You can receive US$100 Off Your Phoenix Registration

If you attend the January 20, 2010 New York City Education Investment Business Breakfast, you are eligible for US$100 off the March 1-3, 2010 Education Industry Investment Forum.

The business breakfast information is found at the Education Investment Business Breakfast website.

Speaker faculty
Daniel Pianko, Founder & CEO, The Noah Fund
Stephen Gilfus, Founder of Blackboard, President and CEO, Gilfus Education Group
Josh Schwartz, Managing Director, East Wind Advisors

Schedule for January 20, 2010
8.00 am – Gather and Breakfast, Networking
8.45 am – Introductory Remarks, Education Industry Investment Forum Director Doug Crets and Moderator
9.00 am – Panel discussion begins
11.00 am – Questions & Answers
11.30 am – Business Networking and Card Exchange
12:00 pm – Business Breakfast Ends

Location
Omni Berkshire Place
21 East 52nd Street at Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022
(212) 753-5800

After China

Spent a day in China visiting old friends and sitting in on a digital convergence lab that was set up by my old journalism school director, Ying Chan.

The school of journalism there is backed by Li Ka Shing Foundation, so it's an interesting case for China. Its probably the only public university in China funded by private dollars. Lots of implications here.

What does that mean for American investors who want to put money down on building up private education in China?

What happens with American or other foreign money in China? Just because you put private money into a state run and state-funded operation, it doesn't mean you are going to get that money back. There is always that risk.

So how can Ying Chan do it? Aside from having the backing of Li Ka Shing, Asia's richest man, she's also got ties to Hong Kong and is backed by solid partners. It's an interesting education about education in China. I am glad I got to see it first hand.

I learned two things about this:

Shantou University is on the cutting edge of how education will be done in China. I will be writing more about this later, but in a nutshell:

First university in China to use an open source, Chinese language-friendly digital publishing and curriculum tool. It started out in the Journalism School, but now the university itself wants to run it for the whole institution of 8,000 students.

If that is open source, there is no problem to think that they would make this expansion down to other schools in China and in Asia. Jeremiah Foo, CTO of the school said that he is already in talks with Malaysian schools to spread this technology.

They are working with Apple to launch something in March. More on that in March. I can't talk about it.

It is totally feasible that corporations in the United States can partner with a school like this and actually teach classes on the corporate culture, on business, and on everything from engineering, to accounting and more to these students. It's very possible we might see a day where actual global companies have teaching units inside some of these public universities in China. What does that mean? It's hard to even fathom how revolutionary that kind of education system would be.

There is so much more to talk about, and I will be mentioning some if it off and on in the next few weeks.

Now it is time to go back out into Hong Kong, and have some yum cha and talk with my friends. Good to be back "home" again.

By the way, for those of you in New York, it's 55 degrees today and I got sunburn. Suckers!

House of the Roses

A conversation last night brought me to House of the Roses.

It's a volunteer dance company for underprivileged kids in New York City. Are we allowed to say underprivileged anymore? I don't know what is politically correct anymore. Any way, they are kids that don't have the resources that your typical dance company patron might have.

Point being, they are trying to do something good. They use positive reinforcement to encourage a child's use of creativity for change and constructive life-living. And I mention this because I am reading two books that are bringing this method to my attention.

Data Dump

Here's a little data dump for all of you. I like to do this from time to time on other blogs, but I have never done it on this one. People have been asking me where does site traffic come from, and what are some of the interesting search terms that bring people to the Education blog.

Geographic Interest

Traffic comes from 1,310 cities around the world. Here are the top twenty cities, and then some unusual cities or locations thrown in for fun

1. New York

2. Charlotte

3. Washington

4. Chicago

5. San Francisco

6. Los Angeles

7. (not set)-- This is probably several cities in China, Blogger is blocked in China, and people use proxies to get to the site, leaving it anonymous.

