Collegium Novum at Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Photo by Jan Mehlich)

Q: There’s a perception in the United States that we are beginning to slip behind, and that there are some competitors out there. Poland’s achievements in the economic realm especially, and in universities, are prompting people to look at this country as something serious. And yet the OECD reported seven years ago that Poland needed to close the gaps between universities and the workplace, and make learning more active in higher education. What still needs to be done?

A: First, universities are functioning much better in open space, in the sense that when transformation is moving faster and faster in our society in other areas, it is influencing our higher-education institutions to open our ideas to everything that goes on outside. Right now there is no need to protect selfishly our experience as a unique system which has to be preserved and protected. Maybe colleagues at Oxford or Harvard can believe—let them believe they deserve to be treated very seriously—but most institutions all over the world have to look around…

I often repeat to my colleagues, we are not protected against failure. We can destroy the chance of our university if we do not offer something more interesting, more appealing to the younger generation—this generation which has this impressive capability to communicate with themselves, and who can go very quickly [to universities] outside of Poland.

I have spoken with people in the IT field who believe Polish university graduates are very competent in terms of basic skills, but aren’t very prepared for the situations they’ll face in the working world. They say there’s too much lecturing but not enough teamwork and practical projects or challenges. I’m wondering whether you are at the point of being able to reinvent the way undergraduate teaching takes place. Is the classroom experience changing fundamentally?

The biggest transformation took place when we accepted the Bologna system. Five years of studying were transformed into 3+2. And at the beginning it was just strictly mechanical, just cut. This was definitely not the idea of the Bologna Process…

After 10 years of experience, we have begun to define a method of teaching that would allow a graduate with three years of study, with a first degree, [to gain] a readiness to be active on the labor market…

[He cites research from Austria suggesting that the labor market in Europe has “not accepted” the three-year bachelor’s degree adopted by many countries, putting pressure on students to continue studying for master’s degrees.]

This is a good moment for defining the first level of education in a completely different way.  That should be [a degree] which gives you enough knowledge and skills and social competence to be active on the labor market…

I do not believe “revolution” is the word that should be used for transformation of the educational system, because a lot of people are involved in this process. We really have to at first convince them that transformation gives them a chance to teach in a different way according to their potential and their chances. In a short [amount of time] I have to ask people, for example, to forget about the traditional lectures. What could you offer instead of traditional lectures?

We found from questionnaires sent to students that not all lecturers are interesting. They would like to have more moot courts for the lawyers. They would like to have more, let’s say, training groups organized for small groups of students… There is a strong pressure from students… They do not want to study some theoretical aspect just for nothing, without understanding what they want to do with their life. I like this new approach…

So what do you do about this? Do you hire young professors to work with the older professors, people who have had recent experience in the marketplace? How quickly can you change?

From the formal point of view, according to new regulations, our new program [began] Oct. 1, 2012. This means that everybody accepted by the admission committee, they have to study in a new way and in new programs, built on the idea of the European Qualifications Framework, with a new form of education. But each faculty gets to determine what form of education is needed…

I’m not telling you it’s easily accepted by all of the scholars. Remember, if you’ve been teaching your course for 20 years and practically changing only a small percentage every year, life was easier. Suddenly, if you have to instead of giving your course, organize project groups, initiate some ideas, leave them for two or three weeks, then meet with them and evaluate the value of the project, it’s a new activity for you. And we are pushing for it. I don’t want everything to be changed dramatically. But in the case of Poland, thanks to the transformation of law in May of 2011, there is pressure… The level of changes depends on the school and partly depends on me and the University Senate. We are evaluating to what degree they are fulfilling the regulations described in the law.

How are you doing that? Are you reading their reports, or are you walking into their classrooms and seeing with your own eyes?

Faculties are [legally] independent. This means they report to me, and all programs before they start are accepted by the University Senate. …If I see that the program is completely the same as it used to be, I might say no… They should [know] that money will come to them from the central budget in a limited amount—some of them might lose their jobs. They should be clever. This is an opportunity for them…

Each chair is responsible for visiting courses, but mostly [those] taught by younger people. I think it would be unreasonable and maybe a little bit inhuman to just visit the courses of people in their last two years of teaching before retirement. This is a stupid idea. Definitely transformation will be done by people in their 30s and 40s, because they teach 80 percent of the courses in our university. And all the courses taught by them have to be visited. But the problem is not only the fact of the visit. I do not have a problem with them. Rather, I have a problem with the hesitation of the older generation [who say,] “There is no need for change.” They would like to live in the old way. I swallow some of these remarks, but I always address my meetings to the younger generation. Because, [I tell them], you are building the university for yourself. If you are not attractive, the name of Jagiellonian University is not enough to believe that you are secure.

Such is the current reputation of Poland, which has continued to grow during the global financial crisis as neighboring countries decline, lining itself up for a strong run to become the continent’s next economic powerhouse.

General Electric officials say they haven’t for a moment regretted basing one of their global design centers here, where Polish engineers helped create the new GEnx engine for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner.

Boeing 787 Dreamliner (Photo by José A. Montes)

“In 2000, we ended the year with 11 engineers,” said G.E.’s human-resources director in Warsaw, Kinga Zalucka. “Today, we have 1,300 engineers. I think it was a good choice.”

How has Poland pulled off this feat of economic magic? Observers say it’s not just about the low labor costs compared to neighboring Germany, or the boon of a currency freed from the struggling Euro. They point to an impressive, decade-long campaign to raise the quality of secondary and university education.

As early as 1999, policymakers were planting the seeds for growth, adding a year of secondary education and extra language instruction for all students before tracking them onto professional or vocational paths. By 2003, Poland had vaulted past the United States and most of Europe on the reading section of the Programme for International Student Assessment exam.

“Students needed more in general education, including subjects like math, in order to help them stay flexible and navigate the labor market later on,” said Nina Arnhold, a senior education specialist at the World Bank, referring to Poland’s strategy. “It made a huge difference.”

