May 9, 2011

The terms "outsourcing" and "workforce development" rarely appear as allies in the same sentence. At least not in Rust Belt states like Indiana, where the loss of manufacturing jobs has driven an increase in demand for postsecondary degrees that point to jobs that will not soon be exported overseas.

But Indiana's leaders have embraced an outsourcing solution to the state's outsourcing problem. As Indiana faced down a challenge shared by many other states in the aftermath of 2008's financial bloodbath -- trying to increase capacity, especially for adult learners, at public universities while simultaneously gutting their budgets -- Gov. Mitch Daniels decided that, instead of paying to expand online programs at its existing state institutions, Indiana would contract with a private university outside its borders.

Enter Western Governors University, a private, nonprofit, regionally accredited institution headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. Founded in 1997 with seed money from the governors of 18 western states, Western Governors had been, until recently, a sleeping giant. But last June, Daniels signed an executive order bringing Western Governors into the fold as Indiana's "eighth state university." Under the deal, Western Governors would create WGU Indiana: a locally branded -- yet still remote, other than a new satellite office in Indianapolis -- version of the university, to which Hoosiers could take their state financial aid dollars just as they would to Indiana's other institutions. In late April, Washington State's legislature passed a law creating WGU Washington. Other states are rumored to be in talks to create similar partnerships, including California, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana.

These arrangements are unusual beyond the oddity of anointing a Utah-based institution as a state university of Indiana and Washington. (Online education is common at public universities, and Indiana and Washington are no exceptions.) Rather, the main point of departure has to do with Western Governors's pedagogical model, which focuses not only on teaching new skills but also on awarding credits for existing ones. No classes, no lectures, no fixed academic calendar. For what students can prove they already know, they get credit. For what they can't, they are given learning materials and some light guidance. Students are charged tuition every six months and take exams whenever they feel they are ready.

The model, called "competency-based learning," has a number of champions in the policy world. The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning has advocated for "prior learning assessment" as a way of making sure students -- especially low-income ones -- do not pay any more to complete a degree than they have to. The Center for American Progress has praised Western Governors specifically as a beacon of innovation in an industry entrenched in the tyranny of the credit hour. The Stanford Research Institute recently rose to the defense of a competency-based associate degree program in nursing at Excelsior College, noting in an extensive study that its graduates are on par with those of more traditional programs.

But resistance to the model among educators in Washington and Indiana suggests that the Western Governors approach is not universally accepted. And with Western Governors looking to expand its state-by-state strategy, the concerns that have been raised in those states -- that Western Governors will not be held to the same standards of transparency and excellence as other public universities, that it will be taking student financial aid dollars that normally flow to truly in-state institutions, that it could create the illusion of addressing the capacity issue without really making much of a dent -- might foreshadow debates that could soon play out in legislatures across the country.

Competencies, not Courses

It is fair to say that the state-branded versions of Western Governors do not fit the mold of the traditional public university.

For one thing, students do not have professors. The university awards credit based on how well students can demonstrate "competencies" -- skills that students know already, from previous education or work experience, or should be able to learn without any real hand-holding. Its students, whose average age is 36, work through course material on their own, with occasional guidance from "mentors" (75 percent of whom hold graduate degrees) who advise them online or by phone every week or two.

The university's academic heavyweights are relegated to figuring out what students need to prove they have learned by the end of each unit, and designing exams accordingly. The total size of the full-time faculty is 700, according to WGU.

"We do not develop any of our own courses," says Bob Mendenhall, the president of Western Governors. "We develop the competencies required for a degree and the assessments to measure those competencies. Then our faculty go and find the best courses available to ... teach that content." Western Governors licenses course modules from commercial providers such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill and borrows from open courseware sites, Mendenhall says.

Western Governors offers bachelor's and master's degrees (no associate degrees) in four general areas: business, education, health care, and information technology. Students do not need to wait until the end of a semester to take an exam; they can pay to take one at the nearest bricks-and-mortar testing center anytime they think they are ready. Beyond course materials, testing fees, and various other program-specific fees (some of which are $1,000 or more), the amount of tuition students pay depends on how much time it takes them to prepare for and complete all their exams. Tuition is a ticking clock: every six months, students are charged between $2,890 and $4,250, depending on the program.

In other words, students who know the most coming in, or are able to learn the quickest, will probably end up paying the least. Students who take longer -- because they are slow learners, or do not learn well on their own, or have especially demanding jobs or home lives, or are lazy, or some combination -- will probably end up paying the most. Five percent default on their student loans within two years.

Those who graduate take an average of 30 months, or five pay periods, to do so. Given the large number of nontraditional students at Western Governors -- the average age is 36, and two-thirds work full-time -- the university calculates its own graduation rate that, unlike the federal rate, includes part-time and non-first-time students. About 40 percent of Western Governors' students graduate within four years.

In its 2010 annual report, Western Governors emphasized students' high satisfaction with its curriculum: 72 percent of students stick with the program after a year; 96 percent say they are satisfied with their experience; 97 percent say they would recommend Western Governors to a friend. The university scores higher than average on the National Study of Student Engagement. In a recent survey (conducted by the university) of 120 employers, nearly 80 percent judged their employees who graduated from Western Governors to be equal to or better than their employees from other universities.

The media, too, has tended to focus on narratives that show how the university has enabled some students to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In 2009, as part of a series called "What Works," "NBC Nightly News" aired a segment on Western Governors highlighting several success stories: an elementary school teacher in Miami who was able to get a graduate degree while tending to her two young children at home; a veteran computer specialist in Sacramento who had been "in and out of community college" for 20 years before finally finding, in Western Governors, a degree program that would allow him to get a degree necessary for a promotion "with very little studying."

