Sunday Posts

I switched my career to what I thought was Higher Ed (in reality, private training) about thirteen years ago and never stopped being fascinated about it. My fascination, however, is always about how little Higher Education sector knows about itself and wants to learn. A lot has changed in the last thirteen years though. About when I was getting started, a number of studies started coming out. This was also the time when private investor attention turned to Higher Ed and many 'ventures' were launched. Impacted by the global recession, public universities became more entrepreneurial. India started its rapid - and unplanned - expansion of the sector. New frontiers, Africa mainly, were opened and private Higher Ed moved in. Just predating it was the rapid expansion of International Education, which was driven by the growth of private sector. Soon, private Higher Ed, with its teaching focused, no-frills education, was out in the open.  Yet, when I defended my thesis on the sector se...

I pledged to myself to read a book a week and write a short review here. The first book that I read under this pledge is Martin Wolf's 'The Shift and The Shocks : What We Have Learned - And Have Still To Learn - From The Financial Crisis' . A summary judgement, in the tradition of Amazon, is that this is a 5-star, absolutely brilliant book to read on the Financial Crisis and its causes. Martin Wolf, who I saw as an apologist of Globalisation and principally writes in the Financial Times, would not usually be an author I would start my reading pledge with, and it needed some persuasion from a friend whose I advise I value greatly and who suggested, accurately as I understand now, that if one has to read just one book about the financial crisis, this should be it. It is, as is clear from the title, about the financial crisis that started in 2007 and shaped our lives in many ways. The boom years before 2007 is now a distant memory for many of us, and though some countries...