University enrollment has quintupled since the 1990s, with private-university enrollment now accounting for around 25 percent of the total. According to Eurostat, the proportion of Polish young people (aged 25 to 34) with college degrees has jumped from 15.0 to 37.4 percent since 2001.

Those reforms have helped Poland gain a clear edge in the global race for engineering talent. In one survey by McKinsey & Company, human-resources directors said the proportion of Polish graduates prepared to work in multinational environments was at least double that of their peers in China and India.

“It’s a modern, dynamic system,” said Arnhold. “They did many things right.”

These days, Polish universities are increasingly exercising their newfound autonomy under the country’s higher education laws, particularly in the fast-growing energy sector. And the central government continues to provide a boost for key industries such as nuclear power.
“Especially in the last two or three years, the state is paying fellowships to students to enter these studies,” said Marek Kwiek, director of the Center for Public Policy Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. “It’s an enormously popular movement.”

The challenge now is to keep the ball rolling, despite a host of potential problems. Birth rates have plummeted since the 1980s. While the Polish economy grew by 4.3 percent in 2011, virtually all of the country’s European trading partners are slipping  into recession. Unemployment stands at nearly 13 percent, and many investors still complain of stiff bureaucratic hurdles.

Kwiek said officials “took very seriously” the criticism in 2007 from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that Polish universities weren’t adequately preparing graduates for the labor market or helping to retrain existing workers.

“The relationships, the links with industry are [now] very close,” he said, citing the growth of the information-technology industry in cities like Poznań and Kraków. “But there are also bad examples such as the arts and humanities, where universities are still offering curriculums that are not providing good jobs.”

And even within the IT sector, some say universities must do more. It’s one thing to attract offshore investments, but quite another to develop homegrown industry and brands with global appeal.

“Universities should be closer to business, and there should be much more project- and team-work,” said Piotr Wilam, an Oxford-educated partner with Innovation Nest, a $12 million seed fund for IT startups in Kraków. “They are very stagnant.”

Boom town

In many ways, Kraków is a microcosm of Poland’s promise.

The city has been a hotbed of innovation since medieval times. Copernicus himself walked these cobbled streets, crafting mathematical formulas by candlelight and inspiring countless other scholars to make their livings by wit rather than brawn.

Today, that flickering light comes from laptops, and math skills are often parlayed into software code.

Foreign-based employers say they’ve been delighted with the quality of Polish graduates, who leave university with a strong base in mathematics and basic programming. Google, Motorola and IBM are just the biggest names in the rush of Western companies to open development labs here.

But lately those companies are competing for graduates with a flurry of homegrown startups.

“There is lots of energy, and there is a community,” said Wilam. “What is really happening right now is people are starting to think more globally. Five years ago, the Polish market was big enough.”

Piotr Wilam, a partner with Innovation Nest, a seed fund in Krakow for IT startups. (Photo by Tom Marshall)

Sitting in his company’s sleek offices overlooking the Vistula River, it’s easy to imagine Kraków as the sort of place where ideas flow. But Wilam said Polish secondary schools and universities need to reach beyond the outsourcing model for inspiration. That means lecturing less, revamping courses and finding more professors with real-world experience.

Piotr Nedzynski, a 30-year-old software entrepreneur in Kraków, said he learned nothing about “source control”—tracking different versions of software code—while studying at the well-regarded AGH University of Science and Technology. It wasn’t until he started working abroad for a Danish software firm that he picked up that critical knowledge, and saw firsthand how Western European students had been trained to think on their feet.

“In Poland, when a teacher asks a question, everyone is silent,” Nedzynski said.

Szymon Piwowarski, a group leader at G.E.’s Engineering Design Center in Warsaw, said it would be helpful for universities to add a half-year of practical work to their programs, or to make greater use of case studies.

“For many years, they’ve been teaching the same material—without much connection to the manufacturing process,” he said. “Have they ever talked to the guys on the shop floor?”

Some university officials say they’re working to correct that problem, with prompting from a new higher-education law that forces them to specify learning objectives—an approach also gaining traction in the United States—and make curricula more relevant.

“The university is producing people who don’t know how to cooperate with other colleagues,” said Andrzej Mania, vice-rector for educational affairs at Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

Senior professors can be just as resistant, he said. But the university is taking the long view and focusing its reform efforts on professors in their 30s and 40s.

“Something has to be done, and we are doing it,” Mania said. “We are transforming our system to define education in a completely different way.”

Uncertain targets

Some corners of academia are changing at a speed that would have amazed Poland’s old Communist Party bosses.

“We have increased the number of students by 50 percent compared to 10 years ago,” said Stanisław Nagy, head of the gas engineering department at AGH University. “Generally, about 100 students graduate from the department per year. This is a large number. Maybe next year we will open unconventional gas engineering also, and grow to 125.”

Stanisław Nagy, head of the gas engineering department at AGH University of Science and Technology. (Photo by Tom Marshall)

That boom is being driven by shale gas—Europe’s largest potential reserves, enough to fuel Poland’s growing economy and free it from a troublesome dependence on Russian natural gas.

Foreign companies like Chevron have jumped at the opportunity, signing training or research deals with AGH and hiring many students in the midst of their studies. The university is also planning new programs to help mid-career workers—the parents of current students—update their skills.

There is reason for caution, though. ExxonMobil abandoned its shale gas hopes in Poland after two exploratory wells failed, and a government survey concluded that much of the country’s reserves will be difficult to exploit.

“There are lots of obstacles,” Nagy said. But even if Poland’s more than 100 exploratory wells don’t pan out over the next few years, the university will gain expertise in areas like coal-based methane gas technology, he said. “We definitely plan to be a big innovation center in this area.”