8. Delhi

9. Phoenix

10. Boston

11. London

12. Baltimore

13. Mumbai

14. Singapore

15. Toronto

16. Philadelphia

17. Arlington

18. Seattle

19. Brooklyn

20. Houston

And for the really interesting cities: Paris, Chennai, Hyderabad, Givatayim, Petaling Jaya, Vancouver, Abu Dhabi, Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh, Zurich, and Karachi

Search Keywords

These are a list of the top 20 keywords that direct people to this site and then some odd ones that make me wonder what people think we do here. People in the entrepreneur space are hot on this blog.

It seems that people are coming to this site sometimes to learn not only about the education industry but about people who have started ventures, tried something new or different, and are looking to connect with people who have made an impact in some measurable way in education. Here's a sample:

1. daniel pianko

2. john katzman

3. venture capital for the education industry

4. education industry investment forum

5. education industry investment forum 2009

6. jordan goldman

7. jordan goldman unigo

8. shai reshef

9. knowledge investment partners

10. university of the people shai reshef

11. india has more honors kids than america has kids

12. eiif

13. howard block

14. education investment forum

15. tabula digita

16. eduvest

17. keith oelrich

18. inetoo

19. dan madzelan

20. arthur benjamin ati

And then the other remaining umpteen dozen thousands plus search terms that have led people to this blog give you a great sense of the zeitgeist in the global economy and the viewpoints of people in the education industry:

"how bad is the american economy right now?"

"philanthropy is the gateway to power"

"fastest growing continent"

"number of honors students in india"

"arne duncan"

"grand canyon university ipo"

"will we need teachers in the future?"

"what is barack obama's education agenda?"

"explain education as an investment"

"90:10 education obama"

"inspector general's warning to accreditor raises fear"

"three year cohort default rate"

Much more later. There's a whole series of stories to be written in these search terms. If you aggregate them according to time and date, you can pretty much track a pressure cooker economy blowing up and then settling into recession and perhaps, maybe, generating a recovery?

Stay tuned. I will blogging on here while I am in China.

The Visa Office, and Standing in No Line

Something happened to me today that I thought you might want to know about.

I went to go submit my Chinese visa at the Consulate on 12th Avenue in New York City. I rushed over in the taxi, got out at the curb and walked in, expecting a huge line and hordes of people, or at the very best a bureaucratic nightmare. This has been my experience at other visa offices around the world -- especially in Hong Kong at the Indian Consulate and the Consulate of Myanmar.

Just past the security barrier, where the two officers screened my jacket, my phone and my Kindle, is a small room divided in two by two very wide pillars. There are about twenty chairs, blue colored, arranged in neat rows. And scattered in the chairs are a mix of about a dozen people, some of them Chinese-looking, waiting patiently. It was hard to figure out what they were waiting for, but they seemed to have been there for a while.

There was a rope cordon that directed traffic to windows, but at the end of the cordon corridor, another cordon had been erected, blocking any exit from that corridor. So, where was the line.

I reflected on this for a moment. It was so interesting that I anticipated and looked for a line. In China, and in fact, in many situations, there's no sense of a line. My China instincts kicked in. I moved around the back of the room, around the two large pillars, and just stood in a proximate way, next to two people I thought to be in what would probably be a line if there were more than two of them standing there.

One of them moved. He went to a window. Then the other person moved, and she went to a window. And then the first man who went to the previous window moved away, and then the woman in the window looked at me expectantly. I moved to the window, submitted the application, was given my form, and told to come back tomorrow.

What does this have to do with education?

We figure things out on our own, I think. I have learned from my time in Hong Kong, and my occasional trips to China, that my best laid defenses -- wanting and expecting order, following order, and looking for lines -- don't really work when you are on the move and in a new territory. It pays to plan ahead, but it also pays to let those plans slide, and do what is necessary in the moment.

Standing in the Chinese consulate, I was back in China, literally. I was on their turf. It is so refreshing to give up one's sense of order and adopt the expectations of another group.

Can we do that within our own culture? Can we practice a kind of capitalist compassion for the order that others wish to force on us, our schoolchildren and our teachers? Let's turn that into a passion for disruption and the creativity of disorder.

