Students – the migrants everyone wants

By Joris Ranchin and Cuauhtemoc Rebolledo-Gómez 
Staticians, Innovation and Measuring Progress Division 

International students are one of the fastest growing parts of the global education system. In just 20 years their numbers have more than doubled, and there are now over 4 million young people currently studying abroad to get their degree. Driven as much by a rise in tertiary education as by an increasingly globalised world, they are taking advantage of cheaper travel and communication costs to improve their language skills, get high-status qualifications – and give themselves a leg up in a competitive job market. But they’re not the only ones benefiting. The countries they are flocking to are cashing in while countries like China encourage their young people to travel abroad to study in order to bring their new skills home.

So who are these new students and where do they go? The latest edition of Education Indicators in Focus suggests that the global market in education is changing and that there’s increasing competition for these globetrotting young people.

Meet the international student
Your typical international student will be from Asia – most likely China, India or Korea, the top three countries of origin for foreign students. They are overwhelmingly likely to be studying in an OECD country, and preferably  an English-speaking one  – with the United States the number one destination, followed by the United Kingdom and Australia. They’ll probably be studying social sciences, business or the law, and increasingly they’ll be found at the very highest levels of education – one in five of those enrolled in advanced research programmes in the OECD are now international students, and more than one in four in some countries.

Price isn’t everything (but it helps)
With so much choice on offer, international students have to take many factors into account. A country’s reputation and the courses it offers matter – as does the cost. Fees have been rising, with the vast majority of countries charging their international students more than their domestic ones. High fees needn’t necessarily be a deterrent, especially if there are scholarships available or students can work to offset the cost. But at least some of America’s decline as a destination for international students may be due to high university fees, especially as a good quality degree is now on offer more cheaply elsewhere. Sweden is a prime example of this – after introducing tuition fees for students from outside Europe, it saw numbers plummet by more than half in a single year.

Language and laws are also key
There are other barriers – and bridges – to international students, the most important being language and immigration policies. Because English-speaking destinations are so popular, some non-English speaking countries have even taken to offering courses in English to attract more students. Some countries have changed their immigration laws to make it easier for students to come in, and to stay on once they’ve graduated – although others such as the United States and the United Kingdom are increasingly making it harder for international students to enter the country. As a result of these changes, some of the old certainties are changing. Destinations like Germany – and even the United States – are losing popularity, while new destinations – the Russian Federation, New Zealand, Korea – are rising fast.

A changing market in a changing world
Increasingly, international students are seen as an asset both for the countries and the institutions that host them. As well as their fees and their living expenses during the period of study – Canada, for instance, estimates that foreign students are a bigger earner than aluminium or aerospace – international students can benefit the economy long term if they stay on after their education. Patterns of travel reflect  broader migration patterns as students seek countries which already have ties with home, but they also reflect the way countries and institutions are competing to attract the brightest and the best. International students are changing themselves as they get experience of life abroad – but they’re also changing the world they live in.

For more information 
On this topic, visit:
Education Indicators in Focus
On the OECD’s education indicators, visit: http://www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm
Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators: www.oecd.org/edu/eag2013

For immigrant students, early arrival is best

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Arriving in a new country, in a new school as an immigrant student is never easy. But the transition can be a little less damaging if the student has already spent a few of his or her earliest years in his new home country. This month’s PISA in Focus examines the “late-arrival” penalty in student performance among immigrant students who arrived in their new country at the age of 12 or older.

An analysis of PISA data shows that there are no marked differences in reading proficiency between immigrant students who arrived in their new country before they were five and those who arrived between the ages of six and 11. In contrast, in most OECD countries, immigrant students who arrived at the age of 12 or older – and have spent at most four years in their new country – lag farther behind students in the same grade in reading proficiency than immigrants who arrived at younger ages. 

Countries and economies vary markedly in the magnitude of this “late-arrival penalty” for immigrant students. Differences tend to reflect the composition of the immigrant populations. Australia, for instance, has a large proportion of immigrants from the United Kingdom who already speak the same language as non-immigrant Australians. As a result, the average late-arrival penalty for immigrants in Australia is smaller than that in Germany, for example, where the largest groups of students who were born abroad come from the former USSR, the former Yugoslavia and Turkey.