Poles speak passionately of the need to free themselves of dependence on Russian natural gas imports, which supply 13 percent of the country’s energy needs. In 2009, and briefly again in 2011, those supplies were disrupted in a dispute with Ukraine. Poland also faces pressure under European Union agreements to develop renewable energy sources and wean itself from a dependence on carbon-intensive coal.

Even nuclear power is on the table, despite the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and neighboring Germany’s decision to close all of its nuclear plants within the next decade. Poland is still moving forward with plans to build its first reactor by 2024.

At the Warsaw University of Technology, about 80 students have graduated over the last two years with degrees in nuclear engineering, said Miroslaw Lewinski, director of the nuclear energy department at the Ministry of Economy. And it’s the central government that is doing the prodding, offering student scholarships and training in France for professors.

“This is the way to push the higher-education system to react to the needs of the market,” Lewinski said.

He predicted a “disaster” if politics or a series of anti-nuclear referenda derail the country’s latest attempts at energy self-sufficiency. (Residents of Gąski, a village on the Baltic Sea coast, voted overwhelmingly against building a nuclear plant in their backyard earlier this year.)

“We have to install nuclear power stations in Poland,” said Tomasz Szmuc, vice rector for science at AGH University. “There is no chance to go back from this way.”

But officials say some students are hesitating to enter the field out of fear the government may change its plans.

“We need a clear declaration from our government,” said Szmuc. “Studying is an investment in the future.”

Tomasz Wisniewski knows all about such investments. As a newly minted graduate in nuclear engineering back in 1983, he thought his career plans were rock-solid. But six years later, with the end of Communist rule, Poland’s partially built nuclear plants were mothballed.

These days, he’s an associate professor in heat engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology, and at the forefront of efforts to develop renewable energy sources. He still supports nuclear power, but thinks more attention—and funding—ought to be devoted to wind, bio-gas and other sources.

Martin Bugaj, a nuclear engineering student at the Warsaw University of Technology. (Photo by Tom Marshall)

Wisniewski has sent dozens of students to Iceland in an EU-funded partnership with the School for Renewable Energy Science there, and many have found good jobs back in Poland. Research shows huge potential in Poland to develop local bio-mass boilers to heat buildings, allowing agricultural areas to use refuse efficiently. But so far, policymakers have paid scant attention.

“The system is not so flexible,” Wisniewski said, describing the country’s scattered university offerings.

One of his students, Martin Bugaj, is crossing his fingers. The 25-year-old will soon finish his own degree in nuclear engineering. But in recent months he has begun exploring other options like renewable energy and heat-pump technology, just in case Poland changes course.

“I am nervous, but not about my future,” Bugaj said. “I have two ways to go, nuclear and renewable. Now, yes, I am developing both plans.”

This story also appeared on NBCNews.com on December 12, 2012.

Students in Singapore give out scrapbooks to teachers on their national Teachers’ Day. The country was one of the highest performing in every subject in international assessment results released Tuesday. (Photo by Steel Wool)

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) were given to hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders to assess their math and science content knowledge and literacy skills. Fifty-two countries took part in at least one part of TIMSS, which is given every four years and 49 did so for PIRLS, which is given every five years.

The U.S ranked sixth in reading among fourth graders, a significant gain over 14th in 2006. Math scores were less impressive, with the U.S. only in the top 15 among fourth graders and among the top 24 in eighth grade. The U.S. made the top 10 in fourth-grade science, but was only among the top 23 in eighth grade.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described the results as “encouraging news about our students’ progress and some sobering cautionary notes.”

“Learning gains in fourth grade are not being sustained in eight grade – where mathematics and science achievement failed to measurably improve,” he said in a statement. “A number of nations are out-educating us today in STEM disciplines – and if we as a nation don’t turn around, those nations will soon be out-competing us in a knowledge-based, global economy.”

Jim Hull, a senior policy analyst at the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education, was less alarmist. “We’ve still made some of the greater gains in the world since 1999,” he said. “It’s something to keep an eye on.”

In math, Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei and Japan were the top performers at both grade levels. In science, Singapore, Japan, Korea and Chinese Taipei again made the cut across the board, joined by Finland. Russia was also a top performer in fourth grade.

East Asian countries also continued to perform well in math. In fourth grade, for instance, 70 percent of students in the five top performing countries reached the high or advanced benchmark in math. The next best showing came from Northern Ireland with 59 percent of students. These gaps grew in the eighth grade, where the report concluded “clearly the East Asian countries … are pulling away from the rest of the world by a considerable margin.”

The overall U.S. figures tell only part of the story. Nine states included in the national score were also measured as independent education systems. In many cases, the states’ results were not significantly different than that of the whole country, but a few were comparable with the high-ranking countries.

Massachusetts ranked second to Singapore in eighth-grade science and tied for fifth in math. Minnesota also ranked near the top in these subjects. And Florida placed fifth in fourth-grade reading.

“There is a great range in the performance of students in various states,” Hull said. “The U.S. can … perform among the best countries in the world.”

When the data is desegregated by race, Asian-American students perform nearly as well as their counterparts in Asian countries, Hull said. But black students “perform similar to the lowest ranking countries in the world,” Hull said. “That’s a huge, huge gap.”

Finland, which has received international attention and accolades for years as a top performer in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), was edged out of many of the top spots on TIMSS. It still ranked third in fourth-grade science and reading, however, and was in the top 10 in all tests.

Martin said that the difference may be attributed to the form of the tests. While PISA has a more general approach, TIMSS measures student achievement against an agreed upon set of specific skills countries are trying to teach their students.

Gary Beach, author of the upcoming book The U.S. Technology Skills Gap, questioned whether such tests are still relevant. “From my conversations with business executives, they’re not so much interested in hiring brainiacs,” he said, adding that they are more concerned with intangible skills like communication and collaboration. “The importance of testing that is more important than testing basic math and science.”

Most of those surveyed—particularly college-aged Americans themselves—agree that U.S. higher education must change to remain globally competitive, though not everyone is convinced that increasingly popular online courses are as effective as conventional ones.