Sometimes decision makers, like presidents, policy makers and legislators and other lofty people want to make decisions for us in education. They want to tell us what to read, or how to learn. They want to tell us where to go to school and how to build that school model.

There are great people out there, don't get me wrong. But there are so many people out there with great business ideas that are not being heard, or, having been heard, cannot realize their dreams because of what amounts to a love of structure and a distaste for disruption.

A calm and business-like approach to passion for disruption should create a dignified and powerful conversation.

And if you want to talk about this with me personally, or with people like Ron Packard, CEO, K12 and some other professionals in the space, you can find us on January 20 in New York at the collaborative and worlwide Business Breakfast at the Omni Hotel.

Register, and get into the disruption.

My Profession - My Passion

This post is from Surabhi Dewra, our correspondent in India. Please enjoy.


"Harry works at the airport's ticket counter. It has been years since Harry has been checking the tickets of the passengers who wait in long queues for their turn. On one side, most of these travelers are tired or just too impatient to stand in the long queue. On the other side Harry too is always tired and bored of his work, and doesn’t bother to exchange a 'Hi' with them - each time he has to repeat the same process. As a result, Harry is slow at work, which in turn makes the travelers wait a little longer.

On the other counter is Harry's colleague, George. There is a long queue too here, but many travelers in this queue are wearing a smile. Because they don't have to wait for long- their queue moves pretty fast. And once they reach the counter where George is checking their ticket, they are happy and exchange a couple of words with George. George is really quick at his work. In fact he is the fastest among the staff.

Why is the difference between Harry's work speed and George’s? And why are travelers not unhappy when they are standing in queue at George's counter?

Because George does not see his work as mere work. George enjoys his work - checking the traveler's tickets, conversing with them, and making them feel happy about the travel. Yes, George is passionate about his work."

How relevant the above story is in our lives! Contentment in a profession comes only with passion for that work. Else a profession turns into a forced job, where there is only stress and tension of meeting deadly deadlines, torturing targets and running in the rat race to get to a bigger cubicle. But bigger cubicles don't happen without passion for one's work. All that can happen is the death of a career or profession trapped within in the lifeless walls of cubicle.

To drive the above mentioned point among Indian Students we at MeraCareerGuide.Com have created few assessments which talks about interest based career selection and personality based career selection. These career assessments helps in understanding the fact that personality is also helpful in career planning. For example, an introverted person is unlikely to be successful in sales!!

These tests give personality profiles, which will give insight to identify the work environments that suits best.

Whatever work you are in, pause for a moment. Ponder over if you’re doing justice to work. Be George who is passionate towards what he is doing. Who doesn’t crib when he sees a long line of travelers standing at his counter. Nor is he bored. He has found the fun of seeing every traveler’s ticket and striking a conversation with them. He waits for his work to begin every morning, and not look for excuses to avoid work.

Make your work your life. And not your life your work. Be another George. It’s worth it.

Stephen Tave Interview: The Fast Economy and Career Colleges

Interview with Stephen Tave, one of the speakers at the 2010 Education Industry Investment Forum.

Practitioners in for-profit higher education administration tend to be off on the side, compared to how education in this country is viewed generally. Focused on growing companies and creating value for students, it's quite often that you get a good deal of skepticism about the role of for-profit education. That's because of the relative newness of the for-profit school in a hundreds of years tradition of socially-driven education.

These are some of the most interesting points that I have found in Tave's interview with me in New York City last week. I had come to his offices at 2 Penn Plaza to ask him about the future of education. His focus: structure and offering students what they need to survive in the marketplace.

What can a school do to prepare itself and its students for the future?

Schools should have think tanks that focus on what to offer students for the future.

What's going to be popular five or ten years from now? You have to have a certain part of your organization that just focuses on that. You have to have a think tank working on the green opportunities coming on down the line.

Tave points out that the Wind Energy Association just made an agreement with some career colleges to provide education support and job training. Taking a risk like that, without proven return, is a necessary risk and could help your organization in the long run.

You are jumping curves, but it shouldn't stop you from putting the infrastructure in place and constantly testing if that is going to be the case.

