Good better best

KCSE - the Kenyan A level - results came out a few days ago. The broadsheet front pages - and the next five - in all the major papers ranked schools nationally, according to how many of their pupils were ranked in the top 100 pupils and published the names of the top 100 grade scorers in rank order. Not a peep about value added or skills gained, all the focus on the top century, as they call them here.

I've been preoccupied for ages about perceptions of worth.  How my caring colleagues keep talking about 'the best' student intern that we have, on the basis that he came third in the national rankings a few years ago. 'The best at exams' I say dourly, trying to reframe the discussion. 'The best', they say again, hammering home their point to the dozy foreigner.   I try to explain that, for me, there are many ways of being best at things in life.  Maybe he's not so good at customer service?  But that's not how it works here. Pecking orders, rankings, have massive power.  A colleague explained today how university entrance works.  You choose your subject preference (say Medicine, Engineering, and fallback Theology), and put your highest ranked first. Then, on the basis of the KCSE results, the central clearing house sends the ranks 1-20 who get the necessary grades to the top university, numbers 21-40 to the next one, and so on. If you get the grades for Medicine (straight As) then all the pressures are against you opting to study your true preference requiring lower grades (say IT or Commerce).  Better a depressed demotivated doctor, than a happy software developper runs the assumption.

And I've been musing too about what makes 'a good (university) education'.  In particular, what makes 'a good education' when people don't have economic security if they miss a step? I'm an enthusiastic advocate of the joys and benefits of study abroad. I had a lyrically happy - and educational - 18 months in West Berlin, before the Wall came down; and a demanding, if fulfilling 5 months in France.  The official line is that study abroad helps resilience, independence, cultural awareness, language learning, flexibility, problem solving. Thats all true.  But what I learned, in spades, was about difference. New influences, new ways of doing and saying things. New things that matter, there. How good friends in Berlin, wanting to drop round for an impromptu coffee, would phone to check it was ok from the phonebox outside my flat. And then arrive, producing a wrapped box of chocolates (never arrive without a Mitbringsel gift). My German law lectures, in which the judge who taught us was in his mid 30s, and had long hair in a ponytail and leather trousers.  Living right next to the Berlin Wall & its razor wire. Visiting friends in the East. How dry history became personal. The study tour as sole foreigner with a group of Berlin students to Minsk, which had been razed to the ground during WW2 by Nazi troups.  How hearing us speak German on a crowded tram, one woman burst into tears, and visibly distressed, switched carriages. How a friend descibed his mother's forced flight in that period on foot, with her younger brother, across current-day Poland and eastern Germany. The rapes and the violence. How even then in the 1980s, when GoodEgg Gorbatschov came on tv, she still had to change channels, too upset to watch.

Study abroad is lifechanging, if demanding. Why wouldn't you have a go?  But that's from the perspective of someone responsible at that time only for herself, a girl with a small parental economic safety net.  But what would you advise a Kenyan student, who'd achieved the massive accolade of say number 88 in the national rankings?  An accolade with a half life which erodes if you go and study abroad.

Ok, the benefits of study abroad are still obvious if you get a place, say, at Yale. Full scholarship, marvellous resources, world-class university, brand recognition back home too.  But I know that it isn't always the universities with lofty names which offer the best quality of learning or education. That esteemed professors shuffle off the burden of teaching undergrads onto their overburdened research assistants.  The creative innovative courses which respond to cutting edge market needs, are founded by savvy experienced ex-practitioners in under-ranked ex-polytechnics. That some of the most valuable learning happens at the breakfast table in the student flat not in the lecture theatre.  But I can understand that our students want to bet on a certainty, need brand recognition to bolster their choices if they're opting against the security of national ranking. It's not worth upping sticks if they aren't offering 'better' than you'd get in Kenya.  But at what point would you say the intangible benefits of exposure to another system and country are outweighed by the potential risks of running against the herd? 

There's so much to weigh up:
- will the degree you get be recognised and accredited back in Kenya?
- will the degree cover the topics you need to cover to practise in Kenya?
- what about social integration in the new country? China may be a global player with good quality universities, offering scholarships, and future potential to work with the Chinese investors coming to Africa. But how might many young Kenyans, fervent churchgoers, feel studying in a country where local Christians are persecuted?
- what about finding work after graduation? How is the host economy?  Might the host country offer the chance of work at professional levels to a good Kenyan student?  Or if not, which employers, in Kenya, will value the degree from and exposure to this country? Are they likely to offer employment, - or might they too, reserve posts for candidates of their own nationality?
- how does finding work in your desired sector work in Kenya? Will you need to study under a Kenyan professor to get the contacts and momentum for the next step?
- how much does it cost? What are the scholarship opportunities and the competition? And worst case, how likely is it that your funding will run out before you can complete your degree?

As a UK careers advisor, I remember appointments with students from China and India who told me, in tears, of the financial pressures they were under. How their village had clubbed together to send them to university in UK. Of their worries on how they were to repay this loan now that the economy had crashed, and they realised the faint hope of access to a UK graduate job was truly just a glimmer.  To have asked them 'But are you enjoying it?' would have been to miss the point.  Maybe better 'But do you think its worth it, being here? Would you recommend it to someone else?'

For me, study abroad added such breadth and depth to my life, but did it add value, in the monetary sense valued by my students?  I believe there's far more to academic study than increased earning potential. But I would, wouldn't I, having studied Languages not Econometrics?  Career guidance is about helping clients make the choices which are right for them. Yes, helping them see the alternatives, and the self limiting views, but being guided by them. And my students don't see themselves as in the fortunate position to place their bets on a degree abroad which MAY, or may not, repay their investment.

It's my experience that time spent away from a driven objective-oriented to-do list repays itself in spades in creative opportunities and chance discoveries. Newton was sitting under the apple tree when he discovered gravity. Archimedes was wallowing in a bath. But I need to help my clients follow their light as they see best.  However, I'm reminded of Inge, a very grounded, wise 80 year old East German Quaker, with whom I stayed for a week during my time abroad.  She'd been a teenager of Socialist parents during the Nazi time. Had arrived home during the Nazi raid which had scooped them up, but thanks to her quick thinking, had herself escaped. And continued to make her home in Dresden, later East Germany.  Quakers in Britain had been supportive of refugees from Nazi Germany.  Had invited home German soldiers stuck in prisoner of war camps. Some, later in positions of power in East Germany's Communist party, remembered this support with gratitude, all the while 'knowing' Quakers to be naive and wrongheaded.  Inge spoke of using the access that she, and the other East German Quakers had, to represent their views. Of annual appointments, over a thirty year period. Of going unheard. Of persuading herself that this was drip drip drip on a stone. And then, one day, hearing her main contact, the Minister, in an interview on state radio, repeating her views, the words that, when she was in the room with him, he had rebuffed so coldly. 

We can't know, whether, if, or when our words will be meaningful or take hold for another. But for me there is more to learning and to education than teaching to the test, than performing well in an exam or than adding an extra £150,000 to your lifetime earning potential.  And while I'll continue to help my clients meet their objectives, - and understand why they have their perspective - I'm going to carry on talking too of my perspective, and of the occasional value of less programmed paths.  Highways and byways, sabbaticals and study abroad, time picking daisies and sitting under apple trees, - who can say, in the end, what counts?