“These findings are a wake-up call for those of us in higher education,” said Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University, which commissioned the study.

Forty-six percent of respondents consider the state of U.S. higher education “fair” or “poor,” and 61 percent said the same thing about its value for their money. Nearly nine out of every 10 say cost is a major barrier to obtaining a college degree.

Three-quarters of younger people say they’d be happy with a “no-frills” education that forgoes such amenities as athletic facilities and dormitories, and almost the same proportion would have been willing to spend a year or two working in public service in exchange for a break on tuition.

Two in three say cuts in government funding have lowered the nation’s standing as a global leader in higher education, and more than four in five—including majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents—believe that government should invest more in it.

While Americans want more innovation by colleges and universities, slightly more than half aren’t convinced that online education is as good as the conventional kind. But more than two-thirds think online degrees will be equally recognized by employers within the next five to seven years.

The poll, conducted for Northeastern by FTI Consulting, surveyed 1,001 respondents in mid-October as well as 250 people aged 18-30 on the Internet. The margin of error is about 3 percent.

Q: Part of the challenge for nations and universities in Eastern Europe is to move beyond the Soviet model of teaching, where someone is lecturing at the front of the room and it’s just a question of imparting knowledge. How do we know schools and universities are providing quality?

A: From one point of view, the educational system [in Bulgaria] is good. Because, for example, our school-leavers are between the excellent students of Germany, [and] the United States and France. The biggest group of international students in Germany is Bulgarians; the second position is occupied by China.

But the system now is still conservative. We inherited from the Soviet system the model of management of universities and the model of development of academic staff. Two years ago, my first step was to change the development of academic staff. We had a central qualification commission belonging to the government… This commission was designed by Stalin himself in the Soviet Union in the ’30s, and after World War II we inherited this system… If you wanted to defend your Ph.D. thesis, you had to go in front of this commission, not in front of your department. And this commission made a decision to give or not give you a Ph.D. It depended on your personality, whether you got your diploma in two or three years…

Now we have this new act, and I’m very proud because every university—there are 51 universities in Bulgaria—now has its own autonomy. Every department has the right to establish a jury for Ph.D. theses and professorships. Now all of this becomes the job of university authorities, and the minister of education is no longer responsible for these procedures.

But it’s striking that it took until 2011 to do it. It was a real struggle, wasn’t it?

We had a two-year struggle. I had in front of this window two or three thousand representatives of the academic community of Bulgaria. They carried one black coffin with my mummy in it. They used to say that this commission guaranteed the quality of higher education and research in Bulgaria…

Sergei Ignatov (Photo courtesy of the Bulgarian Ministry of Education)

The next step in this field was to create a national research strategy, because the Bulgarian research system is very fragmented. After World War II, there was a decision by the Communist Party to divide the research work from the universities, and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences were transformed into this Soviet model. And according to this ideology, all research work is in the academy, and [not] in universities, which is the second or third level of education for future teachers and bureaucrats and so on…

But the university should be the place where we do research, create knowledge and deliver this knowledge to our students. We divided the finance of fundamental research and more practical research. And now, because this is an act of parliament, only 15 percent of public finance goes for fundamental work. And we sent this money on to the universities. The Academy of Sciences can receive the money if it works with, for example, departments or different structures of universities. I suppose with two acts we managed to destroy this Soviet system.

Bulgaria’s national accreditation agency found that the majority of universities were “very good.” And it took them 10 years to reach that conclusion. How does your new, online university ranking system help?

The national agency of quality and accreditation—this is a good instrument, but it works in an old-fashioned way. There is no discussion in this commission of what happens with the students or what happens with them after they graduate… The national accreditation system, they’re professors in Bulgarian universities. We all know each other, we’re friends. This is a problem… The problem of quality assurance is—I can say this, but it will be a scandal—I believe the right way is to say that every university should have independent accreditation from Europe or the United States…

The new ranking system is a big step, because now we know what happens with everyone after graduating: what kind of work is he doing, what is his salary, what is his future, what is his connection with the mother university. This ranking system is very important because we can investigate even the level of market [penetration] in the regions, and what is the influence of universities in that region…

When we introduced this ranking system, we also changed the system of finance for our universities. Last year in June, we decided to give 10 percent more to … excellent departments, not excellent universities. Because the system is trying to [recognize] not which university occupies the first position in Bulgaria, but which department in arts, economics, history or philosophy. And with the budget of 2012 we’re [giving] 25 percent more to these excellent establishments… My purpose is to introduce this more competitive way of financing universities, from excellent to bad.

I’ve heard some talk of people being frustrated about the increase of student fees happening very quietly at the last minute.

If you have cheap education, you don’t have any education. But here is the problem of responsibility for public finance. Because it depends on university authorities. The average fee will be about 300 or 400 Euros per year. I suppose that political parties from the left positions will now try to speak through students about raising the fees. Of course education [is] very expensive… But we have to change the mentality, because according to our parents and grandparents, it is not good to go to the bank to [borrow for education].

The question is, what are their goals? You believe you have this great future, and if you have this great future, I don’t believe that 2,000 Euros for five years is a big change. This comes from the time of socialism, [the idea] that education and medicine are free of charge. I don’t believe that… But now raising prices is in the hands of the rectors of the universities. They can make this decision, for example, for academic achievers or [those with financial problems] not to pay. But what to do with the student who’s staying at the university for 15 years? This is a public institution, and right now the taxes pay for this excellent life on the campus.

It seems like part of the challenge is giving people, or institutions, without much knowledge of how things work in other parts of the world some exposure to that.

Speaking about quality, after the changes [of 1990] we lost a lot of the quality of education. All society, all of the community of Bulgaria was destroyed…

The problem not only in Bulgaria but even in Romania is the transformation from closed society to open society, and from closed community to open university community. It takes time. Because Bulgaria 22 years ago was a very closed society, and I suppose there were a lot of changes for those 22 years… At the beginning of the changes, I was 29 years old. I believed that in three or five years, Bulgaria would be a normal, Western country. But it needs time. There is a need for a change of generations. It’s not possible to change the mentality.

