The 'College' pivot

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, be it slightly more confused and less able than the year before, but the seats still fill. Some have a nagging feeling that it is becoming like Tobacco, attracting more vulnerable population as its traditional users quit, but if it is not personal, the crisis is just a good common-room debate. There is no incentive to change unless it is broken.

Truth be told, the higher education transformation business is broken. The techies came for it too, but there is no Uber in the sector. Despite the tech assault, which had its heyday during the pandemic, has been resisted well. Most of the transformation efforts were misdirected: Most techies don't know what they are doing anyway. They thought just by breaking the regulatory shackles, they would find efficiencies - in terms of cost and outcome - but they forgot higher education is about regulation itself. The notion - higher education is about skill formation - is wrong; higher education is about maintenance of the myth of meritocracy, a state-approved way of legitimisation of the reward system. Regulation is not an aberration, but a feature of the system. One day, when Bitcoin replaces Dollar and a libertarian utopia is established, we may not need regulation. But, until then, it will be business as usual.

I speak not from despair, but experience. I have tried, optimistically, ambitiously, amateurishly. Failure was my rite of passage, now to be able to try what I am going to try. Having failed enough and well, I feel ready to make a fresh start.

This time, I am all about playing the regulatory game. It is a misconception among the innovators that regulation is an unnecessary burden (it is both essential and savvy players play it well) and comes in the way of scale (there are many counterexamples). I am not daunted by it as I understand it well enough; besides, I had experiences across different jurisdictions and have enough learned friends to enlighten me on the minutiae when needed. 

I have been dismissive of people's fetish for degrees, particularly useless ones. But I have understood that I am better off accepting this obsession as it is, and I can avoid the cynicism trap by trying to make degrees worthwhile. I know there is the problem of 'market for lemon': This is a sector where unscrupulous providers operate, limiting the space for scruples. But, here, I indulge in an excuse like the unscrupulous ones: The market is too vast to have space for one more provider, playing by different rules!

Hence, my college pivot! I have abandoned my plans to create a platform to measure capabilities formation - at least, for now - acknowledging the limitation of such an approach without having the right educational set-up. It is common sense, but I took my time to understand how complex the capabilities formation business really is. But having tried this closely enough, I am now somewhat aware of the complex influences that play out in a college classroom, and how one must try to control as many variables as possible to able to establish processes that lead to capability enhancement.

I see my earlier attempts - usually, art of possible, all of them - as useful stepping stones, but none sturdy enough to construct the whole system on. My idea now is to create a self-contained institution where all processes could be tailored to focus on capability formation, and where the cultural influences can be attuned to that objective. There would be, undeniably, art of the possible at play again: higher education is a vast and complex marketplace, shaped by forces much more powerful than a tiny start-up institution can ever muster. But by keeping the scope small and manageable, I should be able to create an environment within which processes can be set up, and perfected. 

So, I am at the very beginning of a new project. This means the usual search for ideas and new collaborators, and I intend to use this blog to start the conversations. I shall keep a record of my progress here and hope that anyone interested in collaboration would join in.