Sunday Posts

 Photo by Vance Osterhout on Unsplash The standard approach to enhancing employability outcomes in Higher Education takes the form of additional soft skills and technical skills training, internships, career counselling and renewed efforts to ensure campus placement. All of these have their place but the changes in the employer expectations, structures of the professions and breakdown of the traditional career paths demand changes in the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach. As such, there are five key factors why the standard approach isn't enough and must change: 1. Different student motivations: Students in higher education today are different from the students in large, traditional universities. They are often older, from ethnic minority ba...

                                                                 Photo by Lachlan Donald   The idea underlying all my work is this: At the time of great technological and social change, learning by practice gets better results than academic study. Having invested myself in finding better ways to organise learning by practice and in designing better measurements to assess its impact, I am aware of the objections this position might give rise to. At a time of great change - and the resulting uncertainty - it is better to focus on what does not change, human universals, as practice focus may lead to superficiality. The real change, it is true, happens at the fringes. If one really wants to get a sense of what's happening in AI, they are better off at a Research University today than interning ...

When The Economist starts saying that debt levels are unsustainable and a market crash is imminent, one should take notice. This was a lesson I learnt in 2007, before many others woke up to it.  If anything, this time it would be different. In my mind, 2008 was just the beginning of the breakdown. This time, we have multiple bubbles to burst: All those extra money from the bank bailouts, all those extra money from Covid, and all those valuation excesses from AI - the world economy is just several times bigger than what it should be. I am not a doom-monger, and right now, I am terribly unprepared for a market meltdown. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong for me in the recent days and I am not ready for another crisis. But purely intellectually, this appears like the judgement day. That the global financial system works like a giant hoover, sucking labour, time and ideas from people who believe in hard work, good work and honest work, has been clear to me for some time. Thi...

What is an Indian education? I stumbled upon the debate pretty much unknowingly, attempting to call out a hoax ( see here ). Before that, I worked for ten years setting up Computer Education centres in hundreds of towns and cities across the Indian subcontinent but never questioned the cultural significance of my work. After that 2008 post though, I couldn't unsee it anymore. It became the focus of my academic work, which I took up only subsequently.  If anyone asks what my big goal in life is, it will still be to return to India and set up, together in a community of fellow travellers, a truly Indian university. I consider all my current work to be a preparation, daily attempts to understand and to perfect my craft, so that, one day, it can all come together. Periodically, therefore, I get interested in projects in India and excitedly promote projects which show promise. However, within India's current privately driven mass higher education and its crass...

The excitement about AI made it urgent, but it is not about AI. Education systems, in general, and tertiary education systems, in particular, have been operating within a specific environment of ideas since the 1990s, which has now undergone a change. In summary, the entire system functioned as a component of a talent value chain. The industrial thinking has been apparent - the student came in as the input, the graduate came out as the output - and the goal of educational improvement has been process efficiency. The value of the educational intervention sprang not from the process of education itself, but the value that the talent marketplace accorded to the graduate thus produced. Some institutions, particularly top-ranked research institutions, may claim that they haven't been affected by this 'vocational' transformation. They claim that their processes are not attuned to the immediate requirements of the job market, and in the case of Oxford, I was told that their focus ...

A conversation today returned me to the subject of Gen Z! I don't have a great regard for generational labelling and particularly the adulation for Gen Z ( my views  were quite clear).  But a friend trying to discuss a potential PhD subject brought this up: That Gen Z is far clearer about mental health issues, boundaries of what they would do or not do to please the boss etc. We spent some minutes discussing whether organisations should realign themselves to accommodate the Gen Z culture, and my favourite trope that the CEO's job is to define the culture of the company and try to live it. On reflection, though, I am not sure companies should adjust themselves to Gen Z work culture. The label stands for a particular type of thinking and living: Mobile native, with a lingo that includes a lot of TLAs and emojis, defined by the western urban culture and relationships, anxious about many things, etc. These are real attributes and perhaps quite useful for a c...

Indian universities are not known for area studies programmes though there are some shining exceptions. I have been advocating, for some time now, that an open programme - open in terms of who might be able to participate, rather than how it is delivered - for Asian studies may help educate the type of graduate professionals India might need.  For me, it is an old idea - a college of Asia ! I was serious about it in 2014, but that was perhaps the wrong moment. My interest in going back to India and starting again cooled after 2014, with political changes around the world and the focus of my career shifting into a different domain.  It feels like meeting an old friend when I discuss the idea now. I am older, perhaps wiser, and less idealistic than I was then. I have learnt more about education as a business, and more about the concepts such as Asia, about which I had an unquestioning romanticism before. But the idea still attracts me, and I believe its moment has come....

I made an optimistic observation: That India might be able to make the restrictions against its people (H1B visa fees) work for itself, just as China made the restrictions on sending advanced processor chips being sold to them to build its own tech stack. Facebook knew how I felt and continues to recommend reels and posts, made by thousands of Indians around the world, saying similar things. But there is an issue I did not talk about, and I think it is very relevant: How Indians see its diaspora. I don't know what it is, but it is very different from how the Chinese sees it. For the Chinese, the diaspora is a source of strength and ideas. For Indians, these are people who got away and didn't take any responsibility.  But it is more complicated than that. I see that in the posts and counter-posts being made now. One clear trend is jealousy: Many express glee that the non-resident Indians are in trouble. There are others who see this as an affront to India and its govern...

