Sunday Posts

  When the campus is reduced to a screen, are Princeton and Phoenix the same? One may indeed think that higher ed going online create some sort of level-playing field, and in fact, may even give the challenger an advantage. This is based on what happened in Amazon-vs-B&N: When the rules of the game change, new and disruptive players can compete better. Technology can trump track record and endowment. But this belies a lack of understanding how higher education works. Education is NOT about the delivery of content: A lot of it is about signalling of value. Amazon could sell the same book as B&N using a different media and the customer could attain the same outcome - the reading experience! The outcome - in terms of expectation and outcome - from Princeton and Phoenix is quite different.  Besides, when something moves online, brands become more - not less - important. Metaphorically speaking, if Princeton to Phoenix was a 10:1 advantage offline, it is likely to be 100:1 ...

Universities are at an inflection point; so too is private higher education. The education entrepreneurs and private equity backing education ventures may present private higher education as the solution to higher education's current woes. In reality, however, most private higher education institutions are innovation-challenged and fail regularly. While some, like University of Phoenix or Hult Business Schools, have managed to be financially successful for short periods of time, such success is both rare and has been short-lived. Private higher ed model needs as much rethinking as that of the universities. In most countries, private higher education plays a demand-absorption role. When demographic or economic changes result in significant expansion of student numbers and public education, because of their nature as bureaucratic institutions dependent on advance planning without unfettered access to risk capital, private higher ed steps in to absorb the excess demand. However, what ...

The UK Government's proposed Higher Education Bill, which, among other things, makes it easy for For-Profit Universities to get degree-granting status, is expected to face steep opposition at the House of Lords ( see this story ). This is a long-awaited move, and many For-Profit operators, primarily from the US who are having a terrible time at home, are looking forward to this bill. UK Higher Education has a global reputation - arguably an average UK university is better regarded globally than an average US university - and being able to grant an UK degree is indeed a big prize when mass Higher Education is expanding so rapidly in Asia and Africa. Now, one could regard the House of Lords' stance as a retrograde one, and see this as a battle of entitlements - a few privileged people, retired academics among them, fighting for their corner, but this will be a mistake. The expansion of For-Profit Universities is likely to affect UK Higher Education - its effectiveness at home a...

I have followed the conversation about T-Skills, that a modern professional needs at least one 'deep' skill and several other interests and abilities to complement this - for several years (see my earlier post here ). Over the last several years, the idea has gained considerable traction and now has its own 'Summit' (check the last year's videos and details here ), as well as gained academic acceptance and popular support. Whether one uses the T metaphor or not, many people are advocating a similar approach. For example, Professor Howard Gardner, in his Five Minds For The Future , argue that the professionals of the future will require a 'Discipline', a native way of thinking and making sense of the world (the deep end of the T), as well as Synthesis, the ability to assimilate information and ideas from various branches of knowledge (the top of the T) - along with Creativity, Diversity and Ethics. There are several reasons why we are having this conver...

Higher Education as a business is an American idea, mostly! The American For-Profit Education companies are the largest in the world, and they are no longer American. They have assets - universities, publishing companies, online operations - all over the world. And, they are present in every conversation about Higher Ed in every country, lobbying for For-Profit participation (which many countries do not allow) and privileges (mostly access to public funding for students). How this should be viewed depends on one's point of view, and I did previously argue that some diversity is good for Higher Education sectors in different countries (though my views have evolved since, as I came across Hirschman's argument why private sector education, instead of improving the quality of public sector through competition, actually has the opposite effect). But, regardless of the broader argument, one thing fascinates me about this debate: That American For-Profits point to the student de...

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...

Can you be in the business of Education and stop selling courses?  It is a tough ask, as everyone in business has a course-fetish. Courses are the big hammers that the whole sector uses to solve the problems of the world. No matter what you come up with, the educator is likely to say - there is a course for that! We may not quarrel with the essential idea. Course stands to mean a route, or a procedure, originating from the Latin word for Run. But the course, as it appears in our jargon today, is a frozen thing, and means not a journey but rather a static feast of textbooks, lectures, assignments and exams.  Indeed, many people are dismayed by how it is usually done - often with little consideration or care for the person involved. However, course is such a common currency in education that, eventually, everyone seems to fall in the Course trap. It is so endemic that being educated and being Coursed (which indeed means chased) have become two different things alto...

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...

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...

Parag Khanna and Karan Khemka's 'audacious idea', published by Harvard Business Review in 2012, was to ' enrol the world in For-Profit Universities ' in 10 years. They were talking about the 'Global Workforce Crisis' as we are trying to frame it today, along with another issue that we seldom discuss now - that of population! Since then, both of these issues have accentuated: The global workforce crisis has reached serious proportions to start threatening economic expansion (with its short term solutions, such as immigration being politically unacceptable), and the surge of population, which the expansion of global markets was supposed to have absorbed into productive work, caused serious disruptions in a number of countries when such market magic failed to materialise. If anything, the need for an education solution is ever more urgent and important. The 'audacious idea' was however not too audacious as this simply recycled market orthodoxy wit...

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...

The conventional wisdom is that developing societies must tap private capital to build their Higher Education capacity.  The reasons are pretty clear. First, the governments may be indebted and have the money to build universities. Second, the developed countries are increasingly allowing private Higher Education, and therefore, this must be a good model. Third, private Higher Ed is supposed to be more focused on practical and employment orientated education, so must be good for countries struggling with skills and employment.  But, in this discussion, several other issues remain unsaid. For example, in a developing country, the government's job is development. Not subsidies, not fighting wars, development first and foremost! And, the reality of these countries will tell any observer that the first two things that the governments need to do for development is health and education. Indeed, the business friendly rhetoric that the governments are just needed to build th...

Should Laureate International University's recent engagement with Pearl Academy of Fashion in India be considered a pointer for things to come? Laureate International Universities is one of the biggest For-Profit education companies worldwide, and it is one of the first among its peers to get into India. Given that India has not yet finalised its Foreign Education Providers' Bill, and does not technically allow For-Profit involvement in Higher Education, Laureate's involvement is something of a coup de grace for Indian education policy-making. Though this engagement seems to be fairly low key - there is not much Internet noise on this 'partnership' yet - it clearly shows how the Indian Higher Education policy is easier to negotiate with than it seems. Given that we see so many British colleges and universities fret about legislation in India, this is one example of quick decisive action by a For-Profit entity. But this move has other attributes worth consi...

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...

The private colleges in the UK, and I am talking about the ones which are small, mostly run by owner-operators, and privately funded, have taken a terrible beating in the last couple of years. The British Government's across the board clamp down on student migration, the burden of which fell disproportionately on private colleges, made their business model disappear overnight. Some enterprising ones survived the onslaught by adapting quickly to the new student finance regime established in 2012, where the government made money follow the student and opened it up for private sector, even For-Profit, institutions.  This strategy has had some stunning successes, as the quick climb of numbers of students opting for private institutions, as opposed to a Public University, show. The success was primarily because the private colleges, leaner institutions without a mandate for public duty or unionised staff, could afford to charge the students lower fees compared to the universities....