Sunday Posts

China is redefining its universities, and, as a result, changing the landscape of International Higher Ed.  Indeed, this is early days, and most Chinese universities are still very traditional. But the game is changing, and it's time to pay heed. There was a time when British Universities loved China. It meant exotic foreign tours for staff and faculty, eager partners lining up elaborate welcome ceremonies, relatively easily winnable contracts and student numbers, which made nice little case studies. And, it didn't matter how good or bad the university was: Anything British would have done the job (one needed ranking, sure, but it did not matter which ranking: As a Chinese academic once told me, as long as you are the second best university on your street, it would do!) This seemingly unquenchable desire for foreign education came handy when the student numbers in the UK shrunk at the wake of immigration regime change under Theresa May's stewardship in...

Over the last several months, I have made one significant change in my work. I have pivoted to China. It is fashionable to do so, and my own little project has nothing to do with the geopolitical shift of the Obama administration (though it was handy to borrow the term). It is also interesting. Only back in 2012, when I was starting my business and when the potential investors asked me endlessly which countries I should target, I was not sure. At best, there was this hyphenated pair of India-China, as two big Higher Education markets, and I spent the good part of the last four years focusing on India. But, as it would happen, my work shifted, somewhat on its own momentum, to China. Despite spending more time on India, the business got more students in China. And, more generally, when we explored new ways of doing education, we realised the difference between India and China: We got polite nods in China, though the Chinese partners mostly accepted the ideas for their own use...

Higher Education in Asia and Africa has a good problem: It has excess demand. There are just too many people wanting to go to college, oversubscribing any place that there may be. But the number of institutions offering high quality Higher Education are hardly growing: in China, even with 9 new universities joining global top charts between the years 2006 and 2012, this meant high quality provision for only 16% of the additional 385,000 students coming to Higher Ed every year. For Nigeria's 108,000 additional students getting into Higher Ed every year, there will be no expansion of high quality provision. But this does not matter for poor quality institutions because no one is really saying 'high quality or bust'. The whole rhetoric around Higher Education is really 'graduate or bust', though poorly educated usually joins the ranks of unemployed straight afterwards. And, poor education is also good business: Because education is afflicted with assymetric infor...