education Departments in European countries this should be another wakeup call to be proactive. They are already under pressure to increase the emphasis on English because of the dilution of the other languages after the expansion of EU.

Overwork-Japanese Culture of Hardwork

Registered users of  The Economist can read this article about overworking in Japan http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10329261.  This highlights the issues of KAROSHI (the Japanese have a way of glorifying everything with terms) where somebody dies out of overwork. The article picks up an example of a third generation employee of Toyota who worked 80 hrs more unpaid overtime for the last six months apart from the normal working hours. Japanese are slightly less than Americans on their working hours. (1780 hrs compared to 1800 hrs per year). In Germany this is 1440 hrs.   Family members affected by Karoshi are payed compensations by the company.  In fact the widow of this person mentioned commented that Toyota´s dominance is more due to such flexible manpower rather than often quoted efficiency of working. Given the cultural loyalty and the hardworking habits of Japanese I tend to agree with her. The issue of of Karoshi is so pressing that there is even a website for it http://karoshi.jp/english/index.html.

Comparing this with the living conditions in Europe where total working hours are so low and then people are forced to take vacations just to get rid of the accumulated extra hours and days of holidays. Many of them argue that the efficiency of work is not good enough when higher hours are spent. Comparing it with countries like India and China it might be so. But Japan and South Korea have been consistently doing better than the Europeans in all aspects like education, health care etc. This shows that Europe cannot just keep watching. Either they have to work hard or increase efficiency to stay alive with their current conditions. But when I see that we will have public transport strikes in the next few weeks., it appears that the urgency for such changes is not yet being felt by the Europeans

MBA, Management Studies Ranking – FT

Financial Times has published its annual ranking of management institutions and degrees http://www.ft.com/businesseducation/mba . USA dominates in all section lesser though for customised executive education (for most US executives easily take sabbatical to take the course they want full time). Other than UK ,European Management courses  fall pretty short of expectations. UK of course follows the anglo-saxon corporate management which gives a lot more importance to management and so valuation of these courses are higher. But this shows that the European corporate closed style is not going to change drastically in the near future. The politicians demand for salary caps is going to make things worse and   I guess they will be succcessful in implementing the caps in Germany. So I don´t expect any big change in the ranking in few years to come.

But the usual story Indian IIMs find no place even where South African and Nigeran business schools can find one. 

PISA study – German Reaction

Inspite of the good news, most magazines and newspaper have prefered to take a cautious approach to the results of the PISA 2006 survey. I could find only one English article by Deutschewelle http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2988185,00.html. The message pretty much the same in all reports. The main focus is that the improvement in the ranking may be a result of the restructuring of the testing system. Also the poor performance of immigrants  has also got the eye o of storm. If natives alone were considered Germany would be far ahead. Actually immigrant population is very less in the top performing countries like Finland , Japan etc. Another point of discussion is also that educational background of parents affect the student performance. As I mentioned in a previous blog, this will be the case where the working hours are less and student teacher interaction time is less. The parents take over part of the responsibility and thus influence the performance of the student.

Influence of Parent is greater than teacher on performance ?- PISA Study

The latest PISA 2006 has now been made public. The exhaustive amount data which is available by this study and from the Education at a Glance Study 2007 together should be help making correlations between data sets. One of the relationship which struck me was that the students from the top nation spent a lot less hours with the teachers. For example countries like Finland , Japan, Korea rank higher in the survey. But the teaching total hours were lesser than the OECD average, while longer hours does not seem to help students go up in the scale. This is particularly true for US where teachers spend the higher number of hours teaching (though they get paid lesser than atleast Germany,Swiss,Luxemberg,Denmark (on PPP basis). Looking outside these 2 survey, generally it is accepted the working hours are longer among countries like US, Uk in comparison to Finland, Germany, Sweden. This could mean that the parents and children have more time with each other.  Also what can be seen is that the influence of parents education on the performance of students is higher in these countries. So maybe that even though productivity takes  hit with lower work hours, it probably contributes to better education standards.

This is just a surmise based on a glance at the data available. Probably a detail look into the data would give a better view on this issue.  

   

Education at School Level – Good News for Germany

Compared with the other European countries, the result of the PISA studies conducted by OECD to the mathematical and language skills of children was taken seriously by Germany. There were many newspaper reports on this issues. People were talking about  it very often. Politicians were quoting it. Probably they never even imagined that their school method could be  as inadequate as reflected by these reports. The government also was trying to take some action. But even before that, the teachers on their own, have been trying with an extra effort to remedy the situation. Now the latest news is that the IGLU study has concluded and the findings have been published in all German newspapers. I could find any shorter version or a summary . But he detailed report is here http://pirls.bc.edu/isc/publications.html (download the International Report). There are a lot of information (438 pages) with complete details of the research. For Germany , they have improved their ranking from 2003 PISA study (18th place) to 11th place.  The rumour also has it that the Germany has improved also in the upcoming PISA report scheduled for Dec 4th 2007.