In his New York magazine article ‘Paper Tigers,’ the Korean-American writer Wesley Yang argues that the Asian parenting model and cultural values mean that Asians will excel in schools, and only in schools: ‘According to a recent study, Asian- Americans represent roughly 5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board members, and around 2 percent of college presidents.’
While many Asian-Americans attribute this ‘bamboo ceiling’ to racism, Yang argues that the same cultural attitudes and values (the unquestioning work ethic, the narrow-minded focus, and the overwhelming conservatism) that permit Asian-Americans to excel in tests also trap them into ‘middle class servility.’
Yang’s article is a battle hymn for young Asian males to smash out of the bamboo ceiling by ‘(putting) themselves into the spotlight and (making) some noise.’
But is more Asian alpha males really the answer?
In China, everyone agrees there’s a bamboo ceiling in place in multinationals, and no one’s happy about it. Importing an expatriate management staff to China increases overheads for multinationals while constraining their in-country growth. A bi-cultural work environment where expatriates are at the top also creates internal discord, language problems, and cultural misunderstanding. But despite costly and patient attempts to train and develop local management, multinationals still import expatriate managers. So why do Chinese apparently make such terrible managers?
In the land that invented the bureaucracy, management theory and practices have existed for millennia, codified in classic texts such as The Art of War and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. That Chinese would equate management with warfare helps explain why they’re so singularly bad at it. Mao Zedong’s idealism may be long dead and buried, but his politics is alive and flourishing in Chinese offices.
To ease their own violent paranoia, Chinese managers instil and augment violent paranoia in their staff. To maintain absolute control, they will practice divide-and-conquer by constantly changing favourites, spreading innuendoes and rumours and lies, and acting arbitrarily and violently to induce terror. They won’t compose memos or read financial statements, but they’ll probably have watched ‘The Godfather’ dozens of times, and have memorized The Art of War. China’s management problem isn’t that there aren’t enough alpha males—it’s that there are too many.
As a Chinese manager of a bilingual and bicultural work environment, my priority is to maintain a cohesive community, and to accomplish this I’ve learned that the two most important skills needed are empathy and self-understanding.
Being a good manager means ensuring that everyone works towards the same goals. Being a good communicator (articulating values and goals in a concise and clear manner) is important, but being a good listener (taking a personal interest in each employee’s emotional well-being) is even more so.
Just sitting there, and nodding your head as the teacher, the student, or the parent rants and raves isn’t enough—it’s necessary to get inside his head, locate the source of his concerns and discontents, and articulate back to him the logic of his grievances. In other words, to be effective, managers need empathy, something that is refined through a lifetime of interacting with different people in challenging situations, and something that’s lost after a few years of cramming for tests.
Much more difficult than empathy is self-understanding. I’ve discovered that to manage others I need to manage myself, to restrain my ego and emotions, to understand my limitations and control my expectations, and to defer to process and committee: Narcissism, megalomania, and distrust are internal rumblings that can violently shake a workplace, if they’re not tamed by self-control. And self-control is a by-product of self-understanding, which itself is a result of a lifetime of making mistakes, coming to terms with failure, and starting over—practices that are neither valued nor encouraged in the test-taking, risk-averse, and face-obsessed culture that is China.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Why Bother with College? (Diplomat)
This month, in response to my post ‘Education Bubbles,’ I was asked the following three questions:
1. How can you get the most out of your college degree?
2. What can you gain from college that’s not financial?
3. How can we determine a person’s ability, talent, and experience?
Because my students plan to study in the United States, I frequently discuss these issues with them. As I already mentioned, in a bad economy, Americans are increasingly questioning the value of taking out a second mortgage so that junior can have fun. But just as Americans are thinking of dropping out of college, Chinese are queuing up to take their place. Study abroad is such a hot trend that Shenzhen High School’s study abroad programme, which I created, will expand to become two international high schools next year.
I’ve always been sceptical about Chinese students studying in the United States. Many go to study business, and I used to tell them that they should take $10,000 of the $200,000 tuition money and become a fruit vendor. After four years of dealing daily with ignorant customers, arrogant policemen and thugs, they’ll have acquired the requisite knowledge of how to really do business in China, and with the $190,000 they can start their business career. I also told a former student, Zhou Yeran, that he was so talented that he ought to use his tuition money to make low-budget films for four years. (I was popular neither with those students who wanted to study business, nor with Zhou Yeran’s mother.)
