Ever wondered what scholarship agencies do with their ex-scholars? They sign them up for focus group discussions…

An excerpt from a real email I received several months ago at an ancient email address which is now little more than a spam honeypot (emphasis mine):

Dear _______________,

The Public Service Commission (PSC) has engaged _______________, an independent market research company, to conduct a series of focus group discussions to hear views about the PSC scholarships.

The purpose of the study is to gather feedback to improve the overall terms and career prospects of scholars. The findings will be instrumental in the way PSC designs future scholarships.

As an ex-scholar of PSC yourself, we believe you will have constructive insights to offer. Hence, we would therefore like to invite you to a discussion group where we love to hear your valuable views and opinions. The details of the focus group discussion are as follows:

Group1: Scholars who did not complete their bonds

Date: ________________________

Venue: ___________________________________________________

As a token of appreciation, you will receive $100 cash at the end of the discussion. We look forward to seeing you. Please contact ______________ of ____________ at ______/ ______(fax) or e-mail him at _________________ to confirm your attendance. Thank you.

I love how they tacitly avoided saying “Scholars who broke their bonds”. And the sheer naïveté of doing the equivalent of thinking: “Hmm, why did our ex-scholars leave? Let’s not ask them straight away what’s wrong, or alternatively ask them, file the answers away, and then pretend it never happen. And then, let’s spend public tax dollars on an independent third party to tell us what we could have found out for ourselves if only we bothered to listen to them in the first place!”

O, the humanity!

P.S. Maybe I should gone for the session after all. It would have been a discount on my bond on the order of 0.01%…