Yeah, it’s been known interviews can be gamed, but it seems to me like not much has changed. As for student interviews — ha, I wish we were better at filtering the D/F students out… but also think that initial filters are always going to be dicey anyway. (As with hiring, admissions should be a tentative filtration system, with poor performance later on being enough to be flunked out. I don’t know if I’m right in sensing a tension between younger educators who have higher standards, and older ones who are more willing to let things slide, but in any case, it’s so difficult to be flunked out once you’re in that maybe initial filtering is being strained to do what it could never really do anyway?)

And yeah, again, I agree about the effect of a sense of fairness, and distrust of subjective evaluations. I have plenty of experience with that. And it’s a dicey thing: very hard to work around. The idea that an evaluation can be (a) effective, (b) objective, and (c) rapidly deployable is problematic on so many levels. I’d say you can only ever have two of three, IF you have the right (trained, skilled, talented evaluators on hand) and even then you need to see it only as a rough guide, not a true measure.

But then there’s the question of filtering people based on useful skills. I can understand my tech-writing translator friend needing to do well at TOEIC, at least in the abstract. But past students of mine who studied TOEIC for a year so they could land jobs that involved absolutely no English whatsoever is a little more questionable to me. It seems like a rather arbitrary filter that, more than anything, wastes millions of man-hours a year. (Which is to say, I figure most people really don’t need to learn to learn English, and using it as an arbitrary filter — and thus turning it into a mega-industry — both muddies the field for the few who really need or want to learn it, and wastes an astonishing amount of human energy and time.)

I agree that inventing a new English test won’t fix things. I figure people will be gaming the new test in a few short years at most; besides which, the government guidelines I’ve seen for language instruction standards (say, textbooks) are, well… uh, let’s just say that the things highlighted left me scratching my head.

Funny you mention the status of the employed during the Great Depression, as I’ve just now begun reading this econ-popularization by Jeffry (no sic!) A. Frieden called Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century and I was wondering the same thing about those who held onto employment during the earlier depression of 1873-1896. I figured prices dropping had to be beneficial to someone somewhere…

How does this affect the education and labor system here: Everybody clearly recognizes the problem. You need creative, flexible students and workers who are skilled, and who can adapt to new skills easily. Problem is, these are precisely the skills that the current education system seeks to dampen. I think Confuscian culture has something to do with it (since it frowns on going against your elders, superiors, and so-called wisemen and intellectuals); but also contributing is the sense of fairness and (regrettably) transparency – since judging whether somebody is “flexible” and has lots of “future potential” inevitably involves subjective judgment; and Koreans nowadays seem to distrust people making subjective judgment (convinced that the judges are being paid off or influenced by outside factors).

Also, I’ve been doing (and remembering) some stuff on the Great Depression (US) lately due to the global financial crisis, and for workers who did not lose their jobs during the Depression (the unemployment rate for the US was about 25% during the Depression), they lived quite well, since prices were dropping and things could be bought cheaply. As could be expected, the people who were hit the worst were unskilled workers. If performance-based system were brought in very quickly, there probably will be major layoffs. (Korea tends to have lower labor productivity than advanced OECD economies in general – due in part because Koreans work more hours than most other OECD countries, without too many complaints). Also, look at the social problems we are having now with “part-time” or “contract” workers, and the importance labor unions give to job security. I assert (remember, this is my hypothesis that I cannot yet show empirically) that this social system retains Korean tendency for low productivity, (undeserved) job security, and the use of credentials.

I don’t know Spence and Stiglitz, but the stuff about making it harder to fire workers surely sounds like a piece of the puzzle that had never quite occurred to me, though now that you point it out, it makes sense. (I’ve long noted that incompetence doesn’t seem to get people fired so much here, but always attributed it to overemphasis on credentials over real ability alone. The fact it’s hard to fire people once you figure out they’re incompetent pretty much clinches it.)

Everything you say sounds believable, though the transparency also requires the majority of people to buy into the demonstrable value of credentials. I suppose relying on them might be optimal, though I have doubts. (It depends on how broken the credentialing system is, I guess. TOEIC, for example, I see as a widespread credential, but also as a completely broken system. Completely, throw it out the window and start again, broken system.)

If businesses were seriously going to embrace practical ability/skill, they’d probably also have to not just deemphasize, but in fact sideline any credential measures as broken as that, to make room for measures more reflective of, well, anything besides ability to game the system. I can’t see that happening in the short term, though, since the people who’d need to push for it probably wouldn’t want to lose the security of their own credentials, too. Plus designing a new measure, and fighting social norms, is a time-consuming pain in the ass, and who wants to be the first to experiment with a new system? :)

The likely route in terms of hiring is that businesses, mired in traditional job interviewing — not just in Korea — will slowly start trying to find ways to have applicants demonstrate practical skill. I flagged this article months ago as interesting in that it highlights some of the ways in which interviews are quite poor at helping managers pick out who’d be a competent worker in a given position.

If recruitment were at least a little more focused on ability from the get-go, maybe greater transparency wouldn’t need to result in more focus on (easily-gamed) objective credentials.

But of course, since people would still game that system (I can see people paying someone to design the PDF mentioned in the post above), I suppose the real key would remain the ability to fire people who turn out to be less competent than the employer originally thought.

And here I was hoping changes in education could positively affect the labour market. Does that mean a benefit gap will creep in, if and when this happens? (ie. a certain generation of workers would be left out in the cold, or stuck retraining, if the labour market were ever to be fixed in this way?) Or would it be so gradual that this wouldn’t become an issue?

(Yes, you can hear the SF-writer wheels turning in my brain.)

Korean education industry plays to this weakness, and thus the overemphasis on credentials which “signals” that the student can be a good worker; as opposed to “real learning” or in econspeak “building human capital.” However, to determine whether he really is a good worker with high human capital, it requires that you actually work with the worker for a while, and be able to fire him if he turns out to be a dud. If the culture and laws prevent that, then people will try to fake being a good worker, or signal that he is a good worker by getting impressive credentials.

If this hypothesis is true, the optimal answer – to reduce overreliance on credentials, emphasize “real learning” and improve economic efficiency, is to make the labor market more flexible – i.e make it easier to fire workers.

If you can’t make the labor market more flexible, then making choices based on credentials actually ends up to be a socially optimal result, since (even though it is imperfect), it does allow you to distinguish between good and bad workers.

Thus, while I cannot yet show it empirically, I believe that the only way Korea will get over its obsession with credentials and make a true education reform is if Korea fixes the labor market first.

Another consequence (if my hypothesis is true) is that more transparency will *not* help. If you make the hiring process more transparent, then because credentials are a fairly transparent measure of a person, it will become even more important in the hiring process (unless you make the labor market more transparent). As someone who wrote papers on transparency, and advocates more transparency in general, I found this is a truly disturbing consequence, but it follows naturally from the hypothesis.