Since then I’ve grown up a bit, and nowadays I tell my Peking University High School International Division students that, as China becomes increasingly more international and increasing bilingual in Chinese and Chinglish, the ability to read and write well in English is what will guarantee their professional success and personal happiness in life. While Chinese may speak fluent English, they’ll eventually hit a glass ceiling in a multinational because they can’t write well enough in English. But if our students develop the habit of reading, they’ll discover that new worlds would immediately open to them: the Internet would suddenly become an infinite continent, books would permit them to travel back in time and skip forward to the future, and newspapers would connect them to a global community.
Our plan is to have students avoid applying to large state universities and the Ivy League, and apply only to humanities programmes at liberal arts colleges. This is ironic because when Americans mention overpriced, useless degrees they mean the humanities programmes at liberal arts colleges. Americans would presumably agree that the ability to read and write well is a valuable commodity, but many will argue that there’s an infrastructure in place (public libraries, the Internet, writers’ workshops, salons, etc.) that permits students to learn to read and write well through constant practice and communication with peers (one of my favourite writers, James Ellroy, is self-taught). But Chinese lack this language environment and support system, and while four years of intense reading and writing is probably not enough, it’s still a priceless education for them.
And while reading and writing well in English would give our students a tremendous competitive advantage in the China marketplace, what we’re interested in is how this skill makes them better and happier people. To read and write well requires and promotes intellectual curiosity, a wide breadth of knowledge, and logical thinking ability. To truly read and write well, our students need to love learning, and to want to constantly seek new knowledge; a lifetime of constant self-improvement translates into a lifetime of happiness.
The practical implication of targeting liberal arts colleges is that college admissions becomes less of a crapshoot. When I first started working in study abroad, I naively thought that I could get Shenzhen High School’s best students into the Ivy League. I thought Zhou Yeran, who was both a great writer and a great person, was a shoe-in for Yale or Harvard, and when he didn’t, it taught me never again to play the game that is Ivy League admissions.
Ivy League admissions officers say they’re looking for the best fit for their school, and they use what seems the world’s most torturous and belaboured application process to prove how serious they are. But just as employers won’t know the ability of a new hire until he’s been in the organization for months or possibly years, the Ivy League just won’t know what an admitted student’s actual performance is until, at the earliest, the student turns 40 years-old. The only real indicator of a person’s future performance is his family background, and that’s why the US university admissions process is so idiotic: the Ivy League asks for class grades that can be inflated, scores of tests that can be prepped, and essays that can be doctored, and in the end they’ll mainly admit the children of successful parents.
Talent and ability can’t be identified through tests and interviews, and the most egregious aspect of Ivy League admissions is how it can brand people as a success or failure at age 17. Talent and ability are the natural by-products of hard work and dedication in a high-pressure and strict environment, and such an environment is often not found in the Ivy League, where students are too often spoiled and pampered.
What we constantly reinforce in our students is that it doesn’t matter where you go to school, but what you make of the experience while you’re there. The most valuable thing for work and for life they can learn in a US college and university is the priceless skill of writing well. Whether or not they succeed today—in college and in life—is ultimately their choice, and no one has the right to tell them otherwise.
1. How can you get the most out of your college degree?
2. What can you gain from college that’s not financial?
3. How can we determine a person’s ability, talent, and experience?
Because my students plan to study in the United States, I frequently discuss these issues with them. As I already mentioned, in a bad economy, Americans are increasingly questioning the value of taking out a second mortgage so that junior can have fun. But just as Americans are thinking of dropping out of college, Chinese are queuing up to take their place. Study abroad is such a hot trend that Shenzhen High School’s study abroad programme, which I created, will expand to become two international high schools next year.
I’ve always been sceptical about Chinese students studying in the United States. Many go to study business, and I used to tell them that they should take $10,000 of the $200,000 tuition money and become a fruit vendor. After four years of dealing daily with ignorant customers, arrogant policemen and thugs, they’ll have acquired the requisite knowledge of how to really do business in China, and with the $190,000 they can start their business career. I also told a former student, Zhou Yeran, that he was so talented that he ought to use his tuition money to make low-budget films for four years. (I was popular neither with those students who wanted to study business, nor with Zhou Yeran’s mother.)
Since then I’ve grown up a bit, and nowadays I tell my Peking University High School International Division students that, as China becomes increasingly more international and increasing bilingual in Chinese and Chinglish, the ability to read and write well in English is what will guarantee their professional success and personal happiness in life. While Chinese may speak fluent English, they’ll eventually hit a glass ceiling in a multinational because they can’t write well enough in English. But if our students develop the habit of reading, they’ll discover that new worlds would immediately open to them: the Internet would suddenly become an infinite continent, books would permit them to travel back in time and skip forward to the future, and newspapers would connect them to a global community.