Taht constant testing, if accreditation limits didn't stand too much in the way, would enable a career college to do more than be competitive against traditional four-year institutions. In fact, that is not so much the point as it is to just be as flexible as the real marketplace. The marketplace is filled with people who are testing limits, creating new ideas, and immediately putting them out there in the market to test and to generate a return on investment.

The career college vertical is synonymous with that marketplace rigor. In the past, we have talked on this blog about the Ivory Tower mentality of education. Tave went a little further and said that he saw that kind of flexibility in place already, even though it needed to be tweaked and assisted to perform faster and more rigorously:

Our schools are very precise in what they train for, and the rate of return on what you invest in is measured every day. The way we have the ability to efficiently to bring new curriculum is that we have to be able to do the "here-and-now" when it occurs, and not have it in some committee for ten years, and then its all antiquated and isn't necessary for the actual job market that is out there. It's exciting to work in that type of environment.

President Barack Obama Says the Internet is an Educator

During his town hall in China, President Barack Obama talks about how the internet opened up opportunities for himself and for his daughters. He says that he was able to win the presidency with help from the internet.

And he says that that his daughters Sasha and Malia are able to look up information on China and learn anything they want to learn.

Here's that video clip:

Being Gladwellian: An Education in Not Listening to Experience

What is cliche? I believe cliche is the uttered evocative statement that has lost its evocation. It is gloss over nuance and the rivets that keep life together.

Maureen Tkacik gets a little gruff with Malcolm Gladwell over his cliches, but I'm not telling how she ends her own essay. You can read Gladwell for Dummies for yourself.

She reviews his work and posits that he is not the Francisco Redihe thinks he is. In other words, he is a person who glosses over truth, and speaks pretty for industry titans. He's not the guy who has found a new way to deduce what is happening in reality.

Here's her take:

Stars! They're just like us. Which is to say, every time Gladwell begins to close in on a conclusion of real meaning or intellectual impact, he clicks his heels and returns to the mental Melrose Place of quippy clichés. What's more, he apparently has no problem espousing the whole-truthness of two antithetical clichés--the innateness of genius and "The Power of Context" (as Gladwell had christened this truism in The Tipping Point) at almost simultaneous moments in time. Reduced further, depending on Gladwell's narrative needs, genius is either nature or nurture, and he has cheerily eaten his cake, wrapped it up neatly in a take-away box and left us wondering where the crumbs disappeared to.

It may seem obvious to some that these are false dichotomies; neither half is ever true to the exclusion of the other. But that is the rub: there are a great many book buyers determined to hedge their bets in precisely this Gladwellian mode. Depending on the situation, they want to believe in the sovereign power of either nature or nurture--to convince themselves that anyone can be a success but also that should one be so unfortunate as to fail, that failure was predestined by an accident of fate. This is the contradictory "story of success" that runs through Gladwell's articles, The Tipping Point and Outliers. The "power of apparent inevitability," as The Economist termed it, is a narrative that his hungriest readers can use to explain any turn their lives might take, and it was precisely these readers who flooded Gladwell's e-mail inbox with raves about how The Tipping Point had empowered them to take control of their lives and "contexts."

And here:

By the time Gladwell produced a sequel to The Tipping Point, Blink, his preference for light vignettes featuring plucky heroes over grimmer fare was proving its own insult. In Blink's afterword, he describes the book as "a journey into the wonders of our unconscious" but one that should not "be confused with the unconscious described by Sigmund Freud, which was a dark and murky place filled with desires and memories and fantasies that were too disturbing for us to think about consciously." Instead, Blink plumbs an unconscious realm that is surprisingly hospitable. Gladwell makes the case that because human existence is entirely too rich and nuanced to be reducible to data or logic (and by extension, to arguments or allegations), reason and reflex blend over time to yield snap decisions that are often better than the best-laid plans.

Oh, but it gets better.

