Sunday Posts

I was in a debate not long ago on the topic whether For-Profit Higher Education should be allowed in India. In a way, I have a predictable position, given that I have spent most of my working life in For-Profit companies. But there are more reasons why I should generally answer in the affirmative to this question. First, because I always argue for diversity of provisions in the Education sector. Second, and more importantly, I believe that the government is generally incapable of providing services, and should confine itself to providing infrastructure and maintaining regulatory frameworks.  The aforementioned debate was conducted in equally predictable lines. There were some, arguing against For-Profit Higher Education, rooted their argument on a moral revulsion of Profit - that one should not be in education for making money! The other group, arguing in favour, was logic of the market - that it would improve access, bring innovation and enhance efficiency of the sector. The...

I have been involved in the ugly end of the Higher Education - For-profits - for too long to not to detect the puzzle that lies at the heart of Higher Education as a business. Good Higher Education, if we overcome the cynicism to believe that there is such a thing (and overcome the claim that Higher Education is a mechanism to perpetuate privilege, and nothing else), needs elements such as a community, a gift culture, a long term vision and high levels of trust, which are not common in the business world. The investment world, which gets involved in owning and running Higher Education institutions, is really at the far end of the spectrum of values from what makes good education, and while they claim to reward innovative companies, they like regimented Higher Education, and while they want Google to be more college-like, they want college to be more like a factory. Recently, Professor Malcolm Gillies, the recently retired Vice Chancellor of London Metropolitan University, argued that...

August was somewhat the crucial month, with a both a week-long walking tour of Paris and a work trip to India, allowing me to the perspective that I desperately needed. It has been a year that I chose to take up a job after a few years of bootstrapping, and it was most appropriate for me to reflect on what happened since. Besides, I wanted to figure out what I really want to do, and travelling and engaging with different things in different countries was one of the best ways to figure this out. This allowed me to test the assumptions I had, about work and about myself, and while there are no definite answers in these kinds of things, I am much better informed now than I was only a year ago. For a start, I know adult education is something I enjoy being involved in, and I would rather stick to this, despite some tempting offers to work for the technology sector. Even an education technology company is not an education company, I keep reminding myself, and nor an investment bank pu...

The recent comments by Dr Stephen Jackson, the Head of UK's Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), making the case for a different kind of regulatory power to oversee private sector Higher Education in the UK, is significant ( Read the interview here ). Apart from the basic point about the visa fraud and criminality in the education sector, it is important to recognise that the Private Sector Higher Ed is really a different 'beast', and needs special attention. Besides, the Private Sector Higher Ed in the UK is really very different from most other comparable countries, and has so far been regulated quite badly using borrowed frameworks and out of date ideas. The comments made here point to some fresh thinking, though the proposed scheme may remain extremely difficult to legislate and implement. In context, it is rather unfortunate that this conversation is happening in the context of visa fraud (see the back story here , and here ), which will focus hearts and minds along t...

Education produces social good, goes the argument, and therefore, the society should pay for it, argues the advocates of public education. On the other side are the policy wonks who sees education as a tool to build private capabilities, leading to private wealth. Between these two positions, there are lots of people, who apparently hold contradictory positions. For example, the For-Profit entrepreneurs and the Private Equity that sees a great money-making opportunity in education believe that education should be for private wealth but the state should pay for it (so that the market remains big enough for them to invest), and those professors in different schools who would continue to think that the students should care for social good above all despite having to shoulder all their debts. One such position is to see education as a social good even if it creates individual capability and prosperity. We have now come to see that inclusive political and economic institutions as the ...

For-Profit Education stands, more often than not, for poor education. At a time when big claims are being made for the potential of For-Profit Education to change entire economies and alleviate poverty ( See Parag Khanna and Karan Khemka in HBR ), one must seek to understand why For-Profit education under-delivers.  Because, it is impossible to turn a decent profit in education, claim some. Alan Ryan claims that minus the public subsidies going into For-Profit education, "outside technical training in IT, law, finance and medicine, there’s not a lot of money to be made out of higher education" (Alan Ryan in Times Higher Education, see here ) This observation may empirically bear out as most For-Profit activities happen in areas with immediate employability, and where cost of delivery is low (For-Profits in medicine have often come up short, and For-Profit Engineering Education has usually been a disaster). There is more. The history of For-Profits has so far been th...

During my current tour of India, I got involved, somewhat against my will, in a long discussion - argument is a better word perhaps - about the necessity of public funding of Higher Education. This is one debate I usually seek to avoid, because, on this issue, there is little opportunity to have a nuanced position, and I do have a nuanced position. In this particular case, my correspondents were committed defenders of Public Higher Education with a 'you are either with us or against us' stance, and indeed, my reservations about the bureaucratisation of Higher Education (combined with my background in For-Profit education) immediately made me a target of vociferous attacks and compelled me to defend my views. This post is a short summary of the arguments that I made. My first problem with the high pitch defense of public funding of Higher Education is that this is hardly an honest stance. Most of the advocates of public funding represent themselves to be in opposition of m...

I have been studying Higher Education, especially For Profit Higher Education, for several years. In a way, I have an unique position to be an outsider as well as an insider in this: I own and run a private Higher Ed business and work with several others, while in my free time, I do my research and blogging on the subject. I shall claim that I am somewhat neutral on this very political issue - I see private enterprise as a force for good and public higher education, as it stands today, well in the need of a disruption, but also acknowledge that private owners and shareholders of Higher Ed companies haven't figured this out yet. Having worked with several For Profit Higher Ed companies, I have realised the logic of money has to sharpen itself if it has to create a winning Higher Education brand. In fact, my work keeps circling around this central question: How to create something really good with private capital? I claim that I have glimpsed this prospect in my years in NIIT, w...

The issues surrounding For-Profit institutions have been contested around whether allowing For-Profits inevitably means profiteering, and given the prospect of students taking loans to go to For-Profit institutions, profiteering at the taxpayers’ expense. On the other hand, For-Profit institutions argued their case as the ones driving educational innovations in cost and delivery, challenging the status quo in Higher Education, which has, they claimed, failed to change with time. These battles over entitlements, however, should be seen in the context of a broader debate about what the universities are for. Collini (2012) defines the ‘modern university’ with the following four characteristics: “1. That it provides some form of Post-secondary-school education, where education signals something more than professional training. 2. That it furthers some form of advanced scholarship or research whose character is not wholly dictated by the need to solve the immediate practical pr...

Early History While the growth and prominence of For Profit institutions, particularly of degree granting variety, is a relatively recent phenomenon, For-Profit education has a long history on both sides of the Atlantic. Reigner (1959) traces back the origins of For-Profit instruction to 1494 and the development of double-entry book-keeping in Italy. A popular book-keeping textbook was published by Hugh Oldcastle, who ‘taught the booke’ in London (Reigner, 1959). Hayes and Jackson (1935) traces the history of early business schools to the practice of one-on-one instruction on book-keeping, which evolved into the English Grammar Schools in the early Eighteenth century, which promoted a practical education for students who were not interested in classical training common in schools then. In 1617, a college at Henrico was proposed to raise money for cash-strapped Virginia Colony (Land, 1938, quoted in Kinser, 2006), and capital was raised for the same: However...