Our plan is to have students avoid applying to large state universities and the Ivy League, and apply only to humanities programmes at liberal arts colleges. This is ironic because when Americans mention overpriced, useless degrees they mean the humanities programmes at liberal arts colleges. Americans would presumably agree that the ability to read and write well is a valuable commodity, but many will argue that there’s an infrastructure in place (public libraries, the Internet, writers’ workshops, salons, etc.) that permits students to learn to read and write well through constant practice and communication with peers (one of my favourite writers, James Ellroy, is self-taught). But Chinese lack this language environment and support system, and while four years of intense reading and writing is probably not enough, it’s still a priceless education for them.
And while reading and writing well in English would give our students a tremendous competitive advantage in the China marketplace, what we’re interested in is how this skill makes them better and happier people. To read and write well requires and promotes intellectual curiosity, a wide breadth of knowledge, and logical thinking ability. To truly read and write well, our students need to love learning, and to want to constantly seek new knowledge; a lifetime of constant self-improvement translates into a lifetime of happiness.
The practical implication of targeting liberal arts colleges is that college admissions becomes less of a crapshoot. When I first started working in study abroad, I naively thought that I could get Shenzhen High School’s best students into the Ivy League. I thought Zhou Yeran, who was both a great writer and a great person, was a shoe-in for Yale or Harvard, and when he didn’t, it taught me never again to play the game that is Ivy League admissions.
Ivy League admissions officers say they’re looking for the best fit for their school, and they use what seems the world’s most torturous and belaboured application process to prove how serious they are. But just as employers won’t know the ability of a new hire until he’s been in the organization for months or possibly years, the Ivy League just won’t know what an admitted student’s actual performance is until, at the earliest, the student turns 40 years-old. The only real indicator of a person’s future performance is his family background, and that’s why the US university admissions process is so idiotic: the Ivy League asks for class grades that can be inflated, scores of tests that can be prepped, and essays that can be doctored, and in the end they’ll mainly admit the children of successful parents.
Talent and ability can’t be identified through tests and interviews, and the most egregious aspect of Ivy League admissions is how it can brand people as a success or failure at age 17. Talent and ability are the natural by-products of hard work and dedication in a high-pressure and strict environment, and such an environment is often not found in the Ivy League, where students are too often spoiled and pampered.
What we constantly reinforce in our students is that it doesn’t matter where you go to school, but what you make of the experience while you’re there. The most valuable thing for work and for life they can learn in a US college and university is the priceless skill of writing well. Whether or not they succeed today—in college and in life—is ultimately their choice, and no one has the right to tell them otherwise.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Education Bubbles (Diplomat)
In my previous post ‘The Games Adults Play,’ a commenter named Rob linked to an article that questioned the value of American college education, and linked to another that compared inflated US college tuition levels to the housing and dotcom bubbles. A consensus is slowly but surely emerging that American institutions of higher education are overcharging for a too often lame education.
The culprit seems to be easy access to low-interest loans, which is what propelled the housing bubble. But what’s really causing greater debt and even greater mediocrity among many US college graduates is ‘credentialism’, which is the natural consequence of any mass society.
What’s happening in American higher education is no different from what happened in China starting in the late 1990s. To induce consumer spending in a nation of notorious spendthrifts, Premier Zhu Rongji deregulated the education markets so that Chinese colleges and universities overnight doubled their classroom size and tuition fees. The upshot: Like in the United States today, Chinese colleges and universities are graduating too many students with no real abilities, but with very real debts.
The cause isn’t just politicians favouring policies that please the people in the short-term (a college education for all), but which will stick society with a hefty bill in the long-term (a bad, expensive college education for all). It really has to do with the fact that, in the mass technological free market societies that are both China and the United States, people have agreed there’s only one fair way to select winners and losers: credentialism, often referred to by its euphemism ‘meritocracy.’
Ability, talent, and experience are ideally how companies ought to hire employees, but these are unfortunately in too short a demand to satisfy the needs of an economy of 300 million people, let alone 1.3 billion people. More perplexingly, these are all subjective characteristics that are hard to identify, and prone to never-ending debate.
A university degree isn’t, however. An individual’s college and advanced diplomas are the only part of the resume that is immediately reliable, confirmable, and comprehensible. That’s a crucial quality to any mass organization that needs to hire hundreds from tens of thousands of applicants, and just can’t vet every single applicant’s work experience and personal recommendations. Having a university degree doesn’t necessarily open doors, but not having one will most certainly close them.