By making the changes in the H1B visa, Trump has just done a huge favour to India. It doesn't seem that way right now, and there will be a doom-and-gloom in the Indian IT services sector. Its knock-on effect would be felt in many other sectors, including in Higher Education, which, after working as a conveyor belt for IT services jobs, must find a new purpose altogether. However, these changes are bad for Indian companies, but not necessarily for the country. This is one thing we should learn from China. The Trump-Biden restrictions on selling advanced chips to China created the Chinese 'tech stack'. It was not just the restriction on chips: The Chinese students were also barred from advance science and technology research programmes at the top universities. This hurt a lot of people and some companies (remember Huawei?), but China has turned the table in a few years. In fact, a Chinese friend told me that the Chinese policy makers now think that the US restrictions ...

I had a fascinating discussion today which I need to record here.  The point is trivial - which kind of courses are in demand in Indian Higher Ed - but it was a big surprise for me.  In the last several weeks, I have been talking to a lot of people in India. I spent a couple of weeks there, trying to figure out, after a gap of several months, what's exactly is happening so that I can put an India specific business proposition together. These conversations gave me a vague sense that a major shift is underway, but I couldn't quite figure out what that shift really is. Today, the penny dropped! On the surface, the higher ed conversation in India remains the same as before. There is a lot of talk of industry-academia gap, though not much action! The hackathons and boot camps are everywhere. Academic calendars reflect an amazing variety of holidays and excruciating and endless sequence of examinations. Except for some campuses which are more political than any academic instit...

Higher Ed in India is a serious matter.  It should be obvious, given the size of India's youth population, its importance as a major economy and democratic society and the competition it faces from the other rising powers in the region, primarily China. But education in general and higher education in particular were never taken seriously in India, except as an endless series of examinations. The primacy of examinations and middle-class obsession with exam results (Amartya Sen wrote a book titled 'The country of first boys')  Over the last thirty years, the sector has been privatised, de-professionalised and badly regulated. The institutions often became the front for money laundering, and they were run by politicians, either directly or by proxy. There are ghost institutions without any real student, widespread corruption in regulation and ranking processes, fake degrees and professors without qualification: It is a big and profitable market, which c...

At the core of my enterprise is the idea of personal change. This is not about the neo-liberal doctrine that says, everything is changing around you and therefore, you must change and adapt. I accept that things change but refuse to accept that we are just passive participants, changing as our external circumstances change. At least, I would like to believe that it is an educated person's responsibility to find opportunities for change and influence its course. How this change may happen is also a question mark. Those who know me know that I don't hold a high opinion about the coaches, those self-styled individuals who assume that some sort of certificate from somewhere gives them the right to tell another person to live their lives. No one has the right, or the ability, to tell another person what to do or how to live their lives, I believe. All we can do is to help people find their way and be that guide and friend at the moments of confusion which will invariably come...

My current project was all about building better technical training programmes, till it was not. At the time of starting, the premise was that technical training is currently offered with a very narrow focus and this needs to be enhanced with human capabilities. The engineer is no longer just an engineer, but a solver of problems with broader human and systemic implications. We were supposed to be building a better model for technical training, a sort of plus-plus model, by which these human capabilities become embedded (or, in other words, don't stick out!). But, as I travel and speak to people, I understand that perhaps we are at a different point than when these ideas started forming in my head. To be honest, the above premise has an origin story stretching back to the 1990s, my coming-of-age era, where education became overtly vocational and technical. It was a gap I perceived first in the classroom and then the workplace, where I met technically trained ...

I am scaling back my ambitions. No longer boiling the ocean, no longer trying to transform higher education globally! I tried and failed, but don't regret it. How else would I know what I know now?  I know many things. Higher Education is indeed in crisis, but the people inside the system do not know that. Professionalisation has many good aspects, but being perceptive about changes in the world is not one among these. There will be no revolution in higher ed, just decay. The private higher ed is already everywhere and it has changed everything - from the relationship with the students to what scholarship meant - but most people in public universities don't even know the difference. Higher Ed thinks critically about everything else but not its own practice. Some of it is wilful blindness. Things are going fine for most people: The usual cycle of conferences, papers, research grants - some years are better than others, but that is all. Students still come,...

As I grew up, I was torn between two ideas of success.  First was to be able to sit on the terrace of my ancestral home, a beautiful art deco mansion built in 1940s, on a winter morning, reading something beautiful. This was my idea of vita contempletiva. Second was to travel around the world, doing something meaningful. This was my idea of vita activa. These two ideas are obviously incompatible. My entire life was shaped by this tension. But it was a tension not only in my mind, but in the outside world too. By the time I finished college, Soviet Union disappeared, and the ideas environment I grew up in changed. Even in 1989, one of the subjects in my Undergraduate Economics course was Soviet Economic development, and I spent my paltry college pocket money on buying books published in USSR (primarily because they were cheap). In a sense, my idea of certainty fell away at that point. With that went my first idea of success, one of a quiet, stable life. India was changing, too. This...