Education, fundamental to economic growth and development, has become an arena for global competition in the digital information age. As in the United States, many Asian policymakers are now pushing for higher education reform in the belief that strong, innovative higher education systems will pave the way for their countries’ future economic and political strength.

Looking comparatively at situations across Asia and in the United States, the fourth annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue considered possible solutions to the challenges of reforming higher education today.

Scholars and top-level administrators from Stanford and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on September 6 and 7, 2012. In the discussion sessions following the presentations, participants raised a number of key, policy-relevant points, which are highlighted in the Dialogue’s final report. These include:

All countries face the challenge of preparing students to find meaningful employment, yet there is a lack of clarity in educational goals. Several participants felt the political expediency of government funding aiming for world university rankings must be balanced with the less politically attractive but potentially more critical vocational needs of economic development.

University administrators and government policymakers need to define their goals for “globalization” or “internationalization” as they launch new initiatives and policies. Participants noted that, while few are opposed to the principle of internationalization, without a sense of concrete and realistic goals, the cost-benefit of various measures may not make sense.

Online education promises great potential innovation in education, but it is still at a very early stage. While potentially valuable in enhancing traditional learning and research, serious challenges remain. There was a sense that far more needs to be done than simply taking existing forms of education and putting them online in order to truly harness the potential offered by online education.

The Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue series is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko. The final report from the 2012 Dialogue, and previous years, is available for download from the Shorenstein APARC website.

Applying for a Rhodes Scholarship gave Margaret Hayden a chance to talk about her quest to better understand mental illness.

Hayden, whose older sister committed suicide after a sudden and severe depression, wrote in her essay that she "could not begin to craft a meaningful life without acknowledging and trying to understand her [sister's] experience."

In the spring quarter of her freshman year, she enrolled in a class on the anthropology of mental illness. Later, she began pursuing research related to mental illness, working with faculty at Stanford Health Policy at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Now a senior, Hayden is one of two Stanford students joining 30 other newly minted Rhodes Scholars from the United States who will receive full financial support to pursue degrees in England.

The Rhodes Scholarships are the oldest and most celebrated international fellowship awards in the world. Scholars are chosen for their outstanding scholarly achievements as well as their character, commitment to others and to the common good, and potential for leadership in whatever careers they choose.

Hayden, 21, of Brunswick, Maine, is majoring in human biology. She is writing an honors thesis in the Program in Ethics in Society, with an emphasis on the art and ethics of patient care. She plans to pursue a master's degree in medical anthropology at Oxford.

Margaret Hayden

Margaret Hayden

Her honors thesis, "The Ethical Implications of Biological Conceptions of Mental Illness and Personhood," explores the consequences of viewing mental illness as solely a matter of the brain.

In her Rhodes Scholarship application, Hayden said that approach to mental illness may alleviate responsibility from patients, but it also introduces troubling implications: What kind of person do you become when your brain is "broken?"

"It is here I envision my intellectual future – working at the interface of medicine, anthropology and ethics," she wrote. "Anthropology grounds my ethical investigations, because I believe that without the context of the everyday moral experiences of individuals, without attention to emotional, social and political setting, the practice of ethics risks becoming an abstract academic exercise with little relevance to the day-to-day struggles of real people trying to craft lives in this tenuous, unpredictable world. It is these people and their struggles that motivate my own intellectual ambitions."

Hayden is a co-author of "Parents' Perceptions of Benefit of Children's Mental Health Treatment and Continued Use of Services," published Aug. 1, 2012 in Psychiatric Services.

In one of her studies at Stanford Health Policy, she analyzed Latina women's perceptions of post-partum depression. In another, she assessed the success of a program to improve outcomes of low-birth-weight infants by analyzing the mothers' use of and attitudes toward a web-based information portal and social network.

Since the fall of 2010, Hayden has served as a patient advocate at the Mayview Community Health Center in Palo Alto. At the clinic, she conducted a research project on available mental health resources for clients. Since the fall of 2011, she has been a clinic coordinator at the center, serving as a liaison among student volunteers, Stanford program staff and clinic staff.

Hayden was a member of Stanford's varsity squash team and its varsity sailing team.

Hayden will be studying at Oxford with Rachel Kolb, '12, who is currently pursuing a master's degree in English at Stanford

Kolb, 22, of Los Ranchos, N.M., earned a bachelor's degree in English with honors and a minor in human biology in 2012 from Stanford.

Rachel Kolb

Rachel Kolb

Kolb, who was elected as a junior to Phi Beta Kappa, wrote an honors thesis titled, "Grains of Truth in the Wildest Fable: Literary Illustrations, Pictorial Representation, and the Project of Fantasy in Jane Eyre."At Oxford, Kolb plans to pursue a master's degree in contemporary literature and a master's degree in comparative social policy.

In her Rhodes Scholarship application, Kolb, who was born with a profound bilateral hearing loss, wrote: "As someone who understands the different forms communication can take, from spoken to sign language, I understand the value of flexibility in transmitting ideas.

"I see well-rounded, effective communication as essential to ideas, creativity and progress. I want to be a writer committed to exploring issues of access, equality and difference, and the nature of communication itself. Our world often does not know how to talk about these things, just as it does not know how to talk about disability, about differing abilities and strengths, distinct personal styles and challenges."

Kolb, who was active with Christian ministries, wrote a weekly opinion column for The Stanford Daily in 2011. She is the managing editor of Leland Quarterly, a campus literary magazine.

She is a member of the on-campus student advocacy group, Power to ACT: Abilities Coming Together, and was one of several students featured in a new video that welcomes students with disabilities to Stanford. The university's Office of Accessible Education released the video last month.

Kolb won several prizes for her writing at Stanford, including the Marie Louise Rosenberg Award for her honors thesis and the 2011 Creative Nonfiction Prize for her essay, "Seeing at the Speed of Sound."

Kolb is co-president of Stanford's equestrian team and represented the university at the 2010 and 2011 Intercollegiate Horse Show Association National Finals.

Kathleen J. Sullivan is a writer for Stanford's University Communications.