But some of the 40 percent of students who end up graduating from the university can't relate.

Tima Huseman is among them. Huseman, 25, teaches second grade at a school outside Houston. Shortly after earning an undergraduate degree in early childhood education from Texas Tech University, Huseman enrolled in a master's program at Western Governors with a focus on K-8 math education. She graduated promptly and is well on her way to paying back the $12,000 she took on in debt.

There's only one problem, Huseman says: "I didn't learn anything to further my teaching."

The first three months were great, says Huseman. "You watch videos, you have to do worksheets, you plan lessons," she says -- exercises she felt were actually helping her become a better teacher. But the subsequent 14 months were devoted to a research paper that Huseman felt was too narrow and theory-based to have any practical application. She had expected more in the way of teaching strategies. The process of collecting data and drafting her paper made her a better writer and researcher, she says, but not a better teacher.

"I felt like I wasn't learning anything, but I stayed because I didn't want to waste the money I had spent already," Huseman says, adding that her mentor had to talk her out of quitting on three separate occasions.

While she liked her mentor, whom she spoke to every few weeks by phone, Huseman found the "hands-off" model off-putting, and even a bit disturbing. "No one comes to check on you. I know they can't have people everywhere, but I don't know -- I could literally have made up everything."

Huseman is just one story, no more or less valid than the more uplifting ones from the NBC segment. But the contrast of her narrative with the others brings into sharper relief a caveat that is duly acknowledged by advocates, but rarely illustrated: Western Governors is not for everyone.

Model of the Moment?

The nationwide push for college completion has two main parts. The first is getting high school students into, and through, postsecondary degree programs. The second is getting college degrees in the hands of adults who never earned one to begin with. That second group stands to become more important to completion goals as the proportion of high school graduates shrinks.

Research has shown that the most promising degree candidates in the second group are those with some college already under their belt. And these are Western Governors' specialty.

States have begun aggressively pursuing these errant learners. Texas, for example, has compiled a database of dropouts who have at least 100 hours' worth of college credit and instructed their alma maters to try to coax them back, says Ray Paredes, the state's commissioner of higher education.

Meanwhile, Texas -- whose governor recently challenged state institutions to come up with a four-year degree that would cost students less than $10,000 -- has been in talks with Western Governors about a potential WGU Texas, according to Paredes. (Some back-of-the-napkin arithmetic puts the cheapest Western Governors degree at a shade under $15,000 if completed in the average amount of time.)

"The whole issue of competency-based instruction ... is all part of the national movement, that's gaining a lot of steam, to look at ways to deliver high-quality education at a reasonable price," says Paredes. "Because the model we currently have is unsustainable."

The model appears to be gaining momentum in some policy circles, even as the Obama administration, in its efforts to reduce fraud and abuse in federal financial aid programs, has taken steps to enshrine the traditional credit hour in federal law.

The Center for American Progress, meanwhile, has published several harsh critiques of the credit-hour as a standard for measuring progress toward a degree. "Policy efforts ... that intentionally or unintentionally lock in the credit hour as the unit of measure based on seat time, for example, hold back the innovation in some significant ways to the detriment of students," wrote the authors of one report published earlier this year.

"Policymakers must first address higher-education budget constraints by helping low-cost disruptive universities -- public and private -- gain market share by eliminating barriers and partnering with them to grow enrollments and capability," says the report.

It goes on to laud Western Governors for marrying competency-based learning, which allows students to skip the stuff they already know, and online learning, which allows students to move at their own pace rather than the pace of their classmates and professors. The two innovations are, they say, a natural fit.

Meanwhile, the Center for Adult and Experiential Learning published a huge study last year that suggested students who were allowed to earn credit via "prior learning assessment" were far likelier to complete a degree. This was particularly true of Hispanic and black students. "Awarding college credit for significant life learning could be an effective way to accelerate degree completion, while lowering the cost, for underserved populations," the center wrote in a follow-up research brief last month.

Even before the eggheads started weighing in, Western Governors -- whose early years, in the late 1990s, were plagued by accreditation woes and underwhelming growth -- had quietly begun to boom. Its enrollment, which stood at 500 students in 2003, has soared to 23,000. Between 2006 and last year, its yearly revenue shot from $32 million to $111 million.

Perfect pitch

The university's recent shift to state-by-state colonization could mean even quicker growth. In the year since Daniels, the Indiana governor, announced the partnership with Western Governors, the number of Indiana residents enrolled at the online university has leaped from 300 to 1,200 -- more than 20 times the growth rate of the entire student body.

"The strategy is not only to be a state resource, but also to spread the model," Mendenhall, the Western Governors president, told Inside Higher Ed in February. "So a state might choose to say, 'OK, we're going to create our own technology-based, competency-based university using the WGU model.' I don't know that states have the resources to do that right now. A faster, cheaper way for them to get to the same end would be essentially to private-label WGU and let us run it for them."

Mendenhall knows that state governors are under pressure to increase college access and completion while slashing college budgets, and has tailored his sales pitch accordingly. He gave Inside Higher Ed a brief demo:

"Look, two-thirds of your jobs are going to require a college degree by 2013 [according to an oft-cited Georgetown University study], and 40 percent of your adults have a degree," says Mendenhall, speaking as he would to state officials. "...You're not going to get to 66 percent of your workforce having a postsecondary degree just by educating more people coming out of high school. You've got to go back and recover a lot of those adults. We fill a hole in your system that allows you to reach working adults and educate them for the jobs of the future -- and we'll do it at no cost to the state."

