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This event has reached capacity. Please join us to watch the live-stream at this link. 

The symposium will focus on the key questions that impact health through the year 2020. How could the 2016 election affect health care in the U.S.? How will payment reform affect health systems, physicians and patients? Are the insurance exchanges viable? What challenges pose the biggest threat to global health? Experts from Stanford and beyond address these topics and more as they discuss the future of health policy.

 

Innovation, Discovery and Education from CHP/PCOR on Vimeo.

Agenda:  
 

  1:00PM - 1:15PMRegistration  
 
 
  1:15PM - 1:45PMOpening RemarksLloyd Minor  
Douglas Owens  
Laurence Baker  
 
  1:45PM - 2:15PMInternational HealthGrant Miller  
Eran Bendavid  
Marcella Alsan  
 
  2:15PM - 3:15PMKeynote: ACA at Five Years:  
Progress and Policy Opportunities
Bob Kocher  
Q&A with Laurence Baker  
 
  3:15PM - 3:30PMBreak  
 
 
  3:30PM - 4:15PMPayment ReformDavid Entwistle  
Chris Dawes  
Jay Bhattacharya  
Laurence Baker  
 
  4:15PM - 4:45PMPatient Safety and ValueDouglas Owens  
Kathryn McDonald  
David Chan  
 
  4:45PM - 5:30PMAmerican Health Policy:  
The Election and Beyond
Kate Bundorf  
David Studdert  
Michelle Mello  
Maria Polyakova  
 
  5:30PM - 5:40PMClosing RemarksLaurence Baker  
Douglas Owens  
 
  5:40PM - 7:00PMReception  
 
 

Featured Speakers:

 

Lloyd Minor, Dean, Stanford University School of Medicine

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Minor, MD, is a scientist, surgeon and academic leader. He is the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, a position he has held since December 2012. Minor leads more than 1,500 faculty and 1,000 students at the oldest medical school in the West and has made precision health — the prevention of disease before it strikes — a hallmark of research, education and patient care at Stanford Medicine.

 

 

Bob Kocher, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Venrock

Bob Kocher

Kocher, MD, is a partner at Venrock who focuses on healthcare IT and services investments and is a consulting professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. He served in the Obama Administration as special assistant to the president for health care and economic policy and was one of the key shapers of the Affordable Care Act.

 

 

 

David Entwistle, President and CEO, Stanford Health Care 

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Entwistle joined Stanford Health Care as its President and CEO in July, bringing extensive executive experience at leading academic medical centers. Most recently he served as CEO of the University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics, the only academic medical center in the Intermountain West region. While serving at UUHC, Entwistle received the Modern Healthcare “Up and Comers Award,” for significant contributions in health-care administration, management or policy.

 

Chris Dawes, President and CEO, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital 

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Christopher G. Dawes became President and Chief Executive Officer of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in 1997 after five years of service as Chief Operating Officer. Under his guidance, the hospital, research center and regional medical network has been ranked as one of the best in the nation, as an industry leader in patient safety and innovation in providing a full complement of services for children and expectant mothers.

 

Panelists:  
 

Marcella Alsan, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University

Marcella Alsan’s research focuses on the relationship between health and socioeconomic disparities with a focus on infectious disease. Another vein of research focuses on the microfoundations of antibiotic overuse and resistance. She received a BA degree in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University, a master’s degree in international public health from Harvard School of Public Health, a medical degree from Loyola University, and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. She is board-certified in both internal medicine and infectious disease. She trained at Brigham and Women’s Hospital,  completing the Hiatt Global Health Equity Residency Fellowship in internal medicine. She combined her PhD with an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. She currently is an infectious disease specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto.

Laurence Baker, Chair of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University

Laurence Baker is an economist interested in the organization and economic performance of the U.S. health-care system, and his research has investigated a range of topics including financial incentives in health care, competition in health-care markets, health insurance and managed care and health-care technology adoption. Baker is a past recipient of the ASHE medal from ASHEcon and the Alice Hersch Award from AcademyHealth. He received his BA from Calvin College, and his MA and PhD in economics from Princeton University.

