WCA January 2012

From the americas

Indian high school graduates and the too-few openings at India’s first-rank colleges. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and its middle class growing rapidly, the country’s highly selective universities are overwhelmed. (“Squeezed Out in India, Students Turn to US,” 13 th October). Cumulative scores on final high school examinations are the sole criteria for admission to most colleges in India. Ms Najar reported that, this past summer, Delhi University, or DU – the first choice of many applicants – issued cutoff scores at its top colleges that reached a near-impossible 100 per cent in some cases. The countrywide Indian Institutes of Technology have an acceptance rate of less than two per cent – and that from a pool of roughly 500,000 who had to put in two years of after-school coaching even to qualify to sit for the entrance exam. “The problem is clear,” Kapil Sibal, the government minister overseeing education in India and himself an Ivy Leaguer (Harvard Law School), told the Times . “There is a demand and supply issue. You don’t have enough quality institutions and there are enough quality young people who want to go to only quality institutions.” The formidable Indian selectivity is America’s opportunity – and it is being grasped. Ms Najar wrote that representatives from the Ivy League (the eight institutions widely considered the crème de la crème of American higher education: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale) have begun visiting India to recruit students and explore partnerships with Indian schools. Some have set up offices there. On 12 th October, the US government lent a hand. The State Department held a United States-India higher education summit meeting at Georgetown University, its neighbour in Washington DC, to promote connections between the two countries. ❖ Indians are now the second-largest foreign student population in North America, after the Chinese, with almost 105,000 students in the United States in the 2009-2010 academic year. According to the American Embassy in New Delhi, student visa applications from India increased 20 per cent in the year to mid-October 2011. Although a majority of Indian students in the US are in graduate school, undergraduate enrolment has grown by more than one-fifth over the past few years. As noted in the Times , while wealthy Indian families have been sending their children to the best American schools for years, the expedient is beginning to spread to the middle-class families for whom Delhi University has historically offered the best option. For those families, the US alternative comes at a price. “The difference in tuition between top American and Indian universities is staggering,” wrote Ms Najar. “Tuition at Dartmouth is $41,736 a year, not including room and board, while most of the colleges of Delhi University cost about $150 to $500 per year.”

Of the 150 biggest employers in Canada, the Waterloo, Ontario-based telecommunication and wireless devices company ranked most desirable in an online survey of 7,000 students and of employed and unemployed Canadians. Participants were asked if they had heard of the companies; and, if so, if they would like to work for them. Two-thirds of respondents who had heard of RIM said they would like to work there. The research was done in February and March of last year, before cut-throat competition on the smartphone and tablet front caused a precipitous drop in RIM’s stock valuation. But the managing director of Randstad Canada resisted the perception that the blow to the company’s fortunes would have affected the results. Jan Hein Bax told the Toronto Star (1 st October): “If you are an employer with a strong brand, that attractiveness can outlive short-term blips as long as you’re consistent with your manner, your message, and your image in the market. In the fight for talent, this is hugely important.” Mr Bax’s theory was put to the test within a month, when Research in Motion was hit with what would be the longest BlackBerry outage in its history. A three-day blackout in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa interrupted email and Internet services for frustrated users around the world. The company’s luck held. On 14 th October, when some 70 million of its subscribers again had reliable service, Research in Motion shares were down only ten cents in trading on the Toronto stock exchange. Even more tellingly, there were very few BlackBerry deserters among Toronto iPhone enthusiasts lined up to buy one of the last products developed under the recently deceased Apple leader Steve Jobs. Of 70 people questioned by the Star at one of the city’s four Apple retail outlets, only four said they were dropping the BlackBerry in favour of the iPhone 4S. One customer said she was buying an iPhone to use in Canada and keeping her BlackBerry for trips to her native India. Another said she was buying an iPhone but keeping her BlackBerry “because I’m attached to it.” Ivy League colleges in the US reach out for top-flight Indian applicants too many for the best universities at home “American universities and colleges have been more than happy to pick up the slack. Faced with shrinking returns from endowment funds, a decline in the number of high school graduates in the United States, and growing economic hardship among American families, they have stepped up their efforts to woo Indian students thousands of miles away.” The “slack” cited by Nida Najar, writing from New Delhi in the New York Times , is the discrepancy between the surging numbers of academically qualified, ambitious Education

Dorothy Fabian Features Editor

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Wire & Cable ASIA – January/February 2012