WCA January 2012

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Wire & Cable ASIA – January/February 2012 38
From theamericas
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 (1st 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.”
Education
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
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,” 13th 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 12th 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.”
Dorothy Fabian
Features Editor