So far in Indiana, the move has been a strategic boon for both the governor and Western Governors. Daniels got kudos for showing a forward-thinking approach to meeting Indiana's college completion goals without spending a dime on infrastructure: "All in all, Western Governors University appears to be a good fit for a Midwestern state with lots of busy, cash-strapped aspirants to higher education," wrote The Indianapolis Star in an editorial. (The Washington deal also garnered praise from the area's most influential newspaper: "Bringing this vision to Washington state will be a plus for our economy and citizens," read The Seattle Times.)

Western Governors, meanwhile, got a lot of free publicity, including a television ad featuring Daniels himself. The deal also opened the door to conversations with other state governments. Mendenhall said in February that Western Governors officials have been in talks with about a half-dozen other states, including several in the east. "Over the next five years we'll aim to do 10, 12 states and then see where that takes us," he says.

'Not a College Education'

But while the arrangements have worked out well for state politicians and Western Governors administrators, some educators in Indiana and Washington say such partnerships are unnecessary and inappropriate.

In an op-ed published in The Seattle Times shortly before the WGU Washington bill became law, Johann Neem, an associate professor of history at Western Washington University, wrote that the competency model "threatens what makes our system successful."

"A college education is about going through a process that leaves students transformed," Neem wrote. "That's why it takes time. Learning is hard -- brain research demonstrates that real learning requires students to struggle with difficult material under the consistent guidance of good teachers. WGU denies students these opportunities. In fact, its advertisements pander to prospective students by offering them credit for what they already know rather than promising to teach them something new.... Whatever WGU is, it is not a college education."

Neem was not alone. Because Washington created its locally branded version of WGU by legislative means, rather than by gubernatorial fiat, it invited a counter-lobbying effort in the run-up to the partnership. Professors at state institutions came out of the woodwork to object, says State Sen. Jim Kastama, who championed the bill.

"Behind the scenes, it was a difficult bill to get through," says Kastama. Some people tried in vain to block Western Governors from ever being eligible to collect in-state aid from Washington students, he says, but the law creating WGU Washington permits it to cash tuition checks paid with those in-state grants and scholarships, pending a review by the Higher Education Coordinating Board. Kastama says he does not expect that to be an obstacle.

Some academic leaders in Indiana, meanwhile, were miffed that the governor did not give them a chance to weigh in before partnering with Western Governors.

"What disappointed me beyond understanding was that the state would put resources into another program at the same time as they are cutting resources to every other nursing program in the state," says Marion Broome, dean of the school of nursing at Indiana University.

Jerry Pattengale, an associate provost at Indiana Wesleyan University, an independent nonprofit institution with a significant online presence, wrote in an e-mail that while he is a big fan of Governor Daniels, "There's an uneasy tension between the new federal regulations on credit integrity and the competency-based WGU approach." (Pattengale allows that "if the WGU approach is indeed valid, and legitimately sidesteps the extreme federal accrediting logistics, then Mitch is brilliant and over 60 Indiana campuses need to make a radical shift and follow suit.")

Anointing Western Governors as the state's "eighth public university" also raises questions about to what extent WGU Indiana is beholden to the same standards of curricular scrutiny as the other seven, Pattengale says.

Many existing public institutions offer flexible, online degree programs for adult learners. And most institutions also still count credits those adults earned long ago. In many cases, returning students would not have to log redundant credit hours if they want to finish their degrees.

"It was cast as if people suddenly had an opportunity to get a degree in a convenient manner, which simply wasn't true," says Pattengale, whose own institution, Indiana Wesleyan, owes a great deal of its recent growth to such programs.

A Red Herring?

Advocates of the state partnership model have dismissed such criticisms as petty and territorial. Of course public and other nonprofit institutions would be put off by Western Governors swooping in and snatching up students and their state-sponsored aid, they say -- the existing institutions want those students and tuition dollars for themselves.

But other critics say competition has nothing to do with it. They say the addition of Western Governors to the state university system could do more to distract from the problems of capacity and access than to solve them.

The Washington State public higher ed system currently struggles to accommodate traditional-age students, says Marsha Riddle Buly, professor of elementary education at Western Washington University. Each year, Washington's public institutions turn away many qualified high school graduates, Buly says. What the state needs to do is increase capacity in programs aimed at those students, she says.

"Those kids are going to have trouble succeeding in a program that is designed for older, working adults, who already have education and work experience," says Buly. "... WGU is not going to help get an 18-year-old freshman or a 20-year-old community college student to really do well and get a degree."

The graduation rate for first-time, full-time students at Western Governors is 22 percent, according to the most recent Education Department data.

The addition of Western Governors to the roster of state-endorsed universities could be insidious, not because the online university is illegitimate, but because it pays lip service to the capacity and access issues without doing much to fix them, says Karen Stout, an associate professor of communication and the incoming faculty senate president at Western Washington.

"It really doesn't improve the access issues," Stout says. "It's an illusion of access. If we want to provide more access for students and really address the needs of high school graduates ... we need to expand access at the universities that they want to go to. And they're not seeking out WGU."

More likely, WGU Washington will attract community college students looking to upgrade to a baccalaureate program, who might have otherwise enrolled at a for-profit institution like University of Phoenix or Kaplan University, says Cable Green, the former director of e-learning for the Washington System of Community and Technical Colleges. For-profit institutions, which in recent years have fallen under intense scrutiny from federal watchdogs, tend to graduate students at similar rates and with more debt than Western Governors, which is nonprofit. And Mendenhall points out that while his university's 5 percent student loan default rate is higher than the rate at most public universities, it is substantially lower than at for-profit institutions.

