The World's Most Reputable Universities In 2014 03-10

The World's Most Reputable Universities In 2014

Harvard still sits on top. MIT comes in second. Stanford is in third place. Those are the three universities with the best reputations in the world, according to a ranking just released by Times Higher Education (THE), a London magazine that tracks the higher education market.

THE also releases a more established list, the World University Ranking, which it has been putting together for the past 10 years, where it uses 13 different metrics, from the number of academic citations schools receive to the percentage of their faculty members with Ph.D.s But THE rankings editor Phil Baty explains that four years ago, he and his colleagues realized that it could also be meaningful to look purely at reputation. 

So THE decided to poll senior, published professors at universities in more than 100 countries around the world. It asked them to do one thing: Nominate 15 or fewer institutions in their field which they considered to have the best departments in their area of study.

 (A company called IpsosMediaCT collected the poll data and gave it to ThomsonReuters, which tallied the numbers for THE.) ThenTHE took the data and divided it into six disciplines: social sciences, engineering, technology, physical sciences, medicine and life sciences, and arts and humanities, and did its tally from there.

“This is purely subjective data,” explains Phil Baty,THE’s rankings editor. “It’s completely based on opinion. But it’s opinion from the people whose opinions really count.”

Why is reputation so important? “Reputation is almost like the currency of higher education,” says Baty. “It’s the way scholars decide whom to do business with, whom to collaborate with and where they’ll go for their next career move.” The same goes for students, he says. “Reputation often comes out as the No. 1 factor that students use to decide where they want to go to school.”

Of course there is something circular about college rankings. If a school comes out on top of the U.S. News ranking, or the Forbes ranking for that matter, it enhances the public perception of that school, which then ups the number of applicants and the quality of students the school can accept. It’s interesting to note that Forbes ranks Harvard down at No. 8 on its list, while Stanford is No. 1 and MIT a distant No. 10. As our readers know, Forbes ranks only U.S. institutions and we use a unique set of criteria including grads’ salaries as calculated by PayScale, faculty comments on RateMyProfessor.com, number of graduates who have landed in Who’s Who and four-year graduation rates. 

But arguably THE’s reputation ranking is more serious than other ratings since it’s entirely the result of a poll of scholars. This year’s ranking is based on 10,500 responses from published senior academics who reported an average of 18 years working in higher education.

As in previous years, U.S. institutions dominate the list. In addition to taking the top three spots, it has eight of the top 10, up from seven last year. Of the top 100, U.S. schools take 46 slots, up from 43 in 2013. Several U.S. universities gained quite a few places this year. Example:  Columbia University rose to 12th from 23rd.  (It’s No. 5 on the Forbes list.)

The majority of U.S. schools that have lost ground are public universities hit by spending cuts. The University of Michigan fell from 12th to 15th place, the University of Texas from 27th to 33rd and the University of Massachusetts from 42nd to the 61-70 band (THE doesn’t give specific numbers to schools in that range). The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida and Rutgers all fell as well. At least two top California institutions are hanging on within the top 10: U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A.

What about schools in other nations? The U.K. has two slots in the top 10: the well-known University of Cambridge and University of Oxford in fourth and fifth place. But Baty notes that several Asian universities are gaining ground, as their financial backing grows. The National University of Singapore is in 21st place, up one slot from last year. Seoul National University has risen to 26th from 41st and Peking University is in 41st place, up from 45th.

Here are the top 10 most reputable universities:

1. Harvard
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3. Stanford University
4. University of Cambridge
5. University of Oxford
6. University of California, Berkeley
7. Princeton University
8. Yale University
9. California Institute of Technology
10. University of California, Los Angeles

View at the original source

How to lead the student from the wrong answer to the correct one? 05-11

Infants use known verbs to learn new nouns 03-09

Infants use known verbs to learn new nouns

There is a lot that 19-month-old children can’t do: They can’t tie their shoes or get their mittens on the correct hands. But they can use words they do know to learn new ones.

New research from Northwestern University demonstrates that even before infants begin to talk in sentences, they are paying careful attention to the way a new word is used in conversations, and they learn new words from this information in sentences.

