Sunday Posts

The excitement about AI made it urgent, but it is not about AI. Education systems, in general, and tertiary education systems, in particular, have been operating within a specific environment of ideas since the 1990s, which has now undergone a change. In summary, the entire system functioned as a component of a talent value chain. The industrial thinking has been apparent - the student came in as the input, the graduate came out as the output - and the goal of educational improvement has been process efficiency. The value of the educational intervention sprang not from the process of education itself, but the value that the talent marketplace accorded to the graduate thus produced. Some institutions, particularly top-ranked research institutions, may claim that they haven't been affected by this 'vocational' transformation. They claim that their processes are not attuned to the immediate requirements of the job market, and in the case of Oxford, I was told that their focus ...

I spend a lot of time speaking with educators. Most of these conversations are about two things: How the world is changing and how higher education does NOT need to change. The assumption is that there is an unmutable core of higher ed: Some type of transcendent purpose beyond the question of practical application and economic returns, beyond here and now, something that can not be or should not be measured. This is very hard to argue against. What kind of lowlife I would be to question an educator dedicated to building better lives?  But I usually leave with a question. If we want to improve lives, is getting the students to attend school and making them read textbooks the best way to do it? Besides, we don't even do it for free: We make them pay for the pleasure of becoming a better person and often their parents have to sell their land (or liquidate family savings) to be able to afford it.  For me, there is indeed an unchanging core of higher education - that to be able to ...

My work is in international education. So my mantra is that education must be global! If we are not preparing our students for the global workplace, we are doing them a disservice, I say!  However, an interesting conversation with an young colleague made me pause and think. Her point, on reading India's new National Education Policy, was that the policy talks a lot about being Indian while promising to prepare Indian graduates for the global workplace. She saw this as an anomaly and hoped I would agree!  But here is my own confusion perhaps. I do think Indian education should be more Indian. I actually find the educated Indians disdain for their own countrymen disconcerting and believe that this is a crucial weakness of the Indian society. It weakens India as the Indian middle classes are increasingly disconnected from the real problems of their own country and try out various Made-in-America solutions rather than thinking on their own. And, I believe education, and particular...

  I recently spoke at an Education Conference and was asked to comment on what is likely to happen in Higher Ed sector post-pandemic. My presentation was about four key changes. I am not sure it resonated with the audience - I very much looked the odd historian trying to talk about the future - but I sincerely believe what I mentioned. Therefore, it is wothwhile to record these observations here, before they were completely forgotten, even by me!  My broad point was that pandemic, traumatic and game-changing as it has been, is not the only force changing higher education. Otherwise, after the infection numbers start falling and we start facing safer again, everything would have gone back to how it was earlier. However, a number of things happened in the last few years, which, taken together, would have a profound effect on how we live now. Before we attempt making a prediction about what happens to Higher Ed, it is definitely worth taking stock of what's changed. Here are some...