Kastama, the state senator who led the effort to create WGU Washington, says he has no illusions that Western Governors will solve all his state's problems. "No, it's not the cat's meow," Kastama says. And true, the online, competency-based Western Governors University does represent "uncharted territory" in the constellation of state-backed higher education models.

But budget cutbacks are forcing state universities to raise tuition by more than 15 percent next year, with further hikes likely to come, Kastama says. In other words, new state investments in instructors, classrooms, and online infrastructure that some educators see as the key to addressing the capacity and access issues that would confound completion goals are not coming any time soon. In such times, Kastama says, what harm is there in publicizing alternatives?

For the latest technology news and opinion from Inside Higher Ed, follow @IHEtech on Twitter.
-- Steve Kolowich

FOR MORE VISIT WWW.INSIDEHIGHERED.COM

May 2, 2011

HONG KONG -- When the South University of Science and Technology of China started its first semester last month, it broke many of the rules of Chinese higher education. It recruited its own students and faculty members, shunning national systems for doing so. It announced that it was looking for people with imagination and innovation, not just basic knowledge. South is planning to offer more money to professors than is standard for Chinese universities, in part to attract foreign talent. The university created a structure without the layers of bureaucracy widely associated with Chinese higher education, and delegated considerable power to faculty members.

Officials at the new university have been widely quoted as saying that the institution they looked to as a model was nearby (physically, at least) -- the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

"It's very much modeled on us," said Tony Chan, the president of HKUST, as the institution is known here. While Chan could point to the university's success at building its academic programs, its rise in the rankings (much discussed here) or its close ties to influential businesses in Hong Kong and the rest of China, he said that a crucial reason his university is the model is simply speed. "They don't want to wait 50 years" to become prominent, he said.

HKUST -- the youngest of Hong Kong's eight universities -- is celebrating its 20th anniversary. And Chan says that the model here demonstrates the ability of universities in this part of the world to quickly become players in global higher education. One key, he said, is having no hesitation about embracing the American model of higher education.

Chan doesn't boast about HKUST being the best university in Hong Kong (the University of Hong Kong and Chinese University of Hong Kong could also make such claims, although HKUST advocates would say it is very much part of a "top three" here). But he doesn't hesitate for a minute to say that "we are the most American."

He should know. A Hong Kong native, he made his academic career in the United States, rising through the ranks to become dean of physical sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles and assistant director of the National Science Foundation before coming to HKUST as president in 2009. One-fourth of the faculty is American and just about everyone here has a Ph.D. from an American university.

"All of my vice presidents have Ph.D.s from the United States," Chan said, before quickly correcting himself that there is one McGill University doctorate in the group, so the statement should be that they all have North American doctorates. Faculty members are hired and promoted through a tenure system. "Of course we have tenure," Chan said, when asked about it.

All courses here are in English - except those on Chinese history and culture. English is a natural in Hong Kong higher education due to the long British rule - and the university was one of the final new institutions created with the active encouragement of British authorities here.

The Move to 4

But in the next year, HKUST (and the rest of higher education in Hong Kong) will make a change that will firmly shift the educational model from one that looked to Britain to one that looks to the United States. The bachelor's degree is shifting from the three-year European model -- in which students focus almost exclusively on their major field of study -- to the four-year American model.

While many observers in the United States are calling for American higher education to become more vocational in orientation, the changes here are motivated by a sense that students need more general education if they are truly to become leaders in Hong Kong and China. Chan recounted a speech he regularly gives to students here: "If you are an accounting major, you should not be an accountant at KPMG, you should be the managing director of KPMG. You must be aware of history, of language, of all the other skills. It's not the mechanical aspects of accounting."

A change already in place at HKUST -- normal policy by American standards but "radical," Chan said, for universities in Hong Kong or China -- is to allow student to designate a general field of admission rather than a specific one. So, for example, one can be admitted to the engineering college generally, and not immediately to chemical or mechanical engineering, and so forth.

But the real revolution in higher ed is coming next year. Even with the commitment to general education at HKUST, the three-year design means that most students take 12 to 18 credits of general education, depending on their programs, said Kar Yan Tam, dean of students. But all of the 36 credits being added as the universities shift to four-year degrees will be for general education, not more specialization.

"Of course some professors want more specialization, more advanced chemistry," said Tam, but there is a wide consensus on the value of general education.

Chan describes a series of new courses being developed. Within broad fields, there will be survey courses exploring the ideas of science, so that students will first go for breadth before burrowing into their majors. And they will be required to add more course work in the humanities and social sciences.

The new courses place a premium on topics that link disciplines and disciplinary categories, and that will challenge students to think creatively -- "Ecology, Culture and Literature," "Theories of Buddha-Nature," "The Sustainable Citizen," "Garbage as Art in Hong Kong." Further, HKUST is revamping numerous more-traditional humanities courses on history and culture (with a strong China emphasis). The course titles wouldn't be stunning in an American college catalog, but as Chan and others noted, many students have typically expected to move from one course to another in their majors alone, never venturing into topics that don't relate directly to those majors.

The hope is to change how students think about learning -- a goal of professors even under the existing curriculum.

King Lun Yeung, a professor of chemical engineering here, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame, and the dome photo prominent in his office (as well as mournful comments about the state of the football program) suggests his continuing ties. He said that the new curriculum combines with American-style teaching methods to challenge undergraduates.

He said that his students are just as bright as American students and generally work harder (the university takes seriously the idea of 2-3 hours of homework or reading per week for each credit of a course, and most students take 15-18 credits a semester). But where he has to push is on creativity.

In his courses with undergraduates, he will pose a broad question, "and then I shut up and say they have to work through the issues," he said. Fresh from a sabbatical at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yeung said that with graduate students, the area HKUST is teaching is how to gain confidence with pushing new ideas.