… But I suppose the discussion is more normal now than two years ago. When we started on the first day, changing this mentality, it was terrible. Even for my personal life. Because I had, during the nights, discussions here on what will happen. They said [that] I and the minister of finance had the purpose to kill education, kill the Academy of Sciences, kill research. It wasn’t easy.

Now we know what to do… Because the problem in Bulgaria is we don’t have communities and the society is not very active, because of these feelings from the past. People still believe the government is responsible for all things. We have to change this.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sofia University (Photo by Aleksander Dragnes)

“I had a French teacher who didn’t come to lectures for weeks as though it was normal,” he said. “There were whole groups of us who were waiting for a lecturer who didn’t even bother to send us an email or let us know.” Finally, last spring, Stanchev got so fed up that he left home for university in the United Kingdom.

Such problems have sparked a fiery struggle over the future of higher education here. Sergei Ignatov, the brash education minister of Bulgaria’s center-right government, is pushing a raft of market-based reforms aimed at raising quality, shining a light on moribund university programs, and stemming the tide of departing students. His most ambitious initiative is an online university ranking system, which allows students to figure out which programs will help them succeed in the job market.

“I think this is the most transparent and clearly structured university ranking system I’ve ever come across,” said the late Cyrus Reed, former provost of the American University in Bulgaria. “It’s really a major step forward.”

Bulgaria’s neighbors are also experimenting with different approaches to improve their higher-education systems. In Romania, the government placed video cameras in high-school exam rooms to combat cheating. Under the camera’s watchful eye, passing rates on the university entrance exam plunged from 81 percent in 2009 to an all-time low of 45 percent in 2011. At South East European University in Macedonia, each professor and staff member is critiqued annually under a rigorous quality control system. Bulgaria, which joined the European Union five years ago, has earned the most praise, however, including a mostly laudatory report from the World Bank.

Still, Ignatov’s efforts have not been wholly welcomed. Critics fear that he wants to fully privatize the 274,000-student system, which includes 37 public and 14 private institutions. Protesters have haunted his three-year tenure, even carrying a black coffin with a mummy made to look like him. The stress, Ignatov said, made his hair fall out.

Bulgarians have reason to distrust the free market, which has offered it a bruising ride since the fall of Communism in 1989. The country escaped the wars that accompanied the break-up of its western neighbor, Yugoslavia, but its economic output plummeted. According to World Bank data, per capita GDP fell from $1,845 in 1988 to $1,373 in 1997, measured in constant dollars.

It took 15 years for GDP to climb back to its 1988 level, only to plunge again with the global economy in 2008. Even as budgets dried up and infrastructure crumbled, university enrollment rates have more than doubled since 1990. “All the quality of education in Bulgaria was destroyed,” Ignatov said of those years. “We lost a lot of ground.”

U.S. businesses look abroad

In the late twentieth century, Eastern Europe’s longest-serving ruler, Todor Zhivkov, presided over Bulgaria when its university system was a point of national pride. Tuition was free, entrance exams were tough, and the nation gained a reputation for technical excellence. Its graduates helped build the Eastern bloc’s first generation of personal computers, while the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences worked on satellite equipment and prepared cosmonauts for outer space.

Hewlett-Packard was sufficiently impressed with the country’s talent pool that in 2006 it opened a global support center here, the Bulgarian capital. The company needed 4,000 highly trained employees, so it forged relationships with three universities, including the public Sofia University, training professors and building state-of-the-art computer labs. High-performing instructors earned bonuses and the company hired many students right out of college.

One of them was Ivan Ivaylo, who was hired as an HP service delivery manager and program lecturer in 2008 following his graduation from Sofia University. There was initial skepticism about dropping Soviet-style lectures to learn from companies. Ivaylo recalled, “We had senior management from the university coming to see with their own eyes that this was working.”

The results are clear: to date, the classes have trained more than 1,000 students, with other companies like Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems, Inc. developing similar programs. They have helped Bulgaria become a magnet for high-tech outsourcing.

Sasha Bezuhanova, director of HP’s public-sector operations for Central and Eastern Europe, is eager to demonstrate the model’s potential. She envisions “an entire ecosystem around innovation” in which Bulgarian universities conduct research and companies like HP turn the results into marketable products—much as happens in Silicon Valley.

But here, too, are obstacles. Under Communist-era regulations, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences—not universities—held responsibility for high-end research. Last year, Ignatov got the law changed and began transferring funds to universities.

But many students, including Stanchev, object to the move. “Why would we basically destroy the Academy of Sciences, which has many successful projects?” he asked. “Create the environment for research, but don’t destroy something that’s already working.”

Rankings use tax and employment data from government

Ignatov is not afraid to challenge the status quo. He defends much-criticized university fee increases that were pushed through parliament without discussion. He dismantled a Soviet-era government commission that until 2010 held exclusive power to award doctoral degrees and professorships. Under the commission’s watch, one applicant returned from England bearing a newly minted degree from the University of Oxford, only to be informed he had to prove that such a university existed.

Ignatov is also pushing university rectors to set up independent governing boards and seek outside accreditation, rather than rely solely on a national body that deemed more than 90 percent of Bulgaria’s universities “good” or “very good” in its first round of ratings.

Ignatov is most proud of the online ranking system, unveiled two years ago. Reed, who served as provost of the American University in Bulgaria until his death from injuries suffered in a car accident in July, characterized the system as miles beyond the popular U.S. News & World Report rankings, because “in this case, they tell you exactly how they got it and they let you manipulate it yourself.” Users can also compare majors and programs according to their own priorities. Looking for professors who show up for class and forge relationships with students? Curious about which biology program is best at helping graduates find jobs? With a few clicks, students can find out.

