Sunday Posts

There is a talent problem in our economies. Speak to any employer in almost any country, and they will tell you how hard it is to find good employees with appropriate skills. And, this happens despite a massive expansion of public education system and rising literacy, an unprecedented level of access to Higher Education and Skills Training. There is also a near total consensus that education has an economic goal - jobs or career - and most employers have existing programmes and expansive plans to engage with education providers at all levels in search of talent. And, yet, the problem persists - and getting worse. Here, I think, we should make the case for a paradigm shift. The recruitment of talent currently happens with a supply chain paradigm. Even in the best of the cases, where employers are deeply engaged with education institutions, they try to shape the curriculum, spot student talent early and do campus interviewing, they are still looking at the educators as passive supp...

Employment may not be the only goal of Higher Education, as some educators will justifiably claim, but it is certainly one of the goals.  A good Higher Education have a great impact in building character, making one free, able to appreciate beauty, cooperate with other people and bring change. Wesleyan's Michael Roth will say that the goal of education is to liberate, animate, cooperate and agitate, and Howard Gardner sum it up as the quest for Truth, Beauty and Goodness. But, beyond this ideal of education, the political nature of the education enterprise that also must be acknowledged. After a century and half of expansion of public Higher Education, Higher Ed has a clearly embedded political purpose, that of lending legitimacy to the governments as they thrive on the idea of a Middle Class society, where everyone has access to opportunity in life through Higher Education. Consequently, the enrollments in Higher Education have expanded rapidly, and in a way, what used to be...

One of the missing pieces, a big one, in the Education-to-Employment conversation is what role does the employer play.  We know that a large number of graduates come out of school and can not find a job. Educators, in some cases resistant to the idea that a job should be seen as an outcome of education, are being held responsible for what is becoming a big social problem. Policy makers and Media are leading the conversation and demanding greater accountability, for a successful outcome defined by productive economic engagement (job or enterprise, whatever), from the educators. Several new-age Education institutions are exploring different educational models tied more closely to the outcome, including more responsive curriculum, pedagogy that mirror workplace practices, intensive career preparation for senior students as well as setting up facilities such as incubation centres connecting students with Capital and networks to start their enterprise. In summary, despite resistan...

To paraphrase Dickens, this is the best and the worst of the times for Higher Education. On one hand, Higher Education was never more popular. A preserve of the rich and the privileged, it has now become the mantra for everyone aspiring to move up in life. The success of the Western Middle Class in the Post-war years of industrial expansion created a template that everyone around the world to follow, a life of suburban bliss (or an urban apartment), a family, a car, a good school for kids, all inextricably tied to going to college and getting a job afterwards. On another, Higher Education is also in serious trouble, because the equation does not work in practice. The middle class jobs are vanishing, the middle class incomes are stagnating, families are breaking down and state provisions of education and health (where it existed) are being whittled down to meaninglessness. And, most apparently, the Education-to-Employment linkage is breaking down. More than half the graduates, on aver...