For example, if you take an infant to the zoo and say, “Look at the gorilla” while pointing at the cage, the infant may not know what exactly is being referred to. However, if you say, “Look! The gorilla is eating,” the infant can use the word that they do know — “eating” — to conclude that “gorilla” must refer to the animal and not, for example, the swing she is sitting on.

The zoo scenario mirrors the method the researchers used for their experiment. First, infants at ages 15 and 19 months were shown several pairs of pictures on a large screen. Each pair included one new kind of animal and a non-living object. Next, the objects disappeared from view and infants overheard a conversation that included a new word, “blick.” Finally, the two objects re-appeared, and infants heard, for example, “Look at the blick.”

“After overhearing this new word in conversation, infants who hear a helpful sentence such as ‘the blick is eating’ should look more towards the animal than the other, non-living object,” said Brock Ferguson, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northwestern and lead author of the study. “We show that by 19 months, they do just that. In contrast, if infants heard the new word in an unhelpful sentence such as ‘the blick is over here’ during the conversation, they don’t focus specifically on the animal because, after all, in this kind of sentence, ‘blick’ could mean anything.”

The researchers said many people believe that word learning occurs only in clear teaching conditions — for example, when someone picks up an object, brings it to the baby, points to it and says its name. In fact, infants usually hear a new word for the first time under much more natural and complex circumstances such as the zoo example described.

“What’s remarkable is that infants learned so much from hearing the conversation alone,” said Sandra Waxman, senior author of the study, the Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern. “This shows how attuned even very young infants are to the conversation around them. It also shows how well infants build upon what they do know to build their vocabulary.”

Ferguson said that this study underscores that the amount of language a child hears on a daily basis can have significant consequences on their language outcomes later in life.

“One implication of our new study is that infants who hear relatively little language in the first few years may also be missing out on critical word learning opportunities that arise everyday in the conversations that surround them,” said Ferguson. He said future research includes examining the link between language input, processing efficiency and the kind of word learning revealed in the study to better understand how to best support children’s language development from a very early age.

View at the original source

'Budget is not just about numbers, it's about our values' 03-09

'Budget is not just about numbers, it's about our values'

Good morning, everybody. I'm here at Powell Elementary School, and just had a chance to see some of the outstanding students here. And I thought it was appropriate for me to say a few words about the Budget that I sent to Congress this morning - because obviously the Budget is not just about numbers, it's about our values and it's about our future, and how well we are laying the groundwork for those young children that I was with just a few moments ago to be able to succeed here in America. These kids may not be the most excited people in town on Budget day, but my Budget is designed with their generation and future generations in mind.

In my State of the Union address, I laid out an agenda to restore opportunity for all people - to uphold the principle that no matter who you are, no matter where you started, you can make it if you try here in America.

This opportunity agenda is built on four parts - more good jobs and good wages; making sure that we're training workers with the skills they need to get those good jobs; guaranteeing every child access to a world-class education; and making sure that our economy is one in which hard work is rewarded.

The Budget I sent Congress this morning lays out how we'll implement this agenda in a balanced and responsible way. It's a road map for creating jobs with good wages and expanding opportunity for all Americans. And at a time when our deficits have been cut in half, it allows us to meet our obligations to future generations without leaving them a mountain of debt. This Budget adheres to the spending levels that both parties in both houses of Congress already agreed to. But it also builds on that progress with what we're calling an Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative that invests in our economic priorities in a smart way that is fully paid for by making smart spending cuts and closing tax loopholes that right now only benefit the well-off and the well-connected.

I'll give you an example. Right now, our tax system provides benefits to wealthy individuals who save, even after they've amassed multi million-dollar retirement accounts. By closing that loophole, we can help create jobs and grow our economy, and expand opportunity without adding a dime to the deficit.

We know that the country that wins the race for new technologies will win the race for new jobs, so this Budget creates 45 high-tech manufacturing hubs where businesses and universities will partner to turn groundbreaking research into new industries and new jobs made in America.

We know - and this is part of the reason why we're here today - that education has to start at the earliest possible ages. So this Budget expands access to the kind of high-quality pre-school and other early learning programmes to give all of our children the same kinds of opportunities that those wonderful children that we just saw are getting right here at Powell.