Boyan Zahariev, program director for governance and public policies at the Open Society Foundations, a philanthropy run by George Soros, oversaw the creation of the ranking system. Zahariev’s team was frustrated by what they saw elsewhere: a hodgepodge of surveys that relied on subjective factors like a university’s reputation, rather than more objective measures of quality. Beginning in 2007, they began pursuing what some consider the Holy Grail of university ranking systems: solid information on student earnings following graduation. Armed with a government contract and extra funding from the European Union, they delved into a rich trove of government data on graduates’ tax payments and unemployment status.

The data don’t include actual salaries or account for graduates who take jobs outside Bulgaria, but they do show which university programs place the most graduates in upper-income brackets within Bulgaria. Such information can be difficult to access in many countries, even among government agencies, Zahariev said. Bulgaria protects privacy by aggregating the data and using an identifying number rather than a student’s name.

Some universities initially balked at requests for data on class size, library holdings, professor credentials and other factors in the rankings. But they knew they couldn’t stonewall a government project, and institutions often found that some of those details actually improved their rankings, Zahariev said.

That information is balanced by 15,000 student surveys administered by an outside research firm. It’s one thing to know the student-teacher ratio or the size of the library collection, but the surveys offer a real-world contrast, said the program coordinator Anita Baikusheva. Does your professor show up for class and make herself available for conferences? How useful is that big library collection?

The government is already using the ranking system to dole out precious supplemental funding. “My purpose is to introduce this more competitive way of financing universities, from excellent to bad,” Ignatov said. He added that though he doesn’t yet have the legal right to say so, “next year, maybe we’ll start to cut the finances of the bad institutions.”

Don Westerheijden, an expert on student information systems at the University of Twente in the Netherlands who acted as a consultant on the rankings, believes Bulgaria’s new system deserves a close look by other nations, including the United States. He knows of no other system that uses government tax or employment data to estimate the earning power of a college degree.

Stanchev, for his part, wishes the rankings had been in place when he was choosing a program—he might have chosen to remain in his native country.

This story also appeared on NBCNews.com on September 26, 2012.

That’s why I found myself moderating sessions at the Iowa Teacher and Principal Leadership Symposium with titles such as “Better Than We Used to Do is Not Good Enough” and “Leadership Lessons From Around the Globe” before a sold-out crowd at Drake University in Des Moines last week.

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (photo by Gage Skidmore)

The titles speak volumes about Republican Gov. Terry Branstad and his determination to improve education in the Hawkeye state, although his agenda has faced its share of setbacks.

Branstad hopes to reform the way teachers are paid and promoted, and he’s giving serious consideration to what other states—and countries—do. He often uses the phrase “world-class schools” to describe his aspirations for Iowa’s classrooms.

The governor sat quietly for hours last week, listening intently to union leaders, school-board officials, principals and teachers. He made it clear beforehand, however, that he has deep concerns about student performance in his state, noting that “the status quo is unacceptable.”

Iowa’s students in used to lead the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics, but now they rank in the middle of the pack. In addition, “33 percent of recent high school graduates who enrolled in Iowa’s community colleges needed remedial help. Iowa employers regularly tell us it’s difficult to find well-qualified applicants for job openings,” Branstad wrote on his website before the symposium.

Branstad’s quest for change is focused on Iowa, but his search for successful role models is one The Hechinger Report is familiar with. We’ve spent time over the last two years visiting countries on three continents to look at their ambitious higher-education agendas. We’ve also scrutinized how other states are attempting to increase the effectiveness of their teachers, as Iowa is.

Branstad was the longest-serving governor in Iowa from 1983 to 1989, and was re-elected again in 2010. He’s since made education reform a priority, even though quite a few of his proposals have been defeated.

Still, Branstad says he’s worried that schools have not changed with the times in Iowa, and that the state’s teachers work in isolation. He hopes to create career ladders with different pay rates and positions depending upon a teacher’s experience and expertise.

He also wants Iowans to learn from other countries. That’s why they listened to a lengthy presentation from Marc Tucker, president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, and author of a new book, Surpassing Shanghai, that examines what strategies are working internationally to foster better student performance. You can watch and listen here.

Those in attendance also heard from Vivien Stewart, who is responsible for building connections between U.S. and Asian education leaders at the Asia Society. She spoke of the need for all young people to meet the growing demands of a global economy, and provided specific examples of what’s been possible elsewhere.

It’ll be fascinating in the coming months and years to see what lessons Iowa and its schools learn from others, both near and far.

It’s a skill he learned first here in South Korea, where undergraduate students are five times more likely to major in engineering than their counterparts in the United States.

U.S. universities and companies often look abroad for students and workers to fill positions because not enough Americans have the necessary skills or training. To help meet the demand, President Obama has announced a goal to train 1 million more graduates over the next decade in engineering and related fields.

At a White House science fair in February, he told the young contestants, “You’re not just trying to win a prize today, you are getting America in shape to win the future. You are making sure we have the best, smartest, most skilled workers in the world, so that the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root right here.”

South Korea far outpaces the United States in the percentage of young adults with college degrees—63 versus 41 percent—and its K-12 students routinely outperform U.S. children on international assessments. While South Korean leaders have begun to fret that their young people—raised among skyscrapers and affluence—are pursuing higher-paying jobs outside technical fields, the workforce remains highly tech-savvy: One in four South Korean college students majors in engineering, compared to one in 20 in the U.S.

The reason for the glut of engineers can be summed up easily: South Korea’s education system was designed to produce them.

A South Korean classroom two days before university entrance exam

As Lee explained, “My path has been set since elementary school.”

South Korea’s school system—unlike the American system—is centralized and regulated according to economic demands. The national ministry of education and the ministry of science and technology are one and the same, and the president’s vision for economic development can have immediate reverberations in schools.