An examination of age-at-arrival profiles for the major immigrant groups in selected countries confirms the importance of language barriers. In Luxembourg, French children do not suffer a late-arrival penalty; and age-at-arrival seems to make no difference to the reading performance among German students who immigrated to Switzerland. In contrast, 15-year-old students from the former Yugoslavia or Portugal who arrived in Switzerland or Luxembourg within the previous few years fare much worse in reading than immigrant students from the same countries who had spent all their school years in their new country.

But language may not be the only factor involved. Differences in educational and living standards between the origin and destination countries may also be relevant. Overall, an analysis of PISA data finds that immigrant students are particularly at risk of suffering a late-arrival penalty if they arrived at lower secondary-school age from less-developed countries where the home language is not the same as their new language of instruction. These students have to quickly acquire language skills and catch up with the higher levels of attainment achieved by their peers – while simultaneously coping with the difficulties of adjusting to a new school and social environment.

These findings can be used to inform immigration policy: Where late arrival is the result of migration policies that delay family reunification, the intended benefits of these policies should be carefully weighed against the costs of remedial assistance. More immediately, though, targeted help with language skills for those foreign-born students who arrive when they’re in their teens can limit the need for future assistance;and flexible arrangements to defer tracking can help to ensure that students perform at their full potential when decisions are taken about further education. Both measures will have a direct impact on these students’ employment prospects later on.

Links:   
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/

PISA in Focus No. 29: Do immigrant students’ reading skills depend on how longthey have been in their new country?

Photo credit: Children in school, from kindergarten, preschool, elementary / Shutterstock

The language of dissent

Language matters to Lea Rosenberg.

The former English teacher and high school principal who is now Deputy Director General of International Relations and UNESCO at Israel’s Ministry of Education recently made an impassioned appeal to fellow education policy makers that they, essentially, watch their language when talking about education. Using the terminology of other disciplines to discuss education policy, Rosenberg argues, does a disservice to education. Rosenberg was speaking at a high-level meeting of representatives of education ministries held at the OECD’s Paris headquarters in mid-October.
Marilyn Achiron, Editor at the OECD’s Directorate for Education, spoke with her after the meeting.

Lea Rosenberg: Throughout the years, when different paradigms from different worlds were introduced into the world of education, people were fascinated by the opportunities that these paradigms gave to education. They enabled larger and deeper views into what education is all about. At the same time, the status of education, compared to other professions, is usually low. So take these two things together and you arrive at where we are now.

We have talked about education through the sociological paradigm, where students are not people, but parts of populations. Of course, teachers should take note of the populations to which students belong and understand them, but that should not be the leading language of education. It is a “foreign language”. Understanding how students and teachers function is fine, but when we used the paradigm of psychology to discuss education – another “foreign language” – teachers started understanding students better, but they lost the notion of demanding something from students. If you don’t demand something from students, you cripple them; you treat them as though they are incapable.

Now we are using management language – talking of “inputs” and “outputs” – and we’re disappointed that the results are not what we expect. Principals and teachers should know and understand this language, but it is not education’s work. The same is true with the language of economics. We depend on economics: it is crucial, elementary to our existence. But this is not the language that should lead the world of education. For example, the word “accountability”: it deals with accounts. I would prefer that our teachers are “responsible” and not only “accountable”. Responsibility covers the range of human emotions, behaviours and activities – elements, such as caring, that are not covered by “accountability”. Students might do well in mathematics, but their morals and values might be terrible.

That is what we should be concerned about: What kind of person comes out of our education systems? The language of education focuses on being responsible for students as whole beings. Of course achievement is important, but students are human beings. The language of education is one of helping students overcome difficulties, taking differences into account, steering students through their mistakes so that they learn something and can then move on. Terminology affects the way we see the world. It affects the way we see students and the way we act towards them. This is especially true in education, where language is the only tool we have.