We know that while not all of today's good jobs are going to require a four-year college degree, more and more of them are going to require some form of higher education or specialised training. So this Budget expands apprenticeships to connect more ready-to-work Americans with ready-to-be-filled jobs. And we know that future generations will continue to deal with the effects of a warming planet, so this Budget proposes a smarter way to address the costs of wildfires. And it includes over $1 billion in new funding for new technologies to help communities prepare for a changing climate today, and set up incentives to build smarter and more resilient infrastructure.

We also know that the most effective and historically bipartisan ways to reduce poverty and help hard-working families pull themselves up is the earned income tax credit. Right now, it helps about half of all parents in America at some point in their lives. This Budget gives millions more workers the opportunity to take advantage of the tax credit. And it pays for it by closing loopholes like the ones that let wealthy individuals classify themselves as a small business to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

This Budget will also continue to put our fiscal house in order over the long term - not by putting the burden on folks who can least afford it, but by reforming our tax code and our immigration system and building on the progress that we've made to reduce health care costs under the Affordable Care Act. And it puts our debt on a downward path as a share of our total economy, which independent experts have set as a critical target for fiscal responsibility.

As I said at the outset, our Budget is about choices. It's about our values. As a country, we've got to make a decision if we're going to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, or if we're going to make smart investments necessary to create jobs and grow our economy, and expand opportunity for every American. At a time when our deficits are falling at the fastest rate in 60 years, we've got to decide if we're going to keep squeezing the middle class, or if we're going to continue to reduce the deficits responsibly, while taking steps to grow and strengthen the middle class.

The American people have made clear time and again which approach they prefer. That's the approach that my Budget offers. That's why I'm going to fight for it this year and in the years to come as president. Thank you very much, everybody.

View at the original source

Using Social Media to Teach Visual Literacy in the 21st Century Classroom 03-05

Using Social Media to Teach Visual Literacy in the 21st Century Classroom

Increasingly, educators are acknowledging and welcoming the relative advantages of social media into the teaching and learning process. From creating school Facebook pages to connecting students with experts via Twitter, social media has taken root as a legitimate classroom learning and communication tool. The highly linguistic nature of social media allows us to create and consume ideas and information unlike ever before. Much attention has been given to composing an articulate blog post and condensing our messages to 140 characters or less. However, effective use of this 21st century technology requires that we not only become proficient in textual communication, but also in our ability to express ourselves and interpret others' ideas through visual literacy.

Why Visual Literacy Matters

Visual literacy is the ability to:

1. Process and make meaning of information presented in an image.
2. Communicate our own ideas through principles of design.
3. Create our own messages that capture our visual thinking in a way that conceptualizes problems to given solutions.

The importance of including visual literacy instruction for our students in the classroom comes from the discovery that students gain a deeper understanding of a concept when they are encouraged and enabled to create a nonlinguistic representation of that concept. When paired with linguistic -- or text-based -- literacy, visual literacy can multiply students' ability to recall and think about what they have learned.

So, what does visual literacy in the classroom look like? If we were to answer this question from our students' points of view, we would likely say Instagram, Emoji and memes. But do any of these platforms offer value to the learning experience? Perhaps that depends on what, or rather, how you are trying to teach.

3 Modes of Visual Communication

As a photo editing and sharing network, Instagram offers much to the educational process simply in its ability to allow students to create and publish original content. But when considered from the context of instructional design, it takes on new dimensions that would otherwise be nonexistent. As stated before, visual literacy includes the ability to create messages that capture our own visual thinking. Imagine what this might look like when issuing students the challenge of capturing what Robert Frost was writing about in his timeless poem "The Road Not Taken" with a single Instagram photo sent to a common classroom hashtag. Not only would this approach encourage students to consider this piece of prose at higher-ordered levels of thinking, it would also free them to do so in the context of their own creativity.

Similarly, Emoji, or ideograms often used in text messaging, have incredible potential in directing our students to effectively communicate through visual designs. At the most basic level, people use Emoji to illustrate their emotions through minute smiley faces and faces with tears. But when utilized as an instructional tool, these otherwise informationally cosmetic accessories could encourage students to consider the emotional tapestry and perspectives of figures from history had they been provided the communication tools and platforms of today. 

Would President Lincoln have included a smiley face with an ideogram of theater tickets along with his social media update about going to Ford's Theater, or would he have conveyed the premonitions that some have attributed to him having on that fateful evening with something a little more sullen? Whatever it may have been, students empathizing with our 16th president would have to determine the message they want to share and then evaluate the effectiveness of symbols to do so.