For decades, South Korea’s strategy for success has been to outsmart its more powerful neighbors. In a country with few natural resources, the next technological breakthrough is sometimes referred to in Korean as the next “meal.”

To transform a poor country of mostly illiterate farmers into a high-tech powerhouse, they had to start at the beginning—with compulsory elementary education and a standardized curriculum.

Lee, who grew up in Seoul, learned the same math and history lessons year to year as students his age in smaller cities or villages throughout South Korea.

A consistent and strong foundation for every child paved the way for South Korea’s college enrollment to explode a few decades later. Between 1980 and 2008, the number of college students increased from 647,500 to 3.6 million. More than 80 percent of high-school graduates go on to higher education, one of the highest rates in the world.

The United States is moving toward a more consistent curriculum, with widely adopted academic standards that aim to make American students more internationally competitive. But a tradition of tracking students by ability and localized decision-making about learning standards has led to uneven results. Not everyone who graduates from high school is ready for college-level work, let alone the advanced math and science course work required for engineering. The proportion of students in Maryland’s public university system who have to take at least one remedial course ranges from 20 to 50 percent, depending on the campus.

The South Korean government also closely regulates higher education, and historically set enrollment quotas for different programs and types of schools to reflect the economy’s needs. Such regulation would be unwelcome in the United States, said Joseph Helble, dean of the engineering school at Dartmouth College. American universities pride themselves on their freedom and on nurturing independent thinking in their students.

“But if you need to rapidly develop technology and train many people, a tightly controlled system works,” he said.

To entice the best students into science and tech fields, the South Korean government also created a flagship university—Kaist, or the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

The nationally sponsored school—similar to military academies in the United States, but dedicated to furthering South Korea’s economy—showcased engineering as a prestigious profession fundamental to the nation’s success starting in 1971.

South Koreans who had gone abroad to study were lured back with handsome salaries to teach. And the best students in the country were recruited with the promise of free tuition and an exemption from mandatory military service, in return for a promise to work in a government lab for three years after graduation. Over the years, Kaist graduates have filled government research institutes and top jobs at companies like Samsung and Hyundai.

Admission became so prized that parents in the countryside would wave banners and host a banquet for the village if their son or daughter was accepted.

Lee, now 33, remembers watching a popular television drama called “Kaist” about life and love in the laboratory when he was a teenager, and imagining himself there. “I never missed an episode,” he said.

He earned a master’s degree there after finishing first in his undergraduate class at Sogong University in Seoul.

On a warm spring afternoon, the grassy fields at the 300-acre campus south of Seoul were deserted but the labs were full. Students were designing exercise equipment for people with Alzheimer’s disease, studying the olfactory systems of fruit flies, and fine-tuning an electric bus that recharges wirelessly as it drives over electric strips embedded in the road.

Kaist president Suh Nampyo, a former mechanical engineering professor and department head at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he wants to make the school not just the best in South Korea, but one of the top 10 science universities in the world. (Kaist was 94th on the 2011-12 Times Higher Education world ranking, up from 132 in 2007).

He has launched a series of reforms to stir competitiveness, offering all-English instruction and overhauling the admissions system. International applications are up, particularly from Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe.

The increasing quality of universities such as Kaist in other countries means the United States has to compete increasingly for international students, making it all the more important to build a better pipeline of talent domestically.

“It’s not at all obvious anymore that we can just turn on the spigot and all the talented people will come here,” said Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington D.C.

Nor can it be assumed they’ll stay here, industry leaders say, thanks to politically volatile immigration policies and new opportunities in emerging economies abroad.

When Lee completes his Ph.D. in 2013, he would like to work for Google. But he’s also interested in going back home to work for a Korean company or university.

“It all depends on the offers I get,” he said.

This story also appeared in The Washington Post on July 17, 2012.

Sarah Carr

Despite these differences of conceit, the American and Chinese education systems share one common, defining characteristic: They are both plagued by gross inequalities and rampant segregation. In the United States, these injustices fall largely along racial and class lines: poor, minority students are more likely to attend highly segregated schools; their schools are more likely to suffer from a lack of resources; and their teachers are more likely to be inexperienced.

The Chinese education system, too, features ethnic and class inequities. But even more so than in the United States, geography and birthplace equal educational destiny. As Sarah Butrymowicz of The Hechinger Report documented in a recent article, millions of schoolchildren have migrated to cities in recent years with their job-hunting parents. Once there, they often find themselves ineligible to attend government-run schools, particularly the best ones. An unknown number wind up in sub-par, pseudo-private schools catering to the migrant population.

Henan Chang, an assistant professor in Loyola University Chicago’s School of Education who has studied the outcomes of migrant schoolchildren in Kunming, said most of them “have no interaction whatsoever with the local residents. They live in their own bubbles. Their playmates, their schoolmates—they’re all migrants themselves.”

Butrymowicz notes that these disparities tainted China’s recent domineering performance on international assessments in reading, math and science because many public schools do not admit migrant students. When Shanghai 15-year-olds outperformed the rest of the world in 2010, observers wondered if their success stemmed at least in part from exclusionary, segregationist practices. After I told a friend of mine who grew up in China about the international rankings, he quipped that public-school students in Shanghai are comparable to private-school students on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in terms of their wealth and privilege. Shaking his head, he noted that no one would take Dalton or Brearley—two of the Big Apple’s most elite private schools—as representative of the whole United States.

In 2006, I spent several weeks in China reporting on the country’s schools, focusing in particular on the education of migrant children living in Beijing. In America, everyone asked me if Chinese schools had left us in the dust, while in China everyone asked me if American schools had left them in the dust. Americans revered the Chinese mastery of basic subjects such as math and geography, while the Chinese extolled the American emphasis on creativity and nurturing individual talent. Americans talked about the striking discipline of Chinese students, while the Chinese wondered why they had not yet won more Nobel prizes.

Nobody in either country framed their fears about international competitiveness in terms of inequality, however.