Links: 
Languages in a Global World: Learning for Better Cultural Understanding
Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st Century - Lessons from around the world
Photo credit: Dictionary entry for "education"/Shutterstock

A Curriculum for the Next Billion

by Charles Leadbeater
Author of Learning from the Extremes and Innovation in Education: Lessons from Pioneers Around the World, published by Bloomsbury with the support of the The Qatar Foundation’s WISE initiative.

Today, global companies are fascinated by the prospect of what the World Economic Forum calls ‘the next billion’ – the future consumers of the developing world whose income is rising from around $2 a day to between $5 and $7 a day. Most of these people are recently arrived in rapidly expanding cities, often living in the poorest areas: every month about 5 million people in the developing world move to cities.

If we were to look at these families as parents and learners, what kind of education will they be looking for? Or to put it another way, if we were to design a curriculum with ‘the next billion’ what would they want?

Having spent much of the last three years visiting a wide variety of education projects in cities across the developing world, it strikes me that the first thing that people want is facility with a global language, usually English, but also in some places Spanish and, in others, Mandarin. They want a language that will give them access to people and jobs linked to global networks and trade – a business hotel, a job in retail, manning a phone in a call centre – rather than confining them to ply their trade in purely local markets.

Next they want a mastery of basic mathematics, the ability to understand numbers and do fairly basic sums, like working out discounts or more complex applications like planning a production schedule. Maths is foundational to much else that people need, and want. to learn.

The third ingredient is digital literacy. People need to be able to work competently and capably with computers, and not just the basics of the Microsoft world of Word and Excel, but increasingly the world of the web and social media, apps and programming. They need to be comfortable with having to learn, and learn again, as technology changes.

None of that, however, is worth very much unless they are skilled at working together with other people. So the fourth thing their education needs to give them is a well-grounded experience in social skills so they know how to respond to customers and work well with their colleagues, to find collaborative solutions to problems. Some of those skills are social and relational, based on empathy and sympathy. But others are more about collaborative self-government, which is why it is so important that education provides children with ample, structured, challenging opportunities to work together, in groups, on projects which they can make their own. As social media spreads so it will open up ever more opportunities for people to find one another and come together to achieve common goals. Citizens will need to learn how to make the most of these technologies, for better government, richer culture and more successful businesses.

All of this needs to be married to entrepreneurial and creative capacity, by which I mean the ability to spot an opportunity, mobilise support to take it, learn how to take risks and recover from setbacks. Most of the ‘next billion’ will find themselves working in small entrepreneurial companies. Studies of the urban poor show that many have to hold down two or three jobs to survive. Their education needs to help them become micro-entrepreneurs, adaptive and resilient, fleet of foot. Learning to juggle work if, not balls, is a key skill.

The slim core skills set out above might provide the starting point for thinking about the kinds of skills all young people might need in the years ahead, in the developed and the developing world.

Yet that is only at best half the story. Setting out what people should learn is just the starting point. How they learn is almost as important. Effective learning needs to be a structured, well-designed, highly engaging activity which challenges and stretches young people as well as supporting them and building their confidence. It needs to pull people to it, by the laws of attraction. Too much of the time at school it is the other way around: people are pushed into learning they do not really understand and cannot make meaningful.

To be motivating learning needs to be intrinsically satisfying and to offer at least the distant prospect of a pay-off: a better job; a practical skill; a useful way of thinking.

Achieving that will mean that learning will have to become more connected to, if not located in, the real world of work and production. The most impressive and attractive places to learn in future, in the developed and developing world, will give young people ample opportunities to design and make, produce and sell things, with their hands and their heads. They should go to school to learn by working and having fun. They should study by making and building rather than sitting and listening.

Too often education is seen as a pristine preparation for a later career. Work is held at bay for as long as possible. I doubt we can afford that distinction in the future in which education increasingly seems to be losing touch with the real world that young people live in – and the real world seems increasingly unwilling to give them the jobs they crave. We need learning to give young people a real sense of what creative, satisfying, productive work can be, so they can take those standards and expectations into their later working life.