Eran Bendavid, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University

Eran Bendavid is an infectious diseases physician.  His research interests involve understanding the relationship between policies and health outcomes in developing countries. He explores how decisions about foreign assistance for health are made, and how those decisions affect the health of those whom assistance aims to serve.  Dr. Bendavid is also a disease modeler, and uses that skill to explore issues of resource allocation in low and middle-income countries with cost-effectiveness analyses. His recent research projects include an impact evaluation of the US assistance program for HIV in Africa, and an exploration of the association between drug prices, aid and health outcomes in countries heavily affected by HIV.

Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine, Stanford University

Jay Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the constraints that vulnerable populations face in making decisions that affect their health status, as well as the effects of government policies and programs designed to benefit vulnerable populations. He has published empirical economics and health services research on the elderly, adolescents, HIV/AIDS and managed care. Most recently, he has researched the regulation of the viatical-settlements market (a secondary life-insurance market that often targets HIV patients) and summer/winter differences in nutritional outcomes for low-income American families. He is also working on a project examining the labor-market conditions that help determine why some U.S. employers do not provide health insurance.

M. Kate Bundorf, Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford University

M. Kate Bundorf is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  She received her M.B.A. and M.P.H. degrees from The University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from The Wharton School. She was a Fulbright Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Fudan School of Public Health in Shanghai, China in 2009 and 2010.  Her research, which focuses on health insurance markets, has been published in leading economics and health policy journals and has received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  She received the 13th Annual Health Care Research Award from The National Institute for Health Care Management in 2007.

David Chan, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University

David Chan is a physician and economist whose research focuses on productivity in US health care. His research draws on insights from labor and organizational economics. He is particularly interested in studying what drives physician behavior, how this explains differences in productivity in health care delivery, and what the implications are for the design of health care. He is the recipient of the 2014 NIH Director’s High-Risk, High-Reward Early Independence Award to study the optimal balance of information in health information technology for patient care. David Chan is also an investigator at the Department of Veterans Affairs and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kathryn M. McDonald, Executive Director of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, Stanford University

Kathryn McDonald, MM, is the Executive Director of the Center for Health Policy (CHP) and Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) and a senior scholar at the Centers. She is also Associate Director of the Stanford-UCSF Evidence-based Practice Center (under RAND). Her work focuses on measures and interventions to achieve evidence-based patient-centered healthcare quality and patient safety. Mrs. McDonald has served as a project director and principal investigator on a number of research projects at the Stanford School of Medicine, including the development and ongoing enhancement of the Quality and Patient Safety Indicators for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She has authored numerous peer reviewed articles and government reports, including several with wide enough followership to merit recent updates: Care Coordination Measures Atlas, Closing the Quality Gap, and Patient Safety Practices.

Michelle Mello, Professor of Law and of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University

Michelle Mello is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Professor of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine.  She conducts empirical research into issues at the intersection of law, ethics, and health policy.  She is the author of more than 150 articles and book chapters on the medical malpractice system, medical errors and patient safety, public health law, research ethics, the obesity epidemic, pharmaceuticals, and other topics. From 2000 to 2014, Dr. Mello was a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she directed the School’s Program in Law and Public Health. In 2013-14 she completed a Lab Fellowship at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Dr. Mello teaches courses in torts and public health law. She holds a J.D. from the Yale Law School, a Ph.D. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.Phil. from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. from Stanford University.  In 2013, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly known as the Institute of Medicine).

Grant Miller, Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford University

Grant Miller is Director of the Stanford Center for International Development, an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His primary interests are health economics, development economics, and economic demography. As a health and development economist based at the Stanford Medical School, Dr. Miller’s overarching focus is research and teaching aimed at developing more effective health improvement strategies for developing countries. His agenda addresses three major interrelated themes. (1) First, what are the major causes of population health improvement around the world and over time? (2) Second, what are the behavioral underpinnings of the major determinants of population health improvement? (3) Third, how can programs and policies use these behavioral insights to improve population health more effectively?