Memes require this same level of analysis and application to share one’s intended message with social stickiness. Lending itself more to commentary on a given topic, understanding what a meme is saying requires mature linguistic and social dexterity. One of my favorite trendy meme characters is the Philosoraptor, an animated dinosaur apparently scratching his chin as he ponders the elusive meaning of life. Recently, I saw a meme created with this image that read,

 "What if math teachers were really just pirates who wanted us to find X just so they could locate buried treasure?" Understanding the humor inherent in this meme not only requires a basic comprehension of algebraic variability, it also asks us to process the demeanor of the Philosoraptor to identify the rhetorical sarcasm in the image. And while viewing and responding to memes requires one set of intellectual skills, creating them based on a current unit of study requires a skillset entirely different.

Embracing a Cognitive Opportunity

That we have evolved our favorite forms of communication is obvious without more than simply watching our students walk through the hallways. It would be easy to demonize social media and each medium that it provides for human interaction. But it would be educationally valuable to embrace it, turning it into an opportunity for our students to develop an appreciation for the advanced cognitive skills they employ on a daily basis. Why not study the highly visual communication models connecting the thoughts that mean the most to them with the social networks where they live their lives?

View at the original source

How to lead the student from the wrong answer to the correct one? 05-11

Read the Full List of Winners of the 86th Academy Awards 03-05

Read the Full List of Winners of the 86th Academy Awards

Even though the Best Picture race seemed to be a close one, the 86th Annual Academy Awards yielded few surprises, with the top awards mostly shaking out the way pundits expected. In a rare split, Best Picture went to 12 Years a Slave, while Best Director went to Alfonso Cuarón of Gravity. Matthew McConaughey and Cate Blanchett took the top acting prizes for Dallas Buyers Club and Blue Jasmine, respectively. Lupita Nyong'o ended up edging out Jennifer Lawrence for Best Supporting Actress. 

Read the full results below. 

Best Picture
American Hustle
Captain Phillips
Dallas Buyers Club
Gravity
Her
Nebraska
Philomena
12 Years a Slave
The Wolf of Wall Street

Predicted winner: 12 Years a Slave

Actual winner: 12 Years a Slave. "Everyone deserves not just to survive, but to live," director Steve McQueen said in his acceptance speech. The win made history. McQueen became the first black person to win a Best Picture trophy. The movie was the first film by a black director to win the Oscars' top prize.

Best Actor
Christian Bale, American Hustle
Bruce Dern, Nebraska
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club

Predicted winner:  Matthew McConaughey 

Actual winner: Matthew McConaughey. McConaughey's speech is long and rambling. All right, all right, all right. 

Best Actress
Amy Adams, American Hustle
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Sandra Bullock, Gravity
Judi Dench, Philomena
Meryl Streep, August: Osage County

Predicted winner: Cate Blanchett

Actual winner: Cate Blanchett. This result is not surprising, she had swept basically every award up until this point. 

Best Director
David O. Russell, American Hustle
Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity
Alexander Payne, Nebraska
Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave
Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

Predicted winner: Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity 

Actual winner: Cuarón wins, making him the first Latino man to win the award. The award was handed out by Angelina Jolie and Sidney Poitier, who was the first black man to win Best Actor. 

Best Supporting Actor
Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips
Bradley Cooper, American Hustle
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
Jonah Hill, The Wolf of Wall Street
Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club

Predicted winner: Jared Leto

Actual winner: Jared Leto. Leto gave an emotional speech about his mother. He also brought up both Venezuela and Ukraine in his speech and said: "this is for the 36 million people who have lost the battle to AIDS." 

Best Supporting Actress
Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave
Julia Roberts, August: Osage County
June Squibb, Nebraska

Predicted winner:  Jennifer Lawrence

Actual winner: Lupita Nyong'o. She gets a standing ovation. Read her full speech here.

Best Costume Design 
American Hustle 
The Grandmaster 
The Great Gatsby 
The Invisible Woman
12 Years Slave 

Predicted winner: Gatsby

Actual winner: Gatsby

Best Makeup and Hairstyling 
Dallas Buyers Club
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
The Lone Ranger

Predicted winner: The Lone Ranger

Actual winner: Dallas Buyers Club. The hair and makeup budget for the film was insanely low, just $250.

