Serve the Community or Serve the World?

Our discussions on Internationalization and Globalization reminded me of my purpose for pursuing my degree in higher education in the first place. I spent five years at my undergraduate institution. It was a small, private Liberal Arts university situated in a city touted as the All-American city despite its high crime rates and poor reputation. Nonetheless, I feel that I received a great education. The issue was that this city had one of the larger populations of Cambodians in the state and a large Southeast Asian population overall but I was one of maybe ten total Cambodian students. I could not help but notice the lack of representation of Southeast Asians in the school. I could not figure out why there were so few Cambodians when there were so many in the community.

On the other hand, interestingly, there was a large Hawaiian student population. I would not know until later that the school does recruit many students from Hawaii as well as all over the nation and world. There were also many other Asian populations on campus and thankfully, the diversity initiatives on campus were amazing. There was no lack of variety in student organizations for almost every ethnic group, except my own.

It was after I had graduated when I was approached to be on the Southeast Asian Recruitment Committee with the Assistant Provost of the school that I realized that the university was doing very little to recruit, engage, or support its surrounding community. It was quite literally the Ivory Tower in which groups just a few miles away felt it was unattainable because relationships were not being developed and fostered. The focus was more on recruiting from outside.

The reason I bring this up is that I believe a higher education institution has an inherent responsibility to serve its surrounding community. I sometimes question why the focus is so much on globalization and having a cosmopolitan view when the local community is just as important as their needs are still underserved. 

The way I connect it to our discussions about internationalization and globalization is that there is such an intense focus on how to build a university and curriculum that develops globally competent students and communities that those who are within the direct vicinity (and thus have the potential to directly benefit from the school) are not being engaged. Focusing on recruiting students from outside the local area prevents the local community from benefiting from having their students educated.  The focus on expanding (especially within the context of the curriculum) creates breadth but not depth.
You can try to create globally competent individuals but what about ones who are locally competent?

Do You Donate?

Today, I received a phone call from an undergraduate student at the business school of my alma mater.  I was expecting it.  You see, every year around this time, I always get roped into these phone calls even though I know what it is they want from me (I somehow can never ignore a ringing phone).  The gist of these calls are to solicit donations from alumni of the university.  And because I have always been in school, I have politely and apologetically declined.

The pitch is pretty interesting.  They ask me to provide a modest donation of $350, initially.  $350?  That's almost half of my rent.  And each time I apologize and say no, they lower it in increments.  The last pitch was for me to make five small monthly installments of $10 after I received my taxes. That shocked me a bit.  It was quite...crafty.

But the most interesting change that I noticed in this conversation that was different from the last five over the years was the admission that they were trying to get as many alumni to donate as much as possible, no matter the amount.  This invoked memories of our last class where Dr. Collins explained the ranking categories for the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges report. (See where UHM ranks here!) A significant ranking category is that of the percentage of alumni who donate to the college.  I had not realized that was a major category and I found it very interesting to get this phone call and understood why I kept getting them.  Previously, I never thought it to be a big deal.  In fact, it puzzled me that a private university would extend so much effort to collect a couple of bucks from me.

It's not to say that I did not want to donate.  I experience a lot of anxiety and guilt over these phone calls.  I hate to say no to these students who must have it tough to make these calls in the first place.  I also hate to say no to an institution that supported me through my degree.  I would gladly donate if I felt I was in a position to do so to help other students.  Now I feel as if I should call back and donate at least a little.  I understand the rankings are skewed and there are politics and power plays that are executed behind the scenes to manipulate the rankings but I also do take pride in the education I received from my alma mater and want to see it be able to provide more quality education to new students.  I do feel that they are doing something right and that should be supported. 

How many of you have received these calls?  Do you donate?  Why or why not?  Does it matter to you the reasons why the school wants your monetary support?  Are there maybe other ways that alumni, who cannot contribute financially, can support and give back to the school? 