In that case, perhaps Gladwell's intellectual compromises are neither commercial nor unintentional but rather a necessary outgrowth of his higher calling: to explore the secret workings of the world and impart the resulting data to its self-appointed stewards, the titans of industry. This conclusion, if true, may resolve many of the most puzzling incongruities riddling Gladwell's articles: his continued defense of the pharmaceutical industry even as he advocates for single-payer healthcare; his refusal to indict the financial sector's rigged "star system" as the engine of corruption that it is; the meticulous bleaching of his own prose so that he's whitewashed out any real context, any framework in which wars and economic collapses can actually be understood as wars and economic collapses rather than simulations or malfunctions; his near total avoidance of academic thought that does not base its findings on things observed in labs (with the exception of Carl Jung, whose legacy he reduces to the popularization of personality tests); his coyness about politics; and most memorably, his irritating, unrelenting readability.

Did Arne Duncan Save Healthcare?

Arne Duncan part of last minute health care deal

African-American Workers Laid Off in Strikingly Bleak Numbers

Fast Company, where I maintain a blog, puts up some incredible analysis of a recent New York Times infographic, and it's something that you should pay attention to, with your thinking cap situated firmly on your head.

Take for example that the unemployment rate for what Fast Company describes as "black" men and women "without a high school degree" is 42.7%. How can our economy survive with that statistic? And what is being done about helping these people maintain a high school education to receive the degree, or go back to high school and get a certification?



The other question this raises for me is this: is there proof that completing high school serves in and of itself as an incentive to go and get a higher degree?

How are degrees-to-job satisfaction or job acquisition ratios calculated? Are they tabulated anywhere? I'd like to see how often someone with a high school degree decides not to go to a higher degree course.

You can read the whole thing below:

Jobless Rate for people like you

PS22 Is Singing a Song from The Cure

Pictures of You

Lunch: Tofu Koans

You can follow us on Twitter, where during lunch I often spout off tofu-induced koans about reality, learning, education and imagination.

Seriously, something about a good Thai food dish sends me back to Thailand, and then thinking about reality in the way that Buddhists might. Questioning the assumption that what I am experiencing is actually real, and what more can be made of that, once it is understood that illusion has a way of seeming real.

Enjoy!

Government Wants Financial Companies Out of Student Loan Business

Bank student loans set for overhaul, according to this post by American Banking News.

At the heart of the legislation, Congress is aiming to get subsidized private companies out of the student lending business and turn it over to the government. Some predict that the proposal will eliminate up to $80 billion in costs by the end of the next decade by eliminating subsidies that are paid to lenders to keep their interest rates down.

The savings from the payment would be used to make colleges more affordable for low-income individuals by increasing the maximum Pell Grant by $1,400 up to a maximum of $6,900. In order to make up for the lack of affordable private student loans that are expected, the government is planning to offer additional low interest loans to students.

Education: Reaching the Inner Monkey

By chance, my friend Jason Bennett, who works with Microsoft and lives in Seattle, began discussing an experiment that dealt with teaching monkeys how to see, even though they had been relieved of their sight. I didn't get all the details of the experiment, and perhaps Jason, if he is reading this, can fill in the details in the comments section.

The point is, I think that Jason's story achieves a good metapohorical representation of what makes the education industry exciting. It's totally an industry that, as a business network, is trying to deal with bringing sight to a group of people who they believe lack vision.

Here's the story:

Rob Crawford Explains the Future of American Education in a New Era

Resource for Indian Education Market

You want a little more information on the Indian education industry, you say?

You should really talk to Rahul Choudaha, who wrote this dissertation (click on the link) about finding a core competency curriculum in international education.

Rahul will be joining us on this blog, where he will be writing from time to time about the intersections and differences in the India-United States for-profit education industry relationship.

Rahul also writes the Dr. Education: Diagnosing Indian Education blog.

Teaching Young Girls, Spiting the Taliban

An article on what it means to teach young children in the Forever War, the name given to the war in Afghanistan, popularized by reporter Dexter Filkins.