Douglas K. Owens, Director of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, Stanford University

Douglas K. Owens, MD, MS, is the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr., Professor at Stanford University, where he is a professor of medicine. He is director of the Center for Health Policy in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director of the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) in the Department of Medicine. He is a general internist and associate director of the Center for Innovation to Implementation at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. A past member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, he has helped lead the development of national U.S. guidelines on screening for HIV, hepatitis C, hepatitis B, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, and use of aspirin and statins to prevent cardiovascular disease.

Maria Polyakova, Assistant Professor of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University

Maria Polyakova, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Health Research and Policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research investigates questions surrounding the role of government in the design and financing of health insurance systems. She is especially interested in the relationships between public policies and individuals’ decision-making in health care and health insurance, as well as in the risk protection and re-distributive aspects of health insurance systems. She received a BA degree in Economics and Mathematics from Yale University and a PhD in Economics from MIT.

David M. Studdert, Professor of Medicine and of Law, Stanford University

David M. Studdert is a leading expert in the fields of health law and empirical legal research. His scholarship explores how the legal system influences the health and well-being of populations. A prolific scholar, he has authored more than 150 articles and book chapters, and his work appears frequently in leading international medical, law and health policy publications. Professor Studdert has received the Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award from AcademyHealth, the leading organization for health services and health policy research in the United States. He was awarded a Federation Fellowship (2006) and a Laureate Fellowship (2011) by the Australian Research Council. He holds a law degree from University of Melbourne and a doctoral degree in health policy and public health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Symposiums
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Abstract:

“Corruption in the post-Tiananmen era exhibits distinct characteristics not found in the 1980s, such as astronomical sums of money looted by officials, their family members, and their cronies in the private sector, large networks of co-conspirators, and the sale of public office. By examining the evolution of Chinese economic and political institutions since the early 1990s, we can trace the emergence of crony capitalism to two critical changes in the control of property rights of the assets owned by the state and the personnel management of the officials the ruling Communist Party. The cumulative effects of these changes have dramatically decentralized the control of public property without clarifying its ownership and granted local party chiefs unprecedented personnel power. Consequently, local political and business elites gain greater incentives and opportunities to collude with each other in looting the assets nominally owned by the state. The insights from a sample of 260 cases of corruption involving multiple officials and businessmen suggest that crony capitalism in China has given birth to a decentralized kleptocracy with its own market rules and dynamics.”

 

Speaker Bio:

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minxin pei
Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker '72 Professor of Government and directs the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He is the author of China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (Harvard, 2016); China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Harvard, 2006) and From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Harvard, 1994). Pei has published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Project Syndicate, Fortune.com, Nikkei Asian Review, and many scholarly journals and edited volumes. He was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1999-2009) and an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University (1992-1998). He received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University in 1991.

Minxin Pei Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College
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Oksenberg Conference Room

Encina Hall, 3rd floor, South

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What will happen when a new US president is sworn in? Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, leads a panel of faculty experts to discuss the imminent foreign policy challenges that the next president must face.

Michael McFaul

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Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab WorldWill China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Stanford University
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Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
abbas_milani_photo_by_babak_payami.jpg PhD

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.

Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.

Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies
Co-director of the Iran Democracy Project
CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
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Stanford University
Encina Hall, E216
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
amyzegart-9.jpg PhD

Dr. Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of five books, she specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies, and national security. At Hoover, she leads the Technology Policy Accelerator and the Oster National Security Affairs Fellows Program. She also is an associate director and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI; a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute; and professor of political science by courtesy, teaching 100 students each year about how emerging technologies are transforming espionage.

Her award-winning research includes the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11: Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, 2007) and the bestseller Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton, 2022), which was nominated by Princeton University Press for the Pulitzer Prize. She also coauthored Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity, with Condoleezza Rice (Twelve, 2018). Her op-eds and essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Politico, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Zegart has advised senior officials about intelligence and foreign policy for more than two decades. She served on the National Security Council staff and as a presidential campaign foreign policy advisor and has testified before numerous congressional committees. Before her academic career, she spent several years as a McKinsey & Company consultant.