When graduate students start their programs, and he poses a challenge to them, they are likely to search for whatever has been written about the issue, rather than framing a hypothesis. "There is a sense that, 'If I come up with a good idea, someone must have already come up with the same idea, so I'll look for it,' " Yeung said. The approach at HKUST is to encourage students to gain the confidence to put forward their own ideas, while also learning the material.

The university also plans to push study abroad. Currently, one-third of HKUST students spend at least a semester abroad -- a figure that is large by the standards of science-oriented universities. Chan said that the number will be up to 50 percent once the new curriculum is in place.

HKUST also wants more foreign students. Hong Kong's government permits public universities to allocate up to 20 percent of undergraduate slots to "non-local" students (who pay more than twice as much as Hong Kong residents, for whom tuition is 42,000 Hong Kong dollars, or about $5,400). Currently, HKUST's undergraduate enrollment is about 16 percent non-local, with students coming from all over Asia, and a notable number from Scandinavia. Chan said that as soon as more dormitories are finished, he plans to start admitting more students from outside Hong Kong.

Demand for this style of education is strong. Last year, about 5,000 students from the rest of China applied for 150 slots for them.

Growth Environment

As HKUST ponders growth, it has some key advantages -- compared to institutions in the United States, and to others in Hong Kong, as well.

The central parts of Hong Kong Island -- home to the University of Hong Kong and other institutions -- are packed in ways that make Manhattan look wide open. HKUST, in contrast, sits on 150 acres on a hilly peninsula in East Kowloon -- about a half-hour from the center of Hong Kong, but with room to grow.

From his office with views overlooking Clear Water Bay, Chan points to the new student facilities and another new initiative on the research side -- an Institute of Advanced Study, modeled on the one in Princeton, N.J. HKUST recently recruited Henry Tye away from an endowed chair in physics at Cornell University to lead the institute. Among the scholars who have agreed to serve on the new institute's advisory board are 13 Nobel laureates from around the world.

But beyond space, the university gets support from the Hong Kong government. About three-quarters of the cost of new buildings comes from the government, and the university's 20 years have seen an entire campus sprout up as a result - white tile buildings, with splashes of color, geometrical figures as windows in key locations, and a large red sundial (a Chinese invention) at the center.

The shift to four-year bachelor's programs means that the undergraduate student body will soon grow by a third, and Chan said that the government has committed to providing funds to hire a proportionate number of new faculty members. (The budget won't go up by one-third, he said, because government officials have pointed out that there are some economies of scale, such as "needing only one president," Chan quipped.)

The government and private investors are also backing expansion of two campuses for HKUST in China proper. One, in Nansha, is an R&D campus, paid for by a $300 million donation from a Hong Kong executive. The other, in Shenzhen, includes research space, incubators for businesses, and space for the M.B.A. program.

For now, Chan said, he doesn't anticipate starting undergraduate programs in China. But he wants to see ties expand. The area across the Pearl River -- very close to Hong Kong -- has a booming population, and many educators there want to work with the university.

So is there a global shift in higher education to China (from the United States), even as universities like Chan's embrace American-style education? "I sense a shift," he said. But he quickly added: "Are we going to overtake the U.S.? Not in a long time," even with the massive cuts faced by many American universities.

Great higher education, Chan said, needs "money and talent." Even with the cuts in the United States (and Chan remains on UCLA listservs such that he knows just how bad it is there budgetwise, and talks with pain about the cuts that are going on), the strengths remain.

But a minute later, he is pulling out the various magazine rankings of the most influential scientists in various fields, and noting the Chinese researchers (some in China, some in Hong Kong, some in the U.S.) who top the lists. So if China and Hong Kong have talent and money, why isn't he predicting that they will soon dominate higher education?

Money and talent "are necessary but not sufficient" to create outstanding universities, Chan said. That's why he's promoting general education on top of the current base in subject areas. "You need an ecosystem, a culture," he said. To Chan, that culture must be international -- and that's part of why he thinks Hong Kong's mesh of nationalities and close, but still separate, relationship with China make it an ideal spot. But it's also about "true excellence in teaching and scholarship."

That, he said, includes academic freedom. Can HKUST export that idea to China? "We are playing a small role," Chan said. Simply existing with academic freedom -- and advancing at a speed attractive to Chinese government and university leaders -- creates an awareness that could be significant over time, he said.

"We have delegations from every university, and they see," he said. While many of those delegations visit the top universities in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, he noted that they don't see institutions there that are both global and Chinese in nature, and they don't see great universities that didn't exist 20 years ago.

"We act as a model," Chan said. "It can be done."

-- Scott Jaschik. FOR MORE GO TO WWW.INSIDEHIGHERED.COM

RISING debt and lost output are the common measures of the cost of the financial crisis. But a new global opinion poll shows another, perhaps more serious form of damage: falling public support for capitalism. This is most marked in the country that used to epitomise free enterprise. In 2002, 80% of Americans agreed that the world's best bet was the free-market system. By 2010 that support had fallen to 59%, only a little above the 54% average for the 25 countries polled. Nominally Communist China is now one of the world's strongest supporters of capitalism, at 68%, up from 66% in 2002. Brazil scores 68% too. Germany squeaks into top place with 69%.



France, one of the world's strongest economies, continues as an anti-capitalist outlier. Only 6% of French "strongly" support the free market, down from an already puny 8% in 2002. Add those who "somewhat agree" with capitalism's superiority and the figure is 30%, down from 42% in 2002. Turkey (another free-market success story) had the same level of support then, but it has dropped even lower, to a mere 27%. In Europe only Spain seems to buck the trend, rising from 37% in 2002 to 51% . Indians, on paper big winners from free-market reforms, appear unimpressed: support has dropped to 58% from 73%.