This in effect means that colleges and universities are at best gatekeepers, and at worse toll collectors. And this means that US colleges and universities are either incentivized, as in the case of the most elite, to reject as many people as possible to maintain their allure of exclusivity, or, as in the case of everyone else, to let in as many people as possible. And that’s why an increasing number of American colleges and universities are traveling to China each year to recruit Chinese students. As long as this toll collecting system is in effect, all US colleges and universities are incentivized to focus on recruiting and admissions, and not on actually rigorously preparing students for a 21st century global economy.
All this means is that while American higher education, like its Chinese counterpart, may offer a sometimes poor education at an inflated price, it isn’t an asset bubble. A 21st century global economy means that if indifferent and lazy American students smarten up and drop out of colleges and universities to become plumbers and auto mechanics, indifferent and lazy Chinese students are more than willing and ready to replace them.
And when that happens, (because it will most certainly happen), everyone suffers. US colleges and universities will have to find a way to dumb down their curriculum even further to accommodate all those non-English speaking Chinese students (offer a double major in World of Warcraft and Counterstrike?). And both the Chinese government bureaucracy and economy will become plagued with individuals who having failed miserably to get a proper education in China, failed even more miserably to get a proper education in the United States.
Unfortunately, that’s just the nature of the global economy we’re living in, where an extremely mediocre individual with a Yale BA and a Harvard MBA, and a slightly less so one with a Columbia BA and a Harvard JD have both ascended to the very top.
The culprit seems to be easy access to low-interest loans, which is what propelled the housing bubble. But what’s really causing greater debt and even greater mediocrity among many US college graduates is ‘credentialism’, which is the natural consequence of any mass society.
What’s happening in American higher education is no different from what happened in China starting in the late 1990s. To induce consumer spending in a nation of notorious spendthrifts, Premier Zhu Rongji deregulated the education markets so that Chinese colleges and universities overnight doubled their classroom size and tuition fees. The upshot: Like in the United States today, Chinese colleges and universities are graduating too many students with no real abilities, but with very real debts.
The cause isn’t just politicians favouring policies that please the people in the short-term (a college education for all), but which will stick society with a hefty bill in the long-term (a bad, expensive college education for all). It really has to do with the fact that, in the mass technological free market societies that are both China and the United States, people have agreed there’s only one fair way to select winners and losers: credentialism, often referred to by its euphemism ‘meritocracy.’
Ability, talent, and experience are ideally how companies ought to hire employees, but these are unfortunately in too short a demand to satisfy the needs of an economy of 300 million people, let alone 1.3 billion people. More perplexingly, these are all subjective characteristics that are hard to identify, and prone to never-ending debate.
A university degree isn’t, however. An individual’s college and advanced diplomas are the only part of the resume that is immediately reliable, confirmable, and comprehensible. That’s a crucial quality to any mass organization that needs to hire hundreds from tens of thousands of applicants, and just can’t vet every single applicant’s work experience and personal recommendations. Having a university degree doesn’t necessarily open doors, but not having one will most certainly close them.
This in effect means that colleges and universities are at best gatekeepers, and at worse toll collectors. And this means that US colleges and universities are either incentivized, as in the case of the most elite, to reject as many people as possible to maintain their allure of exclusivity, or, as in the case of everyone else, to let in as many people as possible. And that’s why an increasing number of American colleges and universities are traveling to China each year to recruit Chinese students. As long as this toll collecting system is in effect, all US colleges and universities are incentivized to focus on recruiting and admissions, and not on actually rigorously preparing students for a 21st century global economy.
All this means is that while American higher education, like its Chinese counterpart, may offer a sometimes poor education at an inflated price, it isn’t an asset bubble. A 21st century global economy means that if indifferent and lazy American students smarten up and drop out of colleges and universities to become plumbers and auto mechanics, indifferent and lazy Chinese students are more than willing and ready to replace them.
And when that happens, (because it will most certainly happen), everyone suffers. US colleges and universities will have to find a way to dumb down their curriculum even further to accommodate all those non-English speaking Chinese students (offer a double major in World of Warcraft and Counterstrike?). And both the Chinese government bureaucracy and economy will become plagued with individuals who having failed miserably to get a proper education in China, failed even more miserably to get a proper education in the United States.
Unfortunately, that’s just the nature of the global economy we’re living in, where an extremely mediocre individual with a Yale BA and a Harvard MBA, and a slightly less so one with a Columbia BA and a Harvard JD have both ascended to the very top.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)