All innovators succeed by challenging ingrained conventional wisdom. Breaking down the barriers between work and learning will be one of the chief opportunities for educational innovators in the decades to come, especially if they want to meet the needs of the next billion parents and children entering formal education.


Links:
Innovation in Education: Lessons from Pioneers around the World
See also: OECD Skills Strategy

Visit our interactive portal on skills: http://skills.oecd.org
Languages in a Global World: Learning for Better Cultural Understanding

Photo credit: Population of our World in Colour / Shutterstock

Let’s learn a new language

by Lynda Hawe
Communications Officer, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), Directorate for Education 

How many of you have experienced while travelling, in a country which hosts a foreign language and a different culture, the desperate need to wholeheartedly express yourself?  As frantically you watch your intrigued interlocutor return your inadequate efforts with blank looks of total incomprehension! Then, with the support of some friendly smiles, warm gestures and some very theatrical hand waving motions, suddenly the situation eases and you feel a connection, even if you’re still not completely understood!

The language assets of a country, as well as the language components of human capital of individuals, can provide to be of a comparative advantage in our globalising world. Visibly, globalisation transcends time and geographical barriers as well as political and social ideals. It also enhances the blending of cultural elements, such as music, languages and cuisine.

Currently, the use of more than one language is no longer exceptional - over six billion people in the world speak an estimated six thousand languages.  Moreover, as UNESCO explains, there are many endangered languages with the risk that the disappearance of these unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge.

Amazingly, for early infants simple gaze following is a crucial developmental component because it enables language learning and their acquisition of new skills via imitation and instruction, as explained by Dr. Meltzoff of the LIFE Center at a recent CERI and New Science Foundation (NSF) conference during his presentation on Social Cognition and the Early Years.  But it’s never too late to learn a new language; a current project on brain function investigates how mastering of multiple languages can have profound effects on our cognitive abilities, extending beyond social and communicative benefits. Bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a variety of tasks that are cognitively demanding, such as those drawing on executive processes such as inhibitory control and working memory.

Consequently, nothing is more fundamentally connected to education than language. And isn’t it just amazing how languages issues manage to arouse such strong emotional reactions? Positions in the various debates on languages in education can also have strong political consequences. Even in the scientific community research findings and scholarly arguments are transformed easily into causes that appear to need to be vigorously endorsed. The strong emotional and political loading of language issues in education can be explained by the rapidly changing social context in which old concepts seem to clash with the exigencies of newer ones.   For example, in the United States at the Abraham Lincoln Elementary School, located in Indianapolis, Indiana there are 59 languages spoken among the student body.  Here they have found that many children from other countries are quick to learn English, but communicating with their families is often a much bigger challenge.

The Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)'s upcoming book “Languages in a Global World: Learning for Better Cultural Understanding” demonstrates how issues concerning languages in education are undergoing profound transitions as a consequence of globalisation, migration and changes in modern societies.  This book will look at the big questions of language diversity around the world and its relation to education learning.  Since learning a new language is not only a means to improving communication, but more importantly a way to promote global understanding.

Given that culture and language are inextricably intertwined, learning a language necessitates familiarising oneself with a new culture. This gives us the unique opportunity to step outside our familiar scope of existence. It allows us to view culture's customs, traditions and norms as well as our own value systems through the eyes of others.  Does this understanding promote appreciation of cultural differences, which in turn creates more tolerance and thus a better appreciation of others? People often express a perceived positive and productive change in their identities as a result of experiences with other languages and cultures.

Learn more:
• OECD work on Globalisation and Linguistic Competencies
• OECD work on the brain and learning
• Activities in the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) 

Related blog posts and articles:

• Internet and Language Change, Macmillan Dictionary Blog 
• China's drive to teach English stalls in the west, The Guardian
• My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling, The New York Times
• Variety of languages challenges, enriches schools Indystar 
• How Language Affects Thought, Education Matters blogspot
• UNESCO International Mother Language day is on 21st of February 

Photo Credit © dihrespati