Sunday Posts

Robots are coming for private higher ed. It is usual to toast the rapid automation of work at investor conferences, in the hope that this would break the State monopolies on higher ed and usher in a new era of education innovation. What's left unspoken is that the public higher ed will eventually die, underfunded and unloved, under the sheer weight of its bureaucracy.  However, the collateral damage in this brave new world may not be public universities, the better of which are far better equipped to handle the coming of the Robots, but the private higher education that has grown rapidly worldwide over the last twenty years. Indeed, the same investors have billions of dollars at stake in private higher ed and wouldn't be pleased if the first casualty of the very disruption they celebrate costs them a bomb.  But this seems likely for two reasons. First, the impact of automation will be most felt in the jobs that involve narrow specialisations and process-based jobs, exactly the...

There is an argument that the developing countries will not follow the path of developed nations setting up educational institutions and campuses, but rather leapfrog into universities built on modern technologies, such as 4G. The evidence of leapfrogging can be found quite easily. Indeed, none of the developing countries went step by step through the IT revolution, and many of them directly joined in at the mobile era. The fact that a quarter of Kenyan GNP flows through mobile transactions is one of the great examples of technology leapfrogging, and often cited to back the case that universities may do the same. In fact, some commentators see the emphasis on university campuses and infrastructure in developing countries as plainly wasteful. There are, however, two parts of this argument, which need to be examined separately. First, that the developing countries would not follow the evolutionary path traversed by developed countries is perhaps quite understandable. They are joini...