GLOBAL: What international students want to study

Predicting where future international students will come from and what subjects they go abroad to study has become a mini-industry in receiving countries such as Britain and Australia, where some courses are highly dependent on overseas student fees.

Delegates and experts at the British Council's Going Global conference, held in Hong Kong from 11-12 March, agreed that demand for overseas courses from Asian students will carry on rising.

"Overall demand for international education will continue to grow in the low single digits in the next decade," said Tony Pollock (pictured), Chief Executive of IDP Education, an international student placement service.

However, subject choices may be changing as sending countries like China and India become more affluent, students from Singapore prefer to study at their own excellent universities and Malaysia reduces the number of government scholarships for students on expensive overseas courses.

Medicine and related courses in the West have long been popular with students from India, Malaysia and Hong Kong, while business-related degrees and engineering have been the top choice for students from China, Taiwan and Vietnam.

This is according to a survey of 5,000 prospective international students in 14 countries by Hotcourses, a web-based company that advises students on course choice internationally. 

Students from Pakistan are looking for high quality courses in engineering and technology, and Indonesian students are looking at the natural sciences. 

South Korean students, on the other hand, go abroad to study creative arts and design, while students from India and Malaysia are interested in social sciences and communications, said Mike Elms, Chief Executive of Hotcourses. 

However, patterns are changing in key markets such as China, which last year sent 440,000 students to study abroad, overtaking India as the top sending country.

Prospective students from major Chinese cities may be broadening out the subjects they want to study abroad, according to research by the British Council - information which could also be important for decisions by a number newly emerging regional higher educational hubs on what courses to offer to attract international students. 

The British Council's Education Intelligence Unit research into prospective students' intentions in the coming years found that there have been shifts in the most popular subjects chosen for study in the UK in the last two to three years. 

Students from China are still most likely to study business administration and engineering and technology at overseas universities, but growth in the number of students selecting these subjects is slowing while students from China wanting to study mass communication and documentation, and creative arts and design, has shown much bigger growth. 

"We were trying to capture the student decision-making process before the student embarks on a course," said Janet Illieva, head of research at the British Council in Hong Kong. "For China we have seen decreased demand for engineering."

"There has been a shift in demand towards non-traditional subjects in China at the city level," she said. This was most evident in large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. "We think this is because of the rise in the middle class in these cities. While in the medium-sized cities, there is definitely a rise in those who say they want to study engineering." 

For example, one in four prospective international students in the city of Shenyang want to pursue engineering. In Nanjing, Xi'an and Chengdu the rise was 17% to 18%, taking over where Beijing was a decade ago. These are also cities where there has been a rise in heavy industry and manufacturing, Illieva said.

Students from China saying they want to study mass communication has risen by 81% since 2008, a possible reflection of the burgeoning use of the internet. Prospective Chinese students wanting to study creative arts has risen by 54% during the same period, compared to 25% to 29% growth for business and engineering. Architecture, building and planning has seen 35% growth in interest from China in the last two years. 

Mass communication has soared to become the third most popular choice for Chinese students wanting to study overseas, rising from 8th most popular in 2006-07. Creative arts has risen to fifth place behind social studies compared to ninth place in 2006-07.

The findings have implications for universities hoping to replace declining applications at home with students from overseas, particularly in science and engineering. 

But Hotcourses' Mike Elms said the key motivator for students looking for courses abroad is "to get a better education. They want a higher quality course than is available to them in their own (education) market," he said.

source:http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20110318130504251

Testing time for global supply-chain

Tony Prophet, a Senior Vice-President for operations at Hewlett-Packard (HP), was awakened at 3:30 a.m. in California and was told that an earthquake and tsunami had struck Japan. Soon after, Prophet had set up a virtual ‘situation room,' so managers in Japan, Taiwan and America could instantly share information.

Prophet oversees all hardware purchasing for HP's $65-billion-a-year global supply-chain, which feeds its huge manufacturing engine. The company's factories churn out two personal computers a second, two printers a second and one data-centre computer every 15 seconds.

While other HP staff members checked on the company's workers in Japan none of whom were injured in the disaster Prophet and his team scrambled to define the impact on the company's suppliers in Japan and, if necessary, to draft backup plans.

“It's too early to tell, and we're not going to pretend to predict the outcome,” Prophet said in an interview last week. “It's like being in an emergency room, doing triage.”

The emergency-room image speaks volumes. Modern global supply chains, experts say, mirror complex biological systems like the human body in many ways. They can be remarkably resilient and self-healing, yet at times quite vulnerable to some specific, seemingly small weakness as if a tiny tear in a crucial artery were to cause someone to suffer heart failure.

Day in and day out, the global flow of goods routinely adapts to all kinds of glitches and setbacks. A supply breakdown in one factory in one country, for example, is quickly replaced by added shipments from suppliers elsewhere in the network. Sometimes, the problems span whole regions and require emergency action for days or weeks. When a volcano erupted in Iceland last spring, spewing ash across northern Europe and grounding air travel, supply-chain wizards were put to a test, juggling production and shipments worldwide to keep supplies flowing.