Zegart received an AB in East Asian studies from Harvard and an MA and a PhD in political science from Stanford. She serves on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, and the American Funds/Capital Group.

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In this sixteenth session of the Strategic Forum, former senior American and South Korean government officials and other leading experts will discuss current developments in the Korean Peninsula and North Korea policy, the future of the U.S.-South Korean alliance, and a strategic vision for Northeast Asia. The session is hosted by the Korea Program in association with The Sejong Institute, a top South Korean think tank.

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The Koret Foundation of San Francisco has extended its gift to Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) in support of contemporary Korean studies.

Two more years have been added to a three-year gift awarded to the Center in 2015, totaling to 12 years of lifetime support from the Foundation, whose mission is to endow scholarly solutions to community problems and to invest in leading institutions that serve as levers for achieving impact.

The gifts have allowed the Center to bring eminent professionals from Asia and the United States to Stanford for an annual fellowship and an annual international conference known as the Koret Workshop, all of which aims to promote greater understanding and closer ties between Korea and the United States.

“The Koret Foundation’s gift represents its commitment to strengthening research and finding solutions to challenges in Korea and the United States,” said Shorenstein APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin. “Their support over the past eight years has enabled our Korea Program to invite numerous visiting scholars, offer new courses to students, and foster important conversations in the Bay Area community and beyond. We greatly value our relationship with the Foundation and thank them for their enduring generosity.”

Since 2008, eight Koret fellows have conducted research at the Center, many public seminars have been held, and each workshop has yielded a book published by Shorenstein APARC and the Brookings Institution Press.

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Clifton Parker of the Stanford Report writes about REAP's core researcher, Prashant Loyalka's latest findings on China's higher education system. Read the original article from Stanford News.

 

China can improve its higher education system by introducing incentives for students and teachers so they take learning more seriously, a Stanford professor says. Under the current system, college students are essentially guaranteed a diploma, offering little motivation to excel.

Prashant Loyalka, a center research fellow at the Rural Education Action Program in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, led a forthcoming study that found that Chinese college freshmen in computer science and engineering programs began with academic and critical thinking skills about two to three years ahead of their peers in the United States and Russia, but showed almost no improvement in such skills after two years of college. Critical thinking skills are typically defined as the ability to make clear and well-reasoned analyses and evaluations of information.

Loyalka, also an assistant research professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, recently published an article on how teacher incentives boost student learning in China’s primary schools. Some of the findings could be applicable to China’s universities, he said.

Stanford News Service recently interviewed Loyalka:

 

What are the strengths of the Chinese educational system?

China’s education system is strong in many ways. By the end of junior high school and high school, students in urban areas display high levels of academic skills like math, science, language arts and English. They also show very high levels of higher-order thinking skills, such as critical thinking and quantitative reasoning. Students from both urban and rural areas tend to be incredibly hardworking and disciplined as well. This is partly due to the fact that Chinese students and their parents spend a lot of time and resources on their studies, both inside and outside of school.

Policymakers in China have also done a great job universalizing access to primary school and getting kids to at least start junior high school.

The weaknesses?

Perhaps the most glaring weakness is that the quality of education is low for the millions of kids who live in rural China. The majority of students in rural China are unlikely to complete high school. About one-third drop out of junior high school. Furthermore, the vast majority of students also do not appear to learn very much after primary school. China shuttles millions of rural kids into vocational high schools that, as several of our studies show, fail to build students’ cognitive and non-cognitive abilities.

Another big weakness is that students, on average, do not improve their academic or high-order thinking skills during college. One of the reasons for this could be that students are essentially guaranteed to graduate college on time and correspondingly have few incentives to work hard during college.

What are the main highlights of your forthcoming study?

In 2014, I led a pilot study to measure the skill levels and gains of engineering and computer science students in China, Russia and the United States. Entering university freshmen in China were roughly three years ahead of U.S. students in critical-thinking skills and roughly two years ahead of Russian students in critical thinking, math and physics skills.