Capitalism's waning fortunes are starkly visible among Americans earning below $20,000. Their support for the free market has dropped from 76% to 44% in just one year. The research was conducted by GlobeScan, a polling firm. Its chairman Doug Miller says American business is "close to losing its social contract" with average families.

FOR MORE GO TO WWW.ECONOMIST.COM

When Jacob Barnett first learned about the Schrödinger equation for quantum mechanics, he could hardly contain himself. For three straight days, his little brain buzzed with mathematical functions. From within his 12-year-old, mildly autistic mind, there gradually flowed long strings of pluses, minuses, funky letters and upside-down triangles -- a tapestry of complicated symbols that few can understand. He grabbed his pencil and filled every sheet of paper before grabbing a marker and filling up a dry erase board that hangs in his bedroom. With a single-minded obsession, he kept on, eventually marking up every window in the home.
Strange, say some.
Genius, say others.

But entirely normal for Jacob, a child prodigy who used to crunch his cereal while calculating the volume of the cereal box in his head. "Whenever I try talking about math with anyone in my family," he said, "they just stare blankly." So do many of his older classmates at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who marvel at seeing this scrawny little kid in the front row of the calculus-based physics class he has been taking this semester.

"When I first walked in and saw him, I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm going to school with Doogie Howser,' " said Wanda Anderson, a biochemistry major, referring to a television show that featured a 16-year-old boy-genius physician.

Elementary school couldn't keep Jacob interested. And courses at IUPUI have only served to awaken a sleeping giant. Just a few weeks shy of his 13th birthday, Jake, as he's often called, is starting to move beyond the level of what his professors can teach.In fact, his work is so strong and his ideas so original that he's being courted by a top-notch East Coast research center. IUPUI is interested in him moving from the classroom into a funded researcher's position.

"We have told him that after this semester . . . enough of the book work. You are here to do some science," said IUPUI physics Professor John Ross, who vows to help find some grant funding to support Jake and his work.

"If we can get all of those creative juices in a certain direction, we might be able to see some really amazing stuff down the road."
"My fear was that he would never be in our world"

Teenage college student?

Developer of his own original theory on quantum physics?

Paid researcher at 13?

This is not what Jake's parents expected from a child whose first few years were spent in silence.

"Oh my gosh, when he was 2, my fear was that he would never be in our world at all," said Kristine Barnett, 36, Jake's mother.

"He would not talk to anyone. He would not even look at us."

Child psychologists assessed Jake at the time and diagnosed behavioral characteristics of a borderline autistic child. He was impaired, they said, and had a lack of "spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment," difficulty showing emotion and interacting with others.

Diagnosis: mildly autistic.

"My biggest fear," his mom said last week, with tears welling up in her eyes, "was that he had lost the ability to say, 'I love you' to us."

By age 3, Jake was the focus of a more intense evaluation from a team of psychologists, therapists and a diagnostic teacher.
Their report indicated that while Jake continued to struggle with social activities and physical development, he was showing signs of academic skills that were above his age level.

Diagnosis: Asperger's syndrome, a somewhat milder condition related to autism.

After hearing this, Jake's parents decided to pay closer attention to the things their first-born son was doing -- rather than the things he was not. For example, Jake often recited the alphabet -- forward and then backward. He used Q-tips to create vivid geometrical shapes on the living room floor. He solved 5,000-piece puzzles (rather quickly). And he once soaked in a state road map and ended up memorizing every highway and license plate prefix. And perhaps most amazingly, he could recite the mathematical constant pi out to 70 digits.

"I'm at 98 now," Jake said, interrupting his mom during an interview.

And then, a week later, he was up to 200 digits after the decimal point -- forward and backward.
At 3, his head was in the stars

The Barnetts decided it was time to follow Jake's lead, adopting a method that some parents of children with autism use -- floor-time therapy -- to help foster developmental growth. They let their children focus intently on subjects they like, rather than trying to conform them to "normal" things. For Jake, that meant astronomy. As a 3-year-old, he loved looking at a book about stars, over and over again. So off they went on a tour of the Holcomb Observatory and Planetarium at Butler University. Kristine Barnett will never forget the day.

"We were in the crowd, just sitting, listening to this guy ask the crowd if anyone knew why the moons going around Mars were potato-shaped and not round," she recalls. "Jacob raised his hand and said, 'Excuse me, but what are the sizes of the moons around Mars?' " The lecturer answered, and "Jacob looked at him and said the gravity of the planet . . . is so large that (the moon's) gravity would not be able to pull it into a round shape."

Silence.

"That entire building . . . everyone was just looking at him, like, 'Who is this 3-year-old?' "

After that, the Barnetts began to feed Jake's hunger for knowledge, through more books and more visits to the planetarium. By the time he was 8, he got permission to sit in on an advanced astronomy class at IUPUI.Meanwhile, his math skills were reaching astronomical levels. By the time he was in fifth grade, Jake had become bored with elementary math. He was a student, first at Carey Ridge Elementary School and then at Westfield Intermediate School, an experience he now says he enjoyed for a while.

"The first couple of years were great, but then eventually the math started being, like, OK, we've been discussing this for a while, and it really isn't that hard," Jake said. "Can I move on to calculus now? Can I move on to algebra now?"

The boredom did not go unnoticed at home. Jake was coming home from school quiet, huddling in a safe space in the house and starting to show signs of withdrawing.

"I was really afraid we were going to lose him back into the world he was in when he was 2," his mom said.