But the disaster in Japan, experts say, presents a first-of-its-kind challenge, even if much remains uncertain.

Japan is the world's third-largest economy, and a vital supplier of parts and equipment for major industries like computers, electronics and automobiles. The worst of the damage was northeast of Tokyo, near the quake's epicentre, though Japan's manufacturing heartland is farther south. But greater problems will emerge if rolling electrical blackouts and transportation disruptions across the country continue for long.

Throughout Japan, many plants are closed at least for days, with restart dates uncertain. Already, there are some ripple effects worldwide: for example, a General Motors truck plant in Louisiana announced last week that it was shutting down temporarily for lack of Japanese-made parts. More made-in-Japan supply-chain travails are expected. “This is going to be a huge test of global supply chains, but I don't think it will be a mortal blow,” says Kevin O'Marah, an analyst at Gartner-AMR Research. The good news for the world's manufacturing economy is that the sectors where Japan plays a vital role are fairly mature, global industries.

Japan's importance in the semiconductor industry as a whole has receded in recent years, as more production has shifted to South Korea, Taiwan and even China. Japan accounts for less than 21 per cent of total semiconductor production, down from 28 per cent in 2001, according to IHS iSuppli, a research firm.

Still, Japan produces a far higher share of certain important chips like the lightweight flash memory used in smart phones and tablet computers. Japan makes about 35 per cent of those memory chips, IHS iSuppli estimates, and Toshiba is the major Japanese producer. But South Korean companies, led by Samsung, are also large producers of flash memory.

Apple, like all major companies these days, treats its supply-chain operations as a trade secret. But industry analysts estimate that Apple buys perhaps a third of its flash memory from Toshiba, with the rest coming mainly from South Korea. The lead time between chip orders and delivery is two months or more. A leading customer like Apple will be first in line for supplies, and it has inventories for several weeks, analysts say. So there will be little immediate impact on Apple or its customers, but even Apple will likely be hit with supply shortages of crucial components in the second quarter, predicts Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

That geographic and technological evolution, in theory, should make adapting to the disaster in Japan easier for corporate supply chains.

Most anything can be tracked, but it takes smart technology, investment and effort to do so. And as procurement networks become more complex and supply lines grow longer ‘thin strands,' as the experts call the phenomenon the difficulty and expense of seeing deeper into the supply chain increases.

Indeed, supplies of larger, more costly electronic components, like flash memory and liquid crystal displays, tend to grab the most attention.

But, says Tony Fadell, a former senior Apple executive who led the iPod and iPhone design teams, “there are all kinds of little specialised parts without second sources, like connectors, speakers, microphones, batteries and sensors that don't get the love they deserve. Many are from Japan.”

Lacking some part, even if it costs just dimes or a few dollars, can mean shutting down a factory, Fadell adds.

A recent analysis by IHS iSuppli, taking apart a new Apple iPad2, identified five parts coming from Japanese suppliers: flash memory from Toshiba, random-access memory for temporary storage from Elpida Memory, an electronic compass from AKM Semiconductor, touch-screen glass from Asahi Glass, and a battery from Apple Japan.

Further down the supply chain lie raw materials. Trouble for a supplier to a company's parts supplier can cascade across an industry. For example, reports that a Mitsubishi Gas Chemical factory in Fukushima was damaged by the tsunami have fanned fears of a coming shortage of a resin bismaleimide triazine, or BT used in the packaging for small computer chips in cell phones and other products.

Two Japanese companies are the leading producers of silicon wafers, the raw material used to make computer chips, accounting for more than 60 per cent of the world's supply. The largest is the Shin-Etsu Chemical Corp. Its main wafer plant in Shirakawa was damaged by the earthquake, and the factory is down.

“The continuing violent aftershocks are complicating the inspection work,” said Hideki Aihara, a Shin-Etsu spokesman in Japan, on Friday. “Right now we can't say how badly it was damaged or how long it might take to get started.”

Shin-Etsu does have factories outside Japan. “But the most advanced manufacturing and silicon-growing processes are done in Japan,” says Klaus Rinnen, a semiconductor analyst at Gartner. And growing silicon ingots, which are then sliced into wafers, is a lengthy, delicate process that will be hampered by power failures or other disruptions, he says.

Big chip makers like Intel, Samsung and Toshiba typically hold inventories of silicon wafers for four to six weeks of production.

“But after that, it will get tougher,” Rinnen says.

The Japan quake, some experts say, will prompt companies to re-evaluate risk in their supply chains. Perhaps, they say, there will be a shift from focusing on reducing inventories and costs the just-in-time model, pioneered in Japan to one that places greater emphasis on buffering risk a just-in-case mentality.

Adding inventories and backup suppliers reduces risk by increasing the redundancy in a supply system. It is one way to enhance resilience, experts say, but there are others.

For global operations managers like Prophet of HP, the Japanese disaster will be a severe test of their supply networks and systems. Once the triage stage is passed, though, it will be a learning experience as well. “We'll do a retrospective on what worked best and what didn't, and how to change things to make our supply chain more resilient,” he says.

source:http://www.hindu.com/biz/2011/03/21/stories/2011032150071500.htm