Both nations do well by their most privileged and fortunate students. In China, they attend well-resourced, state-of-the-art government schools that employ some of the country’s best teachers. In America, their families possess the money and freedom to move to regions where public schools excel, or to enroll in any number of wealthy private schools.

For either country, winning the global competition will depend less on changes made for the elites—the children of the 1 percent. Ultimately, success will depend on their leaders’ interest and fortitude in addressing the opportunity gaps that persist throughout their schools. When it comes to education, that’s the single, indelible trait that both countries have long shared.

Workers at a construction site on the Delhi campus of the Indira Gandhi National Open University. (Photo by Sarah Garland)

The campus of the largest university in the world, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), in southern Delhi, is surprisingly small and modest.

A cluster of nondescript, one-story administrative buildings line the drive leading to a brick library, where fans whip the stuffy air and a few students hunch over outdated computers. Further down the road, however, construction workers heave bricks at a building site, and across the Indian countryside, satellite campuses are cropping up.

IGNOU’s enrollment has doubled in recent years, to as many as 4 million students, about 10 times the size of America’s largest university, the University of Phoenix’s online campus. Like American community colleges, admission at an open university is not competitive, but the schools offer a range of programs, including doctoral degrees.

The model tends to be an old-fashioned concept in a digital world: Many students take courses through the mail, or by listening to radio or television broadcasts. But it may also be part of the answer to India’s modern higher-education crisis, which leaders worry could eventually put a crimp in the country’s rapid economic growth.

“Middle-class students are not getting enough opportunities in the universities or colleges,” said Perumalsamy Renga Ramanujam, IGNOU’s pro-vice chancellor, explaining the school’s rapid growth. “And it goes beyond that. The poor people living in rural areas and slum dwellers, all of them have direct access” to IGNOU courses.

Other open universities are also ballooning in size. The Nalanda Open University in Bihar, India’s poorest, least-educated state, went from an enrollment of about 1,500 to 40,000 in the last decade.

Students wait to take tests in the headquarters of the Nalanda Open University in Patna, Bihar. (Photo by Sarah Garland)

India’s economic growth may be staggering, but population growth has increasingly become a hazard to the country’s financial future as it tries to educate a new generation to sustain the progress. India’s population is projected to increase by about 25 percent, or 300 million people, by the year 2026.

A major push by the Indian government for universal K-12 education has made significant headway in districts where once there were no schools at all. Now, as millions of students graduating from high school—along with older villagers across the country—seek to take part in India’s economic progress, the government is struggling to send more of them to college and beyond.

As India worries about getting more students to college, the Obama administration has fretted about America’s low college graduation rates, and both nations are worried about improving the research and innovation produced by universities. India and America have vowed to work together on improving higher education in the two countries, most recently at a summit last summer attended by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But India’s efforts to boost its postsecondary system also represent a potential threat—in under 10 years, the number of college-goers in India is expected to increase to 40 million, double the number in the United States.

Although experts often question the quality of the country’s open universities, they may be one of India’s best hopes for reaching its goals. The schools educate more than 15 percent of India’s higher-education students, most of whom are poor and from rural areas.

Elsewhere in the world, the open-university model is also expanding, including in the United States. Some companies and nonprofit organizations, along with a handful of traditional universities, are also putting more college-level courses online, sometimes for free, in order to increase access. MIT, for example, announced last December that students could earn a certificate after taking free online courses through a new initiative dubbed MITx.

Students study in the library at the IGNOU headquarters in south Delhi. (Photo by Sarah Garland)

India’s open universities tend to offer practical training—in computers and agriculture—or preparation for the country’s civil-service examination, which can lead to a stable government job. But IGNOU has also expanded its offerings to advanced degrees in technology and engineering, along with liberal arts subjects like French and women’s studies.

Rajesh Kumar, 26, is from a small agricultural town in Bihar. He works part time doing data entry and in his free time he takes education courses through the Nalanda Open University, which is based in Patna, the capital of Bihar.

“I wanted to get a teaching qualification,” he said. “Here, it’s easier.” Unlike India’s competitive public universities, open universities accept all applicants, and they’re cheaper than private institutions. A year of tuition for a bachelor’s in education at Nalanda is 1,800 Rupees, or about $37. In an effort to boost the number of female graduates, women only have to pay $27 a year.

On a humid summer day, Kumar stood among hundreds of other students at Nalanda’s cramped headquarters in the city’s sole high-rise building, waiting to complete an end-of-course exam. Taking an open-university course is generally a lonely endeavor, however. For computer and science classes, students must attend labs, and they can contact faculty at one of the university’s 32 study centers around the state if they are struggling. But for most courses, students study texts printed and mailed to them at home.

A classroom at the Nalanda Open University in Patna on a testing day at the end of a semester. (Photo by Sarah Garland)

India’s open universities are increasingly piloting new methods and materials, however, such as online wikis, where students and teachers can share material, and digital libraries. IGNOU makes its content available free on the web so students can learn without paying fees, and faculty at other schools can borrow ideas or replicate entire courses. IGNOU is also experimenting with brick-and-mortar classes, so that students can benefit from interacting with professors and classmates.

Outpacing the United States in the number of students enrolled will mean nothing if they don’t finish or graduate underprepared, however. IGNOU doesn’t track dropouts, and experts worry about the quality and the outcomes of distance-education programs where students who lag behind may receive less support than at traditional schools.

“In some places they’re doing a wonderful job where the traditional schools cannot be set up,” said Pawan Agarwal, an advisor on India’s Higher Education Planning Commission. Nevertheless, “they’ve expanded very fast and there could be some concerns.”

Open-university administrators are aware of the doubts and reservations some might have. “Quality is one of the major focal points,” Ramanujam, of IGNOU, said. But, he added, the country’s open universities are “gradually getting more acceptance and more prestige.”

This story appeared on Time.com on February 19, 2012 as part of an exclusive partnership. Reproduction of this story is not allowed.