An excerpt from the article, where the protagonist is stopped by an extremist and sprayed with battery acid for, among other things, having the audacity to go to school a few miles away from the hometown of Mullah Muhammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban:

Shamsia Husseini and her sister, Atifa, were walking along the highway when they spotted the men on the motorbikes. Shamsia, then 17, was old enough to be married; she was wearing a black scarf that covered most of her face. Shamsia had seen Taliban gunmen before and figured the men on the motorcycles would pass. Then one of the bikes pulled alongside her, and the man on back jumped off. Through the mask, he asked Shamsia what seemed like a strange question.

“Are you going to school?”

The masked man pulled the scarf away from Shamsia’s face and, with his other hand, pumped the trigger on his spray gun. Shamsia felt as if her face and eyes were on fire. As she screamed, the masked man reached for Atifa, who was already running. He pulled at her and tore her scarf away and pumped the spray into her back. The men sped off toward another group of girls. Shamsia lay in the street holding her burning face.

How to Become a Tutor In Hong Kong

The new scandal de jeur in Hong Kong is the rise of very wealthy tutors for public school students in the island territory just off the coast of China.

Hong Kong private tutor centers are cashing in on changes the public school system curriculum, but long before that, famous and sometimes notorious private tutors have been earning millions teaching students how to be successful at what is, very broadly speaking, a by rote and memorization school system in Hong Kong.

This is a touchy subject in Hong Kong. When vacationing students offer to help other students with summer school homework for money, people tend to get skittish and all sorts of moral volleys are lobbed each way and that.

But private forms of education, like many forms of business in Hong Kong, offer topographies for success in a purely capitalist system.

I was a private tutor once, and let me just demonstrate how easy it was to start up my own mini business while I went to grad school in the territory.

It took a few things:

1. Connections -- First and foremost, this is really how many people get anywhere in China and Hong Kong. I knew the wife of a pretty well-known Goldman Sachs director, who, after discussing with me my career options for funding my journalism degree at the local university, put in a polite word or two to six well-connected and wealthy business people near the Southern district of the island, where I lived at the time.

2. Credentials -- In addition to pursuing a second masters' degree, I had one master's degree in creative writing and a B.A in English literature from American universities. I also used to be a teacher. I spoke well, with a Midwestern accent. These really were all the credentials anyone needed. Just show off the degree.

3. Work Cheaply -- I started rates at only HK$400 an hour. That's about US$60 an hour. That is actually relatively cheap for a private English tutor in Hong Kong, someone who visits the home for one hour to one and a half hours a week.

In addition to providing my own transportation -- bus, taxi, or subway -- my other fixed costs were writing tablets to demonstrate handwriting and spelling techniques, novels and textbooks to provide lessons, and pencils and pens.

Really low overhead. I didn't have facilities I needed to maintain. I didn't have to register my name anywhere, or pay a licensing fee.

I am not sure if the same is true for the island's tuition centers, which line the streets of Wan Chai and offer everything from basic math and science tutorials to the big cash cow, English lessons. They even get their photo spreads on city buses.

Free market capitalism never had a greater market to generate profits. A tutor is portable, self-sufficient, and brand recognition all in one.

And it doesn't hurt that the Chinese value education and use it as a means to advance their life and career.

Outside Operators Eye 250 L.A. Unified School District Schools

The views expressed in the following post come from guest blogger Rob Crawford, CEO of The Life Development Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.

The Los Angeles City Board of Education's vote to allow outside private school providers help turn around the district's education system looks like an opening for those entities willing to do the proverbial "dance with the devil", as this move represents a complete 180 degree turn in how children will be educated in the nation's second largest school district.

This could mean several things, among them: more public financing for privately held companies offering educational services to school districts, as well as a surge of interest in VC and private equity funding of ancillary products and services to education in the public realm.

Bidding for contracts could begin as soon as January 2010. With as many as 250 schools or nearly one third of the district's almost 700,000 students impacted by this decision, the ensuing chaos will create at minimum, short term disruption and displacement.

There are great story lines in this drama- a powerful and connected political bureaucracy, the lure of "school choice", as well as a strong entrenched teacher's union. Popular opinion against political establishment with kids/parents in the middle- a juicy story....stay tuned!