Sunday Posts

College Education may indeed change as the social demands of it transform radically. We can debate whether this is good or bad - I have argued elsewhere that there is little objective discussion here and a lot of self-interested talk - but one frightening consequence of this is the impending demise of Humanities. This threat is less clear in some countries than others. An extreme case is India, which is fast becoming a nation of Engineers (and also Doctors and Lawyers), where humanities is usually treated as a subject for girls, or those who are not expected to make a living. But this is also pronounced in countries like the United States, where humanities funding is under threat in many states, and even in Western European countries, which were traditionally focused on liberal education but that edifice is being dismantaled rapidly with the roll-back of public funding of Higher Education. In response to this decline of the humanities, a number of books and articles have been wri...

The hottest discussion in education is the development of Open Competency Frameworks. Gone are those days when a list of courses is the language educators would throw at rest of us. The conversation is now very much around what the education does, because that is what everyone involved in education, government, employers, community and students, want to know. Yes, indeed, there are far too many prospectuses around with endless lists of courses, but we are getting to a point when they need to be rewritten. However, while there is some kind of consensus emerging around the idea of competencies, there is no such agreement on what they should be. Many educators feel that competency is a corporate word, and education should not subject to employer interests alone. This is indeed a justifiable stance, given that employers are often focused on immediate opportunities and not on building capacity and future options, but the educators must offer a better alternative than a list of courses...

The trigger for this post is a comment on Twitter - "in the future, corporations will be better accreditation bodies for H Ed than governments". Would they? At the face of it, it may make sense. Aren't we educating ourselves for a job? And do the employers know best what is needed to get a job? For a good part of my life running For-Profit education, how often did I make a claim that the education my company offered is 'industry accredited'. In the UK, Pearson College wants to create such a degree, as they believe a FTSE 100 accrediting a degree has more weight than even a mid-ranking university. Not in the future, this should already sound like a good idea. It already happens too. We may debate about the semantic of training versus education, but as far as learning is concerned, IBM Global Services, Oracle Education, Microsoft would all be big names if we went just by numbers of students that pursue their certifications and the revenue they generate. Wh...

In a previous post , I questioned the notion of employability training as it is practised now. The subsequent discussion on Linkedin on the subject was illuminating. One of the contributors, Graham Doxey, who set up Neumont University in the US previously, had this to say (I quote him in full): "As you know Supriyo I have been addressing this very issue for over 10 years now. I am impressed with the insights that this conversation is drawing out. I have thought of responding to some very specifically, but there are now too many so I will have to consolidate my thoughts. With my co-founders at Neumont University we set out to address this problem specifically in regard to computer science education in 2002. I personally met with dozens if not hundreds of CEO's and corporate leaders to get their buy in on this new approach to CS education. We got these companies involved in the education process from the first semester with increasing involvement such that by the l...

The Promise of College Education Being middle class means, among other things, aspiring to go to college and having a white collar job of some description in the end. While millions in Asia, Africa and Latin America follow this dream, in the West, there is a different reality: Middle class jobs are disappearing. They are mostly moving down the ladder, reduced to irrelevance by the rise of clever machines. The solid certainty, the ethic of working for a retirement, alongside a clear vision of what life would be like thirty years on, are all fragments of nostalgia. Regardless of aspirations, middle class lives and jobs are disappearing all over the world. If middle class life is to change, the educational ideals must do so too. This is a debate whether the College-for-Jobs myth should be propagated any further and whether time has come to reshape the modern higher education all over again. The Hangover of The Fifties We have come a long way from the Fifties, the age of opt...

If one has to put markers to trace the rapid change in the British Higher Education space, some watershed events will stand out:  First, on 26th July 2010, it was announced that BPP University College of Professional Studies, a For Profit institution which was taken over by the US-based Apollo Group only a year earlier (August 2009), will be granted degree granting power, a first for private sector in nearly 30 years. This led to fierce criticism from the Public Sector Universities and Teachers' Unions alike, who criticised that this amounts to a foreign, albeit American, invasion of British Higher Education, which will lower standards and dumb down student experience. BPP came with a history of Professional Education, primarily in Law and Accounting, and there was resentment about blurring of boundaries between these disciplines and the walled garden of Higher Education, a preserve of the pure. Then, in June 2011, A C Grayling, a prominent philosopher and atheist, announc...

I spent the first half of the day attending an interesting discussion, hosted by the Social Market Foundation , an Westminster think-tank which is doing some interesting work on the transformation of the British Welfare State. This well-attended event, which was to be about Encouraging Responsible Universities, but somewhat ended up becoming a discussion on the University funding regime, drew participation from different sections of the British society, including Press, Businesses and various think-tanks and public intellectuals. In fact, there were people from only eleven universities, some of them on private capacities rather than as official representatives, which was rather interesting and was in fact pointed out in a question to the panel. However, the discussions were nonetheless worthwhile and threw some light on the current policy thinking on British Higher Education. The two keynote speeches of the day were delivered by Shabana Mahmood, the shadow Minister for Universities a...

Steven Schwartz, the VC of Macquarie University, Sydney, wrote a well-argued piece in Times Higher Education, on the need to 'educate' students rather than just train ( read his article here ). He is clearly right. As the universities abandon their responsibility to educate, the world has become a more dangerous place, full of engineers, doctors, lawyers, managers and statesmen who lack moral judgement of any kind. Besides, this failure, at the same time when an university degree is absolutely essential to get anywhere in life, subverts our ability to make rational choices: What a waste of time and energy it is to spend so many years collectively studying something that gives a formula which is already outdated and does not prepare us for any change in circumstances? The reason I think Professor Schwartz is right on the money is partly because the lessons I have learned dealing with universities over last few years. My impression is that for most universities, quality control i...

I have been keenly promoting apprenticeships as a part of our business plan for the new Business School in East London and this opened up a debate with some of my colleagues. In fact, two different debates at once: The first one was about making apprenticeships the focus of the business, at least in the short run; the other one was about staying out of it, as we are focusing on Higher Education. This debate isn't new. Those who do apprenticeships know that there is money in it; particularly the government is very keen to promote them and therefore, there is significant budgetary allocation towards the same. Higher Education in the private sector is still a no-no in Britain, and while you are making a space, it makes abundant sense to play in an arena where public funding is available. While this is business-speak, and I also additionally floated the view that while the HE enrollment money is front-loaded, apprentice money is mostly backloaded, hence a combination is desirable, thes...