Sunday Posts

International student migration ebbs and flows. We have seen the tide rise just before the pandemic and just after. But what goes up always comes down. The international student flow is a big industry where fortunes have been made. The sector has its conferences, awards, rankings, Gurus, retreats, and the works! It has grown manifold over the years and expanded in lockstep with the growth of China, India, and the rest. The middle classes grew precisely at the time when managerialism and retrenchment of public funds hit the universities in Europe, North America, and Australia. So, Champagne flowed! The sector is built on a set of interlocking stories: The destination countries, such as the UK, get access to skilled professionals. The diversity of the student population helps the universities and students get opportunities and exposure. Last but not the least, most students eventually go back, and their home countries gain in expertise and enterprise that come with education and exposure...

  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...

I often ask myself this question: Why is it that when the world's best corporations are trying to set up 'campuses', many universities and colleges are so intent on running 'factories'? I know the obvious answer that the creativity and freedom are supposed to be for the gifted. Most of humanity are not creative, not aspirational and they crave for structure and command. I also know that this answer is wrong. Of course, we have met 'uncreative' people; many of them, possibly. People who would just follow, rather than finding a path. But should we stop to think that it is in their genes to not to be creative, an assumption we implicitly seem to be making, and allow the thought that they might have been encouraged not to think?  Is it that we are mixing up the cause and the effect - our education 'factories' are making people stupid, rather than the other way around? Of course, this is not about social classes, as the toffs would say: "Too many peo...

University rankings are useless. They reflect irrelevant parameters (like how the ranked universities rank each other), elitist assumptions (how many students they reject) and encourage status quo (how much money they have). Besides, these rankings aggregate all these based on completely random distribution of weightage, which means nothing even if one was interested in some parameters that these include.  We are stupidly addicted to them. We make our children follow ranking, despite the huge financial burdens and emotional costs. Perfectly normal people indulge in corruption. Instead of learning and experience, we chase vanity, flaunting which college our children go to even at the cost of their well-being. We let self-appointed experts, mainly from media, soothe and deceive us with a single round number, pandering our innate silliness that all numbers must mean something. The status quo society that we lived in - ever since the end of history in the 90s - this mattered less than ...

Unlike the Hollywood aliens, the future of Higher Education can not be expected to land in the United States alone. The American universities, of course, lead the world in academic prestige, cutting-edge research and endowments. They are, collectively, the best and the brightest, and attract the best researchers and best students from around the world. And they are not just intellectual world leaders but also represent the biggest education industry in the world, sprouting an ecosystem built around the success and prestige of the great universities. However, if higher education has to change and make sense in the future, this is exactly what needs to change. I write this as I am rather tired of reading literature coming out of the United States which portrays the future of higher education in the universalist terms. It seems that there is only one reality - that of higher education in America - and every other variation from around the world represents intermediate stages of a journey ...

Sitting at a meeting where I am told that today's learners would rather sit in a café than in a library, I heard the penny drop. Collectively speaking, we no longer have a clue what it is that we are doing in higher education.  Some conservative commentators see it more clearly than the left-wing ones: That higher education has become an inward-looking credentialing system completing disconnected from any social or even economic utility. It has become so because most of the education, giving in to the consumer economy, is being designed as light entertainment, completely divorced from its own rhetoric. Here is my point: A higher education is nothing if it is not uncomfortable. Aristotle made the point to an impatient Alexander: That there is no royal road to education! Change, which requires, by definition, about abandoning the comfort zones, is uncomfortable: There is no way to soft-serve this. And, yet, as we bring market logic everywhere, education must become easier - comfortab...

As higher ed goes online, we must remember: The medium is the message. There is little point trying to do online what we do in campuses. This is what most online higher ed propositions are built on, and very quickly they become poor copies of the real thing. The screen reduces the whole web of personal interactions and relationships into just content delivery - and universities to diploma shops! It is not surprising that the students do not see the same value in online delivery as they do in the classrooms. But that format also underplays the key strengths that a distributed environment can bring. Flexibility in terms of time and space, for example, may not be that valuable if we are trying to replicate the same activities that happen in a classroom, but mightily important if we try to do what can't be done in a classroom. But there is more: This is not just about access but experience too. There was once a charm getting to know others across the barriers of time and space. Faceboo...

  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 ...

India is where the future of higher education is being decided right now. Of course, the literature on the subject paints a different picture: This is mostly about the future of American Higher Education! The funding follows the same logic - funding technologies and enterprises based on the conversations in the United States.  Implicit in this is the assumption that the United States, the world-dominating civilisation of the moment, represents the peak civilisation, and all the other countries are on a journey - and are at different points - to become more like the United States. Therefore, the future of the future of anything is being more like America.  On the ground, the reality is very different. China has powered its way to global economic top table - and increasingly the academic one too - pragmatically picking and choosing elements of the American model, but steadfastly sticking to its own path. Now India comes to the party, belatedly acknowledging its vast waste of hum...

I have spent a long time making the case for college education and I see I used two different arguments interchangably. The first of these was the human capital argument, the one about skills. Usually, given my line of work, this was about telling employers about work-ready graduates and students about jobs and income. After the universities, I used to cite 'graduate premium', not telling the whole story - that the figure is inflated out of proportion by the incomes of a few winners and collapse of the non-graduate income; most graduates have seen their income stagnate or decline in real terms ever since 2008. I used to argue that the quality of education is best expressed in the starting salary of the graduate (a desperate oversimplification that takes the labour market and all the implicit issues of race and gender out of the consideration) and that the countries should invest in colleges to gain competitive advantage in the knowledge economy.   The other argument was the de...

Future becomes obsolete, but it happens at a uneven pace.  A wise man once said that in history, 'in years, weeks happen, and then in weeks, years happen'. But, the same wise man - Lenin, as it happened to be - thought he could see the future and shape it. As it turned out, the future didn't behave. This should serve as a cautionary tale for today's Gurus, confidently peering into the future. Our ideas and our expectations, shaped by the slow years, proved completