Sunday Posts

This has been the best and worst of the times for Higher and Professional Education. While people pursuing Higher and Professional Education has attained a new peak globally, new questions about its relevance and cost have arisen too. The expansion of formal education has crowded out the ecosystems of informal learning, in effect depriving societies with one of the tried-and-tested coping mechanisms for social and technical change ( see my earlier post on this ), but it has offered little in its space. Its claims on the territory, in various avatars of Lifelong Learning or Massive Open Online Courses, have underachieved, being too structured, too bureaucratic, too content driven and too top-down. Finally, its claims of being able to assess everything overshot its capability, and created dissonance with employers as they struggled to work out hard measures of the 'soft' skills.  However, among all these debates and questions, one that attracts maximum attention is the one ...

There is a certain role of 'degree' and 'diploma' in our society.  These, supported by a generally elaborate regulation structure and recognition from Governments, are not unlike the currency: A diploma holder's worth is transparent and understood generally as a mark of competence. Also, it is important to acknowledge the link between the degree and diploma and commercial employment. We can indulge in as much fantasy about monastic life and pure quest of knowledge for its own sake, but most of the state-funded, modern, mass education system is closely tied to the requirements of the industrial society and its employers, both state and commercial houses [as well as the Research Universities, which should be seen as a specific kind of employer with a specific requirement]. Degrees and Diplomas, therefore, are currencies of competence, to be accepted by the employers. However, we have arrived at a stage where the regulation structure is too elaborate and ...

Over last several years, I have worked to find that Holy Grail of Education: A degree that leads directly to a Job! I did write about this search on this blog, all the dead ends, disappointments and revealations that came along the way. Starting with perfect innocence - that this is the best thing that can happen to corporations whose difficulty in finding skilled personnel - I came to learn the ground realities of the trade, that the skills gap is usually 'someone else's problem' and long-term solutions are no good for the managers focused on quarterly targets.  Despite this, however, I got somewhere. Almost implausibly (to me, at least), I got some advance commitments on hiring graduates we could train. It was a commitment with all the expected checks and balances, but that provided that keystone for building a demand-led degree. And, indeed, the first one is always the hardest: Once that one commitment was signed off, it was easier to have conversations with ot...

I wrote earlier about how, by expecting too much of them, we have positioned college degrees to fail ( See here ). The college and its degrees became, effectively, a tool for the ever expansive state to control another aspect of lives of its citizens. The poverty of this formula becomes apparent at this point in time, when the state is no longer expanding and the promises of middle class life, that pursuit of happiness, looks more hollow than ever. Yet, despite the 'credential-equals-job' mindset that we have all grown up with - and the brutal realisation that it does not, not anymore - we are somewhat caught in this argument that we do not have an alternative credential that we can trust, and therefore, we have to keep sending people to Higher Ed, keep the spectacle going. But there is an alternative credential that we can trust, that all employers look for - the CV! A CV, a portfolio of experiences and verifiable references, is the credential we build and carry through ou...

As I write this, that Penguin, the famous publisher, has abolished degrees as a requirement for their recruitment, is on the news ( see here ). They join a handful of firms at the top of prestige and professional hierarchy, such as Deloitte, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and EY, in their search for a more diverse talent pool.  One could, and possibly many would, dismiss this as mere publicity, rather than serious moves. And, indeed, this may represent a fraction of their total new intakes. For every Penguin taking themselves off-Degree, there may be an Accenture who would not want to look outside a few elite universities. But the point here is philosophical - degrees having dominated our educational thinking so vigorously that we forgot what this stood for - and not statistical.  So, what do degrees stand for? Why did we come to accept that this ornate piece of paper, often deliberately evoking medieval imagery,  come to signify our knowledge, and even our abilities? ...

While everyone agrees that Higher Education needs new thinking, there is one sacred cow: Degrees! All the private capital flooding into the field with the battle cry to change the world meekly surrender themselves to the alter of the Degrees. To follow the rhetoric, the search is for a better way, not a better credential. The degrees, an early modern invention, look safe and sound, despite the world being claimed to be turned upside down. Or, is it? The recent Udacity Nanodegree Plus, which is an employer-backed credential that comes with a job guarantee (which, in effect, is a guarantee of full refund of fees if the learner does not get a job after graduating), opens up an interesting possibility. After a somewhat faltering start, Udacity, among the various MOOC providers, is now finding its mojo through nanodegrees, which, despite the allusion, are not degrees. In a plain vanilla world, this would be called a Certificate. But this, and other similar credentials like Micro-d...

I get asked a lot - what is the value of a foreign degree? The correct answer is - it depends. It depends on where you study, what you study and where you are from. We know the first part already - where you study matters. This is both in terms of the country where you went to school, and the school you went to. The school matters more than the country, but if the school is obscure, the country counts. The effects of other two parameters - what you study and where you come from - are seldom talked about. The discipline matters a lot. Parthenon, a consultancy (now part of EY), studied the effect of foreign qualification on job prospects of a candidate and pay. They concluded that while employers prefer a candidate with foreign qualification over others, it has no discernible impact on pay, except in some disciplines. They pointed out Hospitality and Digital Media as two of the areas where foreign education impacts pay, and perhaps it is easy to guess why that would be so. ...

Bill Gates have now given us a new word, or more precisely, a new meaning to an old word: Decoupling. He suggests that knowledge and employability may be 'decoupled' from university degree in the coming days. Which effectively means that he is predicting university degree may not be relevant anymore. It may sound counter-intuitive, but coming from Gates, the statement is worth exploration. One could argue that college education was never more popular: College-going population worldwide has surged and is continuing to grow. So, the demise, or irrelevance, or, if we must play safe, 'decoupling', of a college degree may sound fantastical. But then, the surge needs to be seen in the perspective of the global jobs crisis. The college has not created jobs, nor it can: It has been an instrument to sell middle class dreams to many, only for those to fail eventually to achieve the promised life. In fact, the surge in college education may be seen as a part of the global...