Best Animated Short Film
Feral
Get a Horse!
Mr. Hublot
Possessions
Room on the Broom 

Predicted winner: Get a Horse!

Actual winner: Mr. Hublot. No Disney love here. 

Best Animated Feature

The Croods
Despicable Me 2
Ernest & Celestine
Frozen
The Wind Rises

Predicted winner: Frozen

Actual winner: Frozen. Of course. 

Best Visual Effects 
Gravity 
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Iron Man 2
The Lone Ranger 
Star Trek Into Darkness 

Predicted winner: Gravity

Actual winner: Gravity  

Best Live-Action Short Film
Aquel No Era Yo (That Wasn't Me)
Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything)
Helium
Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?)
The Voorman Problem

Predicted winner: Helium

Actual winner: Helium, definitely the sentimental favorite. It's the story of a child suffering from cancer. 

Best Documentary Short Subject  
CaveDigger 
Facing Fear 
Karama Has No Walls
The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life
Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall 

Predicted winner: The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life

Actual winner: The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, which is about theworld's oldest living Holocaust survivor. The subject died last week.

Best Documentary Feature

The Act of Killing
Cutie and the Boxer
Dirty Wars
The Square
20 Feet From Stardom

Predicted winner: The Square

Actual winner: 20 Feet From Stardom, the biggest crowd-pleaser. Darlene Love, one of the film's subjects, took the stage, and closed out the acceptance speech by singing her heart out. 

Best Foreign Language Film

The Broken Circle Breakdown (Belgium)
The Missing Picture (Cambodia)
The Hunt (Denmark)
The Great Beauty (Italy)
Omar (Palestine)

Predicted winner: The Great Beauty

Actual winner: The Great Beauty. Read our Q&A with the director here.

Best Sound Mixing  
Captain Phillips
Gravity 
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Inside Llewyn Davis
Lone Survivor 

Predicted winner: Gravity 

Actual winner: Gravity

Best Sound Editing
All Is Lost 
Captain Phillips
Gravity 
The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug 
Lone Survivor

Predicted winner: Gravity  

Actual winner: Gravity. "My heart is beating faster than Sandra's," winner Glenn Freemantle said. 

Best Cinematography
The Grandmaster 
Gravity 
Inside Llewyn Davis 
Nebraska 
Prisoners 

Predicted winner: Emmanuel Lubezki, Gravity

Actual winner: Gravity. When announcing the award with Amy Adams, Bill Murray tacked on Harold Ramis' name to the list of nominees. 

Best Film Editing 
American Hustle 
Captain Phillips 
Dallas Buyers Club 
Gravity 
12 Years a Slave 

Predicted winner: Captain Phillips

Actual winner: Gravity

Best Production Design 

American Hustle 
Gravity 
The Great Gatsby
Her 
12 Years a Slave 

Predicted winner: The Great Gatsby

Actual winner: The Great Gatsby, which makes sense since some would argue that the movie is entirely production design. 

Best Original Score 

John Williams for The Book Thief 
Steven Price for Gravity 
William Butler and Owen Pallett for Her 
Alexandre Desplat for Philomena 
Thomas Newman for Saving Mr. Banks 

Predicted winner: Steven Price for Gravity

Actual winner: Gravity

Best Original Song

"Happy" from Despicable Me 2
"Let it Go" from Frozen
"The Moon Song" from Her 
"Ordinary Love" from Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Predicted winner: "Let It Go"

Actual winner: "Let it Go." Bobby Lopez, who co-wrote the song with his wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez, just got an EGOT with this win!

Best Adapted Screenplay

Before Midnight
Captain Phillips
Philomena
12 Years a Slave
The Wolf of Wall Street

Predicted winner: 12 Years a Slave

Actual winner: 12 Years a Slave

Best Original Screenplay

American Hustle
Blue Jasmine
Dallas Buyers Club
Her
Nebraska

Predicted winner: Her

Actual winner: Her

View at the original ource

Economic Inclusion – Accelerating Impact Collectively 03-05

Economic Inclusion – Accelerating Impact Collectively

Social Entrepreneurs with proven models for including low-income populations convene to refine their impact scaling strategies and collectively overcome ecosystem barriers.

Great business ideas go global to serve customers around the world. Great social innovations, however, too often remain local or national because market forces do not work as efficiently in low-income markets. Although many of the ideas and the entrepreneurs behind them have the potential for global spread, the inclusive business sector still lacks the processes, resources and mechanisms necessary for scaling impact successfully. The Ashoka Globalizer is working to help change this scenario. Founded in 2010, Globalizer capitalizes on Ashoka’s global reach, selection process and network of social and business entrepreneurs to connect “ready to globalize” innovations with the strategic and intellectual support they need to go global rapidly and efficiently.

At the end of February 2014, a group of 20 international Ashoka Fellows will convene for the Economic Inclusion Globalizer Summit in Chennai, India. During three days of structured interactions with business and impact sector thought leaders, they will share and synthesize knowledge and best practices around emerging scaling pathways, exchange practical advice to support each other’s endeavors, and distill their stories to share with the sector at large. In preparation for the summit, Fellows spent several months working to distill or “unbundle” the core elements of their theory of change and refine their strategies for scaling with support from teams of advisors from Ashoka and our business sector partners.  

Systems changing innovations for Economic Inclusion

Much has been written about the great treasure that lies within low-income markets: Four billion people living on less than $3,000 per year who collectively spend $5 trillion per year. By 2050, the world’s population is expected to increase by 3 billion, with growth rates being highest in developing countries. This treasure, however, lies buried at great depth. In order to access it, entrepreneurs have to overcome significant systemic barriers such as low levels of education, inadequate infrastructure, and poorly designed and enforced regulations. Including low-income groups as pure consumers will not necessarily improve their livelihoods. This is why the most promising social entrepreneurship models go beyond increasing peoples’ access to critical goods, services, and financial markets. Rather, they also engage them in creating local value through stimulating economic opportunities. More than 500 of Ashoka’s 3,100 Fellows around the world work on solutions that engage low-income populations in economic value chains as contributors, producers, and micro-entrepreneurs.

Here are three examples of successful models that several Ashoka Fellows are using:

Creating employment and access to markets in remote areas through the set-up of locally owned last-mile distribution infrastructure: Katherine Lucey’s organization Solar Sister trains women in rural Uganda to become last-mile micro-franchise entrepreneurs who bridge the gap in the distribution of affordable, renewable energy products through peer-to-peer sales networks. Greg van Kirk’s Community Enterprise Solutions is delivering health-related goods and services to remote villages using a micro-consignment model in Central America.

Spurring economic opportunity through the support of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs): Through his organization Agora Partnerships, Ben Powell is equipping promising impact entrepreneurs with business knowledge and access to investment capital to run for-profit businesses that help address social problems and promote development in their communities. Paul Basil’s Villgro provides mentoring and funding to early stage innovation-based social enterprises, which positively impact the lives of India's poor.

Empowering informal workers through lobbying and information: Arbind Singh’s organization NIDAN in India provides excluded informal workers with access to markets through large people-owned and managed institutions – large enough to influence policy and act as legitimate competitors in a globalizing marketplace. Ananya Raihan is ushering in an era of information-on-demand in the rural areas of Bangladesh by building a network of locally run kiosks that offer villagers access to everything from up-to-date market prices for their rice to health information and legal forms, all through a centralized, Bengali-language information clearinghouse.

 

How to scale the impact of inclusive business models in low-income markets

Over the last decade, the notion of “scaling what works” has emerged as a broadly shared priority across the social sector. Still, the challenge of enabling powerful inclusive business innovations to spread to where they are most needed continues to frustrate social entrepreneurs and their supporters. Many failed attempts to scale economic inclusion initiatives are due to widespread overreliance on the conventional wisdom of the business sector, in which scaling efforts typically focus on increasing the size of organizations. In recent years, however, the social entrepreneurship sector has increasingly focused on scaling social impact without necessarily increasing the size of the organization. Indeed, Richard Bradach may have framed the current thinking best when he wrote that “finding ways to scale impact without scaling the size of an organization is the new frontier for work in our field.”(1) This emerging paradigm holds the promise of shaping strategies that succeed, thanks to the defining characteristics of the social sector. Leveraging the collaborative potential of mission-driven innovators while keeping organizational footprints— and attendant resource needs—to a minimum are key. The Economic Inclusion Globalizer seeks to accelerate this paradigm shift in the field of economic inclusion.