Frank Lawlis, a Texas-based psychologist who serves as a testing supervisor for the American Mensa organization -- a society for geniuses -- said it would not have been unusual for a child with symptoms of autism to regress backward after a brief time of growth.

"One of the aspects of autism is that these kids' brains grow at an accelerated rate and then, generally speaking, there is kind of a reversal that happens," said Lawlis, who last year wrote "The Autism Answer," a book for parents of children with autism.

"The theory is that the brain reaches a certain capacity, can't grow, becomes inflamed, and then a reversal effect occurs. It's just a theory, but it's very common."

That did not happen to Jake, thanks in part to a third psychological evaluation done nearly two years ago. It showed that this fifth-grader was not regressing but was simply bored and needed to be stimulated -- in a very big way.

As in dropping out of school.

"Indeed, it would not be in Jacob's best interest to force him to complete academic work that he has already mastered," clinical neurophysiologist Carl S. Hale, Merrillville, said in a report provided by the Barnetts.

"He needs work at an instructional level, which currently is a post college graduate level in mathematics, i.e., a post master's degree. In essence, his math skills are at the level found in someone who is working on a doctorate in math, physics, astronomy and astrophysics."

The Barnetts were blown away. They knew Jake was smart, but doctorate-level smart?

"I flunked math," Kristine said with a laugh. "I know this did not come from me."
Off to college, where he tutors classmates

Encouraged by this new assessment, the Barnetts made the tough decision to pull Jake out of Westfield Washington Schools and enroll him in IUPUI's early college entrance program that caters to gifted and talented kids -- although typically they are advanced high school students, not 12-year-old whiz kids. As he prepared for the more rigorous work of a college class, Jake decided he ought to make sure he could master all high school-level math that would be required in college.

"In one two-week period, he sat on our front porch and learned all of his high school math," Kristine said. "He tested out of algebra 1 and 2, geometry, trigonometry and calculus." At this point, Jake's math IQ -- which has been measured at 170 (top of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) -- could not get any higher.

"You could tell right off the bat, his performance has been outstanding," said Ross, who, at age 46 with a Ph.D. from Boston University, has never seen a kid as smart as Jake.

"When he asks a question, he is always two steps ahead of the lecture," Ross said. "Everyone in the class gets quiet. Poor kid. . . . He sits right in the front row, and they all just look at him.

"He will come to see me during office hours and ask even more detailed questions. And you can tell he's been thinking these things through."

Jake is driven by Mom or Dad from his home in Hamilton County to IUPUI's campus, where he attends classes a few days each week. In between classes, he spends time at the Honors College lounge, where he has become a go-to guy for much older classmates needing tutoring.

"A lot of people come to him for help when they don't understand a physics problem," said Anderson, his class partner. "People come up to him all the time and say, 'Hey Jake, can you help me?' "

"A lot of people think a genius is hard to talk to, but Jake explains things that would still be over their head."

His professor has noticed.

"Is he a genius? Well, yeah," Ross said. "Kids his age would normally have problems adding fractions, and he is helping out some of his fellow students."

If Jake stays on track, Ross could see him working someday at a government lab or an observatory. Maybe he'll be a professor or a highly respected researcher.

"He can do anything he wants."
A normal boy, except for the numbers

Despite this new experience, his parents insist that Jake remain close with his friends in Westfield. Social activity is important, they know.For Jake, life is not all centered on math and astrophysics. He also likes playing video games. ("Guitar Hero" and "Halo: Reach" are his current favorites.) He plays basketball with friends, has a girlfriend and recently attended his first dance. He likes music -- classical, which he plays by memory on a piano, but he also plays some contemporary songs he hears on the radio. He loves sci-fi movies and the Disney Channel. He watches documentaries on the History Channel.

A normal kid.

But then, late at night, when the TV is off, the homework is done and everyone in the house is sleeping, the numbers start to percolate again.They percolate so much that he has trouble sleeping. His parents got so worried a few years ago that they took him for medical tests, but no malady was diagnosed. He just can't fall asleep easily.

"A lot keeps me awake," Jake said. "I scare people."

The numbers that keep him from snoozing are the same that led him to develop his own theory of physics -- an original work that proposed a "new expanded theory of relativity" and takes what Einstein developed even further.His mom, still not sure whether her son was truly a genius at work or a kid at play, decided to send a video of Jake explaining his theory to the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study near Princeton University, one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. That's where astrophysics Professor Scott Tremaine does his work. Tremaine is one of the world's leading scientists and is an expert in the evolution of planetary systems, comets, black holes, galaxies -- all the stuff Jake really likes.In a letter to the Barnetts, Tremaine confirmed the brilliance.

"I'm impressed by his interest in physics and the amount that he has learned so far," Tremaine wrote in an email, provided by the family. "The theory that he's working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics.

"Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize."

He then encouraged Jake to spend as much time as possible to learn more and to further develop his theory.Contacted by The Indianapolis Star, Tremaine confirmed the exchange of notes.

"I have seen a YouTube video in which Jake describes his theory, and I have spoken with his mother and corresponded with both her and Jake by email," Tremaine said. "I hope that Jake continues his interest in physics and mathematics."
Thinking big is what he does. Meanwhile, Jake is moving on to his next challenge: proving that the big-bang theory, the event some think led to the formation of the universe, is, well, wrong.

Wrong?

He explains.

"There are two different types of when stars end. When the little stars die, it's just like a small poof. They just turn into a planetary nebula. But the big ones, above 1.4 solar masses, blow up in one giant explosion, a supernova," Jake said. "What it does, is, in larger stars there is a larger mass, and it can fuse higher elements because it's more dense."

OK . . . trying to follow you.

