Sunday Posts

Sitting at a meeting where I am told that today's learners would rather sit in a café than in a library, I heard the penny drop. Collectively speaking, we no longer have a clue what it is that we are doing in higher education.  Some conservative commentators see it more clearly than the left-wing ones: That higher education has become an inward-looking credentialing system completing disconnected from any social or even economic utility. It has become so because most of the education, giving in to the consumer economy, is being designed as light entertainment, completely divorced from its own rhetoric. Here is my point: A higher education is nothing if it is not uncomfortable. Aristotle made the point to an impatient Alexander: That there is no royal road to education! Change, which requires, by definition, about abandoning the comfort zones, is uncomfortable: There is no way to soft-serve this. And, yet, as we bring market logic everywhere, education must become easier - comfortab...

A large part of my work now is designing an educational programme that can sit alongside university curricula aimed at student 'employability'. We started this very predictably - with a mandate to ensure early preparation for the job market and industry connections - but as we assimilate various ideas and learn from experience, we know that we can't stick to the business as usual.  By business-as-usual, I mean the mechanistic employability programmes that are now so popular. A degree does not ensure jobs any more. Besides, the governments across the world are paying more attention to student loan books than they previously did and holding universities responsible for employment outcomes. Hence, it's common to see training programmes that prepare students for job search, CV writing and interviews.  There are clear limitations to what such training can do. These make two assumptions which are not necessarily correct: First, it assumes that the job the students will have e...

One tends to focus on technological possibilities when debating whether the college has a future. The traditional brick-and-mortar institution often seem too costly and too limiting, from a technological perspective, and therefore, its demise is commonly foretold. But the college continues to defy these death-wishes often by consolidating its prestige and attracting ever more students to it. In most countries in the world, colleges can not take all the students that apply to it, and are often not allowed to charge as much fee as the students are willing to pay to get in, and in such circumstances, the college isn't going to fade out any time soon. The mortal danger of the college, on the contrary, come from another angle, the lack of hope of change. The point of education is change, for better. College education does not stand for a vacant time for the society to figure out what to with its youngsters - it needs to have a specific purpose for all those preparations and troubl...

The education problem is obvious. There are more than 550 million school-age children who don't have access to school. There are more than 400 million adults, most of them in South Asia, who can't read or write. In some countries, majority of children coming out of primary school, over 90% in some cases, can't read or write. Bad Higher Education is wasting whole generations in countries like India, affecting close to 100 million people. Graduates can't get jobs in Europe because their education isn't good enough, and they are not paying back their loans. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa note that they are not doing much in college either. It looks pretty bad all round. This looks so bad is because we talk about it. In fact, we are talking about it more and more, even more than things like safe drinking water, which affects more people, because of two reasons.  First, the wider economy is feeling the impact of the education problem. The fact that someone does ...

India is building new universities, at least at a rate of one a week. Same is true for many emerging countries. Building universities is seen as the panacea for lack of modernity. The route looks ever so simple: More universities will mean more people in Higher Education, which will mean better skilled workforce and higher productivity, and hence Higher GDP - and everything else will follow. India is also a great example of what could go wrong with this formula. The universities are being legislated into, but most become weaklings at birth, most with only a few students, limited number of disciplines, almost no research activities and no industry linkages: The prospect for future GDPs don't look that bright. If anything, they hardly herald a promising future and rather stand as monuments of wasted opportunity.  However, anyone will be impressed if they visit these new institutions. Some aberrations aside, they are mostly shiny new institutions with adequate infrastructure...

My contention that the idea of the university has changed since last time we noticed and talked about such changes (in works such as Jencks and Riesman's The Academic Revolution) and undergone what amounts to an ' Institutional Corruption ', which undermines the effectiveness of the institution in discharging its public duty and undermines the public trust in the institution in discharging its public duties; and that such changes are primarily due to 'financialisation' of the institution, which can roughly be understood as enabling finance (financial institutions, financial rules, financial prism) to determine the shape, the priorities and the objectives of the institution. Financialisation as a concept is attracting an increasing amount of scholarly interest. While the concept has popular acceptance, and there is a growing unease about the roles financial institutions play in our societies and how they shape the priorities, financialisation as a concept has w...

The conversation about universities today are defined by two extreme views: One says that the universities are failing their mission by failing to serve their students, by failing to connect them to jobs, and therefore, failing to make them successful; the other says that the universities are failing their mission as they have abandoned their traditional values, they have become 'marketised' and are engaged in a struggle to fit into badly fitting form as education can't be a market activity. Two polar opposites, united in the agreement that universities are failing their mission - they are not doing what they are supposed to do. I have admittedly oscillated between these two views as I 'blogged' (rather than systematically researched) about the universities. I did see the problem of disconnectedness, the teleological view of the universities in some quarters that the universities have a purpose of their own, rather than being an institution to serve contempora...

The university is changing. This statement may be self-evident, but there is no consensus about what it is changing into, much less on whether this is a good thing. On one hand, there is nostalgia, based on an image of a golden age, which, as one of my teachers appropriately defined, was always based on as things were when the interlocutor was about twenty years old; on the other, there are the apocalyptic visionaries, the prophets of the information age, those who believe software is eating the world and should, must, eat the universities as well. And, overarching all these passions and interests is the very real question of entitlement - the questions of winners and losers of a new system - played out in Britain over the last few years noisily and vividly. I engaged in this conversation with intent and purpose. The changing landscape and its implications perhaps became clearer to me during the time I was attempting to set up a network of Vocational Training centres in many diff...

One of the most troubling questions for me is what is happening to knowledge. Knowledge has been commoditised, I am told. It no longer matters, as one can know by typing a string of words on Google. My interlocutors' point primarily was to say that education must change under these circumstances: It should be about something other than knowledge. That knowledge is easily accessible is a somewhat common-sense observation, but I wonder this is one of those things that we call conventional wisdom. While it may be waiting on the other side of Google, do I always know what to type? And, even before that, do I know what I should be searching for? Would this count as knowledge? However, I must concede that the contemporary discussions about the effect of Google on Knowledge somewhat acknowledge the first issue: Knowing how to search. In fact, this is their precise point, that education will be less about memorising facts and more about the mechanics of fact finding. That has...

I just finished reading Arthur Levine and Diane R Deane's excellent Generation on a Tightrope: A Portrait of Today's College Student (Jossey-Bass: 2012), a follow-up of Arthur Levine's earlier works looking at the college students in the 70s ( When Dreams and Heroes Died , Jossey-Bass, 1980) and in the 1990s ( When Hope and Fear Collide , co-authored with Jeanette S Cureton, Jossey-Bass, 1998). Just like the previous volumes, this is an insightful read, covering institutions across America and exploring the life of American undergraduate students. The most pleasant thing about this, however, is its optimism: It is not one of those books decrying the state of education or the non-engagement of today's graduates. Instead, this talks about the challenges (that today's graduates are less attentive in the classroom, more likely to plagiarise, talks global but would fail to recognise the names of world leaders, etc.) and follow-up with analysis why this may be so and ...