More About Edu-to-Employment

Posted: April 1st, 2014 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 1 Comment »

The IFC folks have assembled a great panel. A few moments that I recall:

Saleh Al-Amr is CEO of Colleges of Excellence in Saudi Arabia.

CoE offer certificates and diplomas in specialized application areas for high school graduates who are Saudis or sons and daughters of Saudi mothers, in addition, during the preparatory year, CoE focuses on developing English language and communication skills.

So here’s how the Saudi government did it. They did a request for proposals from lots of colleges around the world. Then they picked 10. Each college gets paid per student a base amount, but there are incentive payments too, for results. Three types of results, Saleh said:

Inspection (team visits college, decides if it’s great – double payment, or good – 50% payment)

Exams

Employment outcomes of the graduates

The basic idea here makes so much sense: A Race To The Top competition to get providers of education to open up in Saudi Arabia, and then a measurement system that creates incentives to excel once the providers are chosen.

The moderator, Jorge Klor de Alva of Nexus Research and Policy Center, said:

I’m half Mex and half Russian. So in both countries, the motto is rise early, work hard, find oil. What happens for countries where you can’t find oil?

Doug Becker responded. He is chairman and chief executive officer of Laureate Education Inc., which was once Sylvan Learning Systems. They operate in a ton of countries. Doug said something along the lines of:

All of this problem-solving is inherently local. A country without oil finds another way. Meanwhile, some of the challenges of even this effort will be local. For example, it’s great that Colleges Of Excellence is now enrolling 300% more girls — but will they get jobs in male-dominated industries? Those solutions — for example, is self-employment an alternative for them? — need to be local too.

He later added:

The best driver of future employment is a good internship. All of our data says that. But most internships as done by colleges are terrible, done as an afterthought.

Brazil regulators do one great thing — examine college grads based on an exam, what they learned — outputs versus inputs. But in most places where our company does business, people focus on useless inputs, like whether the instructor has a Phd, or how many books are in the library.

Gabriel then said:

Here is a practical thing governments could do to generate more employable adults. When a country bids a large engineering project, they ask for specs including how many engineers, how many tractors, etc. They never set a clear target for “using the local workforce.” Never. People might think it’s impractical. But this is my business, and I say it would be simple to put that in a bid. It would force the private sector to innovate here on job training.