"So you get all the elements, all the different materials, from those bigger stars. The little stars, they just make hydrogen and helium, and when they blow up, all the carbon that remains in them is just in the white dwarf; it never really comes off.

"So, um, in the big-bang theory, what they do is, there is this big explosion and there is all this temperature going off and the temperature decreases really rapidly because it's really big. The other day I calculated, they have this period where they suppose the hydrogen and helium were created, and, um, I don't care about the hydrogen and helium, but I thought, wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?"

He could go on and on.

And he did.

"Otherwise, the carbon would have to be coming out of the stars and hence the Earth, made mostly of carbon, we wouldn't be here. So I calculated, the time it would take to create 2 percent of the carbon in the universe, it would actually have to be several micro-seconds. Or a couple of nano-seconds, or something like that. An extremely small period of time. Like faster than a snap. That isn't gonna happen."

"Because of that," he continued, "that means that the world would have never been created because none of the carbon would have been given 7 billion years to fuse together. We'd have to be 21 billion years old . . . and that would just screw everything up."

So, we had to ask.

If not the big bang, then how did the universe come about?

"I'm still working on that," he said. "I have an idea, but . . . I'm still working out the details."

Call Star reporter Dan McFeely at (317) 444-6253.

John Jensen, Ph.D. - With the discussion of core standards inhaling so much of the oxygen in the education world, may I float an alternative view? My biggest concern is that the whole exercise is a waste of time. When you're setting up a system of any kind, you foresee a pathway of actions, one leading to another.

jjensen@gci.net and will email an ebook version of the titles above to anyone without charge upon request.

You examine your system carefully for anywhere the sequence of actions might break down, and you give that spot special attention. You shore it up so it faithfully passes on the power of the system to the outcomes desired. A handy rule for many areas of life is Do not leave the key step to chance.

So in the education standards discussion, what is the likely point of breakdown?

There may be other critical points, of course, but the whole system appears poised behind a single bottleneck, the intent of the teacher hour by hour. That intent always begins with the teacher's direct perception of what's possible with these students just now. Are they attentive and disciplined already, or rife with "attitude?" Are they grounded in the very terms of the current discussion, or do we lack even elementary verbal understanding to build on? Are there many or few students, plenty of time or little, external pressures from other people or support, etc.? Imagine the teacher, having mentally plotted a potential pathway through these hazards, being visited by the assistant principal, who comments, "And remember, the standards say that by now we should be halfway through X, okay?"

The teacher nods and says mentally, 'Yeah, right," muttering to herself, "I hereby declare us halfway through." The issue of which student gets and retains how much-presumably the point of it all--is pre-empted by an extrinsic, arbitrary pace that "should" be maintained (you frequently and, I think inevitably, see this prescriptive nuance voiced in these discussions).

From the teacher's perspective, the key is that posing standards makes sense only if you can regularize the conditions that could blow them out of the water! It's the difference between running PE tests on students first thing in the morning when they're fresh, or after two hours of strenuous exercise in the sun late in the day. What meaning can the test results have if you can't control for critical conditions? A parallel is in trading securities. A rule of thumb is "If your 'system' has any area in which you have to use personal judgment about some element, then it isn't a system at all. It's just your approach to using personal judgment." So we say to teachers, "We want you to use this system," but in leaving the critical elements up to their judgment, we really are saying "Just use your best judgment."

Which then bids us ask why have the system of standards at all? Is in driven commercially? Purveyors of learning materials would of course like to know if, across the country, everyone studies the solar system in fourth grade. Okay then, that's where we pitch our materials. Another reason may be to make it easier for children to move school to school. The downside to these and other reasons is that we essentially impose an extrinsic concept on what's actually happening. We push people to displace a priority they currently respond to in order to comply with a generalized "everybody-should" priority.

If on the other hand your goal is just to regularize, to get people doing similar things, a more realistic, respectful, cooperative, and replicable way to do it is just to sample schoolrooms. Find out what's happening now. Let objective information drive cooperation. You'd see perhaps, "In Georgia, 75% of schools are teaching ancient Egypt in the third grade," and "In Illinois, 60 percent go into the Industrial Revolution in the fifth grade," etc. This would give people concrete information about how their region and state treated the big chunks, and hence spontaneously open directions toward which sheer interest and efficiency would move them voluntarily ("We can get a break on price if we order this book together.") But it would also leave free to exercise her wits the teacher who's been sandbagged with a large class of kids who have an attitude and are also way behind.

Having just one person's direct familiarity with many classrooms I could be wrong about this, but my impression is that most teachers, if asked, would say emphatically "Yes, I know what my students need to do next." In other words, with even a curriculum laid out simply by subject name, in a week or less the teacher recognizes clearly "where they're at." This leaves him/her with two choices. Either take them precisely there and try to move them one step at a time further, or "follow the curriculum" and make the jumps demanded--leaving students with inevitable holes in their learning that later slow them down and also show up as across-the-board deficiencies in their district's test scores.

This line of thought suggests certain steps: 1) Let objective information from the bottom up about what's done now be the focus instead of general advice from the top down. 2) Before saying word one about national standards, first solve the problems obvious at the bottleneck. 3) Recognize that teachers must take students where they are, and aim for learning to extend and deepen what's previously learned. 4) Design instruction for long-term mastery rather than short-term test-passing.

Once you have confidence that you can get any learning at all past the bottleneck, then a more robust attempt to gain the benefits of cooperation may make sense. Start first with the key step and don't leave it to chance.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of The Silver Bullet Easy Learning System: How to Change Classrooms Fast and Energize Students for Success (Xlibris, 2008), and of Practice Makes Perfect: How to Rescue Education One Classroom at a Time.