After two years of study, students in the U.S. and Russia closed about half the skill gap with students in China.

The reduction in the skills gap between countries was due to the fact that while U.S. and Russian students made positive skill gains, Chinese students made no skill gains over two years.

I am now in the midst of conducting a much larger study, using nationally random, representative samples of engineering and computer science students in China, Russia and other developed and developing countries. The goals of the study are not just to measure how much students learn in university, but even more to explain what types of factors can contribute to increases in learning.

Why are China’s high schools doing better than their colleges?

Students in China have to study extremely hard if they want to go to college. There are a limited number of spots in academic high schools and colleges, and students have to pass highly competitive exams to get into each level of schooling. In order to prepare students for college, academic high schools offer a rigorous curriculum in math, science, Chinese and English. Academic high school administrators and teachers maintain a highly disciplined environment in which students study long hours in school and do lots of homework and tutoring outside of school. Academic high school teachers are also highly incentivized to make sure students do well.

What are some possible reforms?

China may wish to consider introducing a series of incentives into universities that make students take learning, and faculty take teaching, even more seriously. For faculty, incentives that reward better teaching and are linked to promotion and pay may be needed.

For students, it is likely that they need more incentives to study their course material during college. The vast majority of students do not have significant pressure to show that they learned the course material. They are given a “pass” for their different courses no matter whether they learned the material or not; they also almost all graduate after four years. By contrast, the graduation rates for STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] majors in the U.S. are much lower.

China could also revisit its university curricula and instruction. If, for example, as our study shows, engineering students are already equipped with high levels of math and physics skills before they enter university, offering a more diverse liberal arts curriculum may be a more cost-effective use of resources. Instruction in universities also tends to be passive and rote – students at the university level would likely benefit from a more dynamic interaction with professors than they currently have.

How does the Chinese leadership view education’s impact on the national economy?

China’s leaders are clear that the health of the national economy is tied to the health of its education system. At this point, they appear especially open to improving the quality of higher education. I believe that a lot of attention could continue to be paid to improving the quality of education in rural areas, however, and also expanding access to academic high school and college for rural students.

 

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Prashant Loyalka says that China’s education system is strong in many ways, but shows weaknesses at the college level. | Paul Burns / Getty Images
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Joint Presentation

DESIGN UNDER UNCERTAINTY: APPLICATIONS IN AIRCRAFT DESIGN AND WATER RESOURCES

Rick Walter Fenrich, Aeronautics & Astronautics Department, Stanford University

What do stock market investments and aircraft design have in common? They both contain uncertainties! For example, one can never be sure of next year's stock returns or exactly what weather an aircraft will fly in. Despite their differences, in fact both disciplines can use similar techniques to manage their uncertainties. Engineers can use these techniques to make predictions about the behavior of the stock market or aircraft performance, leading to savings in time, saving (or making) money, and in the case of aircraft design, confidently achieving a required level of safety. His research seeks to advance these techniques and integrate them with optimization methods used in design. Rick is also expanding my application area to water resources engineering at Peking University.

COMMUNICATING WITH LIGHT ON COMPUTER CHIPS

Colleen Shang Fenrich, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University

Light has been used for centuries as a mode of communication between people such as by light houses, signal lamps, or even mirrors reflecting the sunlight. Recently, light has also revolutionized the world of telecommunications by transmitting our long-distance telephone calls, Internet traffic, and cable TV signals. However, one area in which light can still make significant advances is the communication of information between or within computer chips, otherwise known as the field of "silicon photonics," which can reduce power dissipation and increase speed in computer chips. Her research seeks to answer how to first generate light on computer chips.

REGISTRATION:

Email: sanjiu39@stanford.edu; Tel: 10-62744163

Lunch will be provided for those who have registered one day before the presentation

 

STANFORD CENTER AT PEKING UNIVERSITY

  The Lee Jung Sen Building, Langrun Yuan, Peking University

  Please bring a photo ID and enter Peking University through the NE Gate.

  Pre-registration for vehicle entrance inside the campus is required.  

  Please note there are no parking spaces outside the Center.

 

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