Three questions for designing a new college

My New Year's resolution is not to wait any longer, but to get on with what I have always wanted to do: set up a new higher-education institution.

I have been waiting forever. Not that I haven't tried, but I have ended up taking the wrong route a few times. Each time I learnt, I have learnt about the merits and considerable challenges of for-profit higher education, and how to balance the different interests to do something innovative. I have learnt about international markets and the rapidly changing expectations of the students. I have taught and know firsthand what social media has done to students' attention and commitment. Having tried project-based learning, I have seen its possibilities and also why it does not work at scale. But, in the learning mode, I was forever waiting - doing various projects adjacent to what I really wanted to do, but not quite the real thing.

Hence, I started the year promising to break from the infinite loop and get on with setting up a new college.

Thinking about college is deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say. Because if I start tracking back on this blog, I must have committed to doing this so many times, ever since 2010 when I first got involved in Higher Ed. Then, without knowing the realities of private higher ed, I was deep into the myth 'private sector = innovation'! Then, in 2014, I believed in online education and then not. In 2019, I walked out of a relatively comfortable but boring existence to reshape yet another private higher-education operation, my only excuse being passion, because I was committing the same mistake twice: For-profit higher ed doesn't innovate! [That should have been a full stop, but I was still surprised.]

Being here again, third time around, is somewhat stupid, but the penny dropped for me in so many different ways. Not least because I was focusing very narrowly on solving one problem lately - transitioning students from education to employment through pre-professional training - and I have figured out a way to merge what we do into a formal curriculum. I am recalibrating to get the missing pieces of the model together. However, I have the core system (not for nothing, we called this a 'new operating system' for higher education) and now need various apps.

Since the new year, I have been back in deal-making mode. In the intervening years, I left the business world and focused narrowly on designing an educational system. This is still work in progress, but I know the key questions now. Most of this project is ahead of me: Finding new collaborators and building a new team, building a new narrative, selling the project to the funders - all those will now happen, and I intend to chronicle that journey as transparently as I can.

At this moment, though, I want to start with three key questions that are keeping me awake at night:

1. How does one educate anyone for a future which is likely to be very different from our own? The methods we have now are based on 'transfer': a more experienced person telling the learner what to do and how to do it, and this has inherent limitations in a changing world. So, how does one build an education model based on 'emergence', which educates people on how to keep looking, often unprofitably, for new ideas and ways of doing things?

2. How does one re-engage the students when the 'student as consumer' paradigm has broken the social contract that the earlier generation of students made with the college, to suffer the discomfort of being educated? And how does one do this without resorting to the traditional trope of college ranking/ prestige, or peer competition, because both of those 'tools' are flawed and can do more harm than good in educating cooperative, socially engaged students?

3. How does one balance the requirements of disciplinary excellence, demanded by modern college curricula, with the clear benefits of attention and cognition, with interdisciplinarity and practical learning? The latter can become very superficial very fast, as the former often is reduced to navel-gazing.

These three questions help me frame the college's idea. Obviously, these questions spawn so many more - what method of delivery, what role should various parties, teachers, employers, support services and all should play, and what outcome should we aim for (just getting a job is so lame!).

It is enormously challenging to fit these explorations into a spreadsheet, as one must when assembling a commercial venture. There is an inherent dumbing-down tendency in for-profit education plays, particularly when education is classified as 'media' and the mental model applied is 'transfer', as above. So the spreadsheet reflects how much content sells through a 'delivery mechanism'. In contrast, a more apt paradigm is a platform that captures a fraction of the collective value creation as students work with one another. Imagine a scaffolded system to take the students from neophytes to value producers, with the college providing them the infrastructure for such progression (and revenue as a percentage of gross earnings of the students) - this is more or less the model I want to create.