All businesses, whether standard or inclusive, face similar challenges when growing such as lack of access to appropriate financing mechanisms and qualified human capital, or the lack of a conducive regulatory environment. When operating in low-income environments, however, structural barriers make coping with these challenges even more difficult: Consumers are even harder to reach; support organizations, such as training providers, are not available; and the general business infrastructure is less developed. This is why the first day of the Globalizer summit focuses on the systemic barriers preventing economic inclusion initiatives from scaling their impact to meet their full demand. Ashoka’s social entrepreneurs will come together with leading minds from different sectors, industries, and markets to share their challenges, solutions, and new ideas for tackling these systemic barriers collectively. A special pool of funds will benefit the most outstanding solutions that emerge, thanks to GIZ and eBay Foundation, in partnership with Ashoka India and Ashoka Globalizer. The Globalizer Summit seeks to facilitate the creation of a strong economic inclusion ecosystem that truly allows economic opportunities to thrive where they are most needed..

View at the original source

At India’s Top Business School, The Jobs Are Plentiful & The Students Satisfied 03-04

At India’s Top Business School, The Jobs Are Plentiful & The Students Satisfied

Many of India’s business elite seem worried. Economic growth has slowed. Corruption remains untamed, a result of poorly paid civil servants who demand bribes in exchange for favors. The country’s infrastructure, long inferior to many other nations, still lags woefully behind. And nearly everyone agrees that an inept and bureaucratic government is holding back the country’s progress.

But if you ask the students at the Indian School of Business who will graduate in early April how things are going, you get nothing but a positive vibe. And why not? By the time the employment numbers get counted, the school is expecting record numbers all around: higher domestic and international salaries for students and an unprecedented number of offers from such leading companies as Amazon, Deloitte Consulting, McKinsey, and one of the hottest e-commerce outfits in India, Flipkart.

“This is the best year I’ve had in ten years,” says V.K. Menon, senior director of careers, admissions and financial aid. Last year some 423 companies showed up on campus to recruit the school’s students, a 21% increase from 348 the previous year. Menon concedes that enough companies went away empty handed that he thinks it would be better if fewer recruiters had showed up, though he expects roughly the same number for this year’s graduating class. He also predicts that the school’s 770 students will receive more than 1,000 signed job offers this year, up from 819 in 2013 and 631 two years ago.

FOR STUDENTS, NUMEROUS INTERVIEWS AND MULTIPLE JOB OFFERS

Upsana Wahi, 27, had interviews with six companies, ranging from a real estate developer and a hospital chain to a high tech startup and the hot e-commerce company. She ended up deciding between two offers and is joining IBM’s global business consulting unit in Bangalore upon graduation. Girish Kumar S.N., 30, interviewed with five companies, also landed two offers and is excited to be joining a three-year mobile platform startup called Zipdial in a product management role. Lokesh Jain, 26, had 12 interviews and three offers.

There’s no greater symbol of how strong the market is for ISB’s students than the story, told by Menon, of an oil equipment company that came to recruit the school’s students for the first time this year. A dozen students were initially offered tax-free $50,000 salaries—nearly double the the average for graduates who remain in India—along with free housing and a car in the Middle East. When the firm found no takers, it returned and doubled the offers to $100,000 each. The 12 students quickly signed up for the deal.

“For us, the MBA market is still buoyant,” says Ajit Rangnekar, who has been dean of the school since January of 2010. “We are seeing a steady and robust interest in our students from companies. Last year, 200 students were placed one month before the previous year. This year, we’re doing even better than that.” (See How ISB Grads Fared In the 2013 Job Market).

ONLY 13 YEARS OLD, ISB HAS BECOME INDIA’S LEADING BUSINESS SCHOOL 

Even students who have yet to connect with an employer don’t seem worried about their prospects. Harmanjot Singh, 27, says he has had 27 interviews with firms that range from Johnson & Johnson to the Times of India. A medical doctor by training, he wants to use his degree to switch to a marketing career and is having trouble convincing recruiters to take him on. “ISB has not given up on me and that is something I am so grateful for,” says Singh, who notes that the career staff has done everything it could to help him.

View at the original source