Edited to add link for methodology of rankings:

The percentage of alumni giving serves as a proxy for how satisfied students are with the school. A higher average alumni giving rate percentage scores better in the ranking model than a lower average alumni giving rate.

Declining by Degrees

In EDEA 646, American College Students, we watched a PBS documentary, Declining by Degrees, and I thought it was especially relevant to the Curriculum class because it identified some major issues with higher education that we discussed about the instruction paradigm. The documentary explored the pressures facing institutions to retain students, pressure on professors to grade on a curve to retain students, and the surface level learning methods students employ to get by in their classes. The documentary reinforced much of what was discussed in Tagg’s book about the instruction paradigm and basically delineated all that was wrong with our higher education system of this age. I've linked it below. If you have time, I highly suggest watching!

Students interviewed describe how they are beating the system and using surface learning methods by doing the least amount of work to get the desired grade. Interestingly, the faculty in the documentary described this phenomenon as "sleepwalking through college". Complaints on either side (administration, faculty, students) are prevalent in this video. Who will accept responsibility?

During one particularly interesting moment, one of the interviewees mentioned efficiency as the motivating factor in the teaching process. Some students had complained that they felt that they were lost in large lecture-style classes. My initial thought during this moment was how can teaching be efficient, in the true sense? By nature, the give and take of information requires critical thinking, disagreement, dissonance, follow up, and critique. That process is not about efficiency. Making teaching efficient is contradictory...efficiency is for factory lines in manufacturing plants (reminds me of the RSA Animate video we watched earlier in class). What about effectiveness? 

The higher education system has become so much more profit-minded and career-oriented that concepts like efficiency is overpowering effectiveness. And students are graduating with pieces of paper that don't necessarily mean much anymore. There's no way to gauge if they are actually learning. Grades certainly don't mean what they used to mean. And I'm not sure if ever meant what it was supposed to mean either.  

Should higher education be valuing efficiency over effectiveness?

Schooled 'Bout School

I have been raised to value and take pride in my education. Growing up, it was ingrained in me that education was the key to a better and more prosperous life. I never questioned it. Education is a major part of my identity. In many ways, I naturally assumed that this was the way to go.

That foundation was rocked a bit when we watched "Schooling the World: The White Man's Burden", a documentary on the effects of Western education on developing worlds. Specifically, it focused on the Ladakh people in India and how they are being indoctrinated in Western education and ideologies that are ill-suited for their world. Furthermore, the loss of language, culture, and understanding their environments is troubling.

Some interesting points from the film:

1. Western education is creating a "human monoculture" as diversity is being destroyed.
2. Traditional forms of education (by family and community) is slowly dying as children are being indoctrinated by western ideals and prepared for a modern/urban environment
3. Education dividing families and communities into children who 'know' more than their elders and creating issues of inferiority in elders.
4. Modern/urban education is creating more social inequity as students cannot return home and utilize their education so they move to big urban developments where there is a lack of jobs. 
5. Social justice advocates would benefit from understanding how they are truly "helping" people in the developing world.

I could not help but evaluate how my life has been changed by education. As a Cambodian American, I struggle with balancing western values with my traditional Khmer culture and upbringing. It's a never ending battle. On one hand, my family pushed me to pursue education but in many other ways they struggled to keep me cultured in their ways. I'm sure many can relate to these struggles. The education that they wanted for me served in many ways to draw me further away from their reach. My fluency in Khmer suffered--I had never even been given the chance to learn how to read or write. My relationship with them also suffered. There was little we could discuss that we had in common. I understand now the struggles they face with wanting to come here to escape oppression and find opportunity for their children only to deal with struggling to preserve identity and culture in a western society.

I find as my identity is evolving, I have a desire to reclaim some of the culture and language that I have lost. The questions raised by the documentary is helping me to critically think about my education and my experiences. I am certainly realizing that western education is not so appreciative of diversity and culture. It's giving me the drive to make it my life's work to protect culture and help to give it a place within our education system.