Education has been labeled “the great equalizer”, and is a key tool for eliminating discrimination and inequality. As a result, education is at the heart of everything we do at The Foundation for Shared Impact. Indeed, our co-founder David Bishop left his legal career primarily because of a desire to educate young leaders, and over a decade, has had the privilege to teach and learn from thousands of talented students from around the world.
But over that same time he also became acutely aware of the inequality in, and inefficiency of, the education sector. Whether in his role at HKU, or as a father of three children, I have seen the cost of education soar, further expanding the clear divide between the haves and have-nots.
Right now in the US, the world’s wealthiest nation, a political battle is waging over whether a university education is a right, and therefore should be free for all. And in Hong Kong, where fewer than 30% of high school graduates can attend university, the ability to pay for “shadow education” — expensive tutorial schools and test prep — often means the difference between whether you spend your adult life serving or being served. Similar circumstances exist around the world, where those with money are admitted as legacies to top universities, with some even scheming to buy their children’s way into top schools, while many of our brightest minds are stymied before they even get a chance to prove themselves.
The reality is that the ability to provide quality, affordable education to everyone has never been more possible. The internet has toppled the ivory towers of the academic past, putting information, people, and opportunities to communicate at our fingertips. We don’t need a revolution, we need recalibration — a different perspective on what constitutes quality education, and a better system for delivering it.
This is particularly true in light of the AI revolution around the corner. As machines become smarter, we need to spend more time thinking about and enhancing what makes us human. As one commentator put it, our education system incorrectly prepares students for the future of work, stating that we’re all scared that human jobs will be replaced by robots, but we’re still teaching kids to think like machines.
College Selectivity is that Important…or Perhaps Not
On 12 March, 50 people in six states in the United States were charged by the Justice Department for taking part in a major college admission fraud, the largest of such prosecution by the Justice Department, involving 200 agents nationwide. By the time you read this, 14 of the 50 charged have pleaded guilty to bribery and mail fraud charges.
From 2011 to February this year, parents have paid William Rick Singer, CEO of a life coaching and college counselling business The Key, an estimated US$25 million to bribe coaches and university administrators to ensure their children will be recruited as athletes and admitted to their college of preference. Much of the money was recorded as tax-deductible donations to his charity, Key Worldwide Foundation. The “side-door” services he provided, including falsifying SAT and ACT results for a free of US$10,000 to $75,000 per test, is “the home run of the home runs”, said Singer himself.
Wealthy parents who once thought their bribery was worthwhile will be dismayed to learn that study after study have shown that students who attend more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges, and students whose parents have the financial means to afford such scandalous bribery are the least likely to benefit. Learn more about who benefit the most from attending selective colleges here.
But this article isn’t meant to be about college admission fraud.
History has seen generation after generation of parents going to great lengths, stretching their imagination, trying anything from lifelong back-breaking work and frugality to risking it all through illegitimate channels (see above), just to ensure their children get a proper education.
We at FSI believe that education is a human right. According to the World Bank, education is a powerful driver of development, and one of the strongest instruments for:
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Reducing poverty: 171 million people could be lifted out of extreme poverty if all children left school with basic reading skills; and globally, the rate of return to one extra year of schooling is a 9% increase in hourly earnings, with higher average rates of return found in schooling for women and in low-income countries;
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Improving health: higher levels of education could mean greater exposure to people, resources, and information on a healthy lifestyle;
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Gender equality: lifetime earnings for women could increase by US$15 trillion to US$30 trillion globally, if every girl worldwide received 12 years of quality education;
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Peace and stability: each year of education reduces the risk of conflict by around 20%.
Currently, at least 260 million children and youth are out of school, many of them girls. If this trend continues, more than 400 million children will have no basic primary education by 2030, and 800 million young people will not have the skills needed to join the modern workforce, says the United Nations.
Future-proofing the Youth of Today
However, in a world of accelerating automation, having access to education today doesn’t necessarily guarantee a better tomorrow. According to World Economic Forum’s 2016 report, The Future of Jobs, by 2020, across all types of occupations, on average, more than a third of the core skills needed to perform most jobs will require skills currently not yet considered crucial to the job, and 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.
As automation eliminates millions of jobs while creating new ones simultaneously, in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, and complex, perhaps one of the imperatives for educators and education institutions worldwide is to future-proof the youth of today, by nurturing soft skills, or human skills — such as complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management, coordinating with others, emotional intelligence, negotiation, and cognitive flexibility.
That seems to be in similar line of thoughts as young scientists and educators all over the world, who reckon these are the changes that need to be included in current and future education systems to prepare today’s youth for the future: connection with nature, interdisciplinary collaboration, health and safety, equal access, communication, social responsibility, creativity, and critical thinking.
With the jobs of the future expected to require a hybrid set of skills from multiple disciplines, the current model of higher education will need to be revamped to focus on customizable credential offerings, and for college students, it will be similar to building a Lego castle plastic block by plastic block, combining humanities skills with tech skills, or communication skills with coding skills, instead of spending four years to pursue the same degree. In fact, this education revolution is already happening with some MOOC providers who collaborate with higher education institutions to offer programs and credentials that serve as standalone certificates, as well as credit-eligible programs at participating colleges. The year 2016 saw 58 million students taking 6,850 online courses from over 700 universities, and 23 million people registering for a MOOC for the first time.
In addition to alternative education providers, in the near future, we will probably be seeing more of online counselling services that enable students to carry out more sophisticated matching based on their natural aptitudes, lifestyle preferences, financial situation, areas of interest, and career aspirations to find the school that best fits their needs, as well as tools that allow students to make more informed choices about their educational finances.
According to this Gallup-Purdue Index Report in 2014, if employed graduates feel that their college prepared them well for post-graduation life, the odds that they are engaged at work increase nearly three times. It was also found by the same report that college selectivity has little impact on graduates’ broad measures of life satisfaction, although there are six college experiences that contribute to graduates’ sense of fulfilment later in life, including finding a mentor who encourages students to follow personal goals, and participating in an internship that applies classroom learning.
Which is why Foundation for Shared Impact’s Impact Lab Course (previously known as the Social Venture Management Internship Course or the SVM Course), a six-credit experiential learning course at the Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, was founded by Principal Lecturer David Bishop to offer students the opportunities to solve real-life problems, manage teams, gain hands-on business experience during their internship, and get a better grasp of social responsibility while working at different social ventures. Read about students’ stories of empowerment through their internship at Soap Cycling, an FSI portfolio company and SVM partner company, here, here, and here.
There is not a dearth of social businesses and organizations in FSI’s portfolio companies that are devoted to empowerment through education.
MYEO, founded by Htet Thiri Shwe, a former student of the Impact Lab Course, is a for-profit edutech social enterprise focusing on furthering the education, skills and professional development opportunities for young people across Myanmar through education content, opportunities, and skill development programs. The role that MYEO plays is especially pivotal for in Myanmar, like in many developing countries, unemployment is far lower for unskilled workers than university graduates. For example, the unemployment rate in Myanmar for people who don’t go to university is 2.9%, while for university graduates it is 9.2%. And it is the needs of the latter that MYEO works hard to address, connecting these university graduates with better opportunities.
OWN Academy, which acts as an interface to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, collaborates with working professionals as coaches to empower young people with industry knowledge and skills. “OWN Academy future-proofs today’s young people by inspiring and instilling the right attitudes, and cultivating the necessary skills for the 21st century. It is hands on and grounded in the real world,” said Natalie Chan, founder of OWN Academy. Find out about OWN Academy’s internship training bootcamp from this video produced by previous student interns of the SVM Course.
EmpowerU, formerly DWEP (Domestic Worker Empowerment Program), was founded by Dr. Michael Manio to provide foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong with a wide range of knowledge and skills to help them assimilate to life in Hong Kong, and to prepare them for life after Hong Kong. Learn more about why Dr. Mike founded DWEP and how EmpowerU empowers foreign domestic workers in this video made by previous Impact Lab Course interns.
Elsewhere, social entrepreneurs, educators, and companies are coming together to bring education to people who normally lack access, such as the University of the People (UoPeople), the first non-profit, tuition-free American-accredited online university that helps qualified high school graduates overcome financial, geographic, political, and personal constraints to pursue higher education. Today, UoPeople has 18,552 students enrolled from over 200 countries and territories, and 1,000 of these students are refugees. The Wings University, a non-profit organization from Germany, offers refugees fleeing from their home countries, often with no documents and little economic resources, the opportunity to get an internationally accredited degree that can be obtained through online classes. With all educational services provided in partnership with several higher education institutions and for free, the Wings University makes it its mission to “help refugees help themselves”. Kiron University, founded in 2015, is another online university for refugees and it gets its courses from universities like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Yale. Kiron offers refugees a free higher education regardless of where they are in the world, and offline courses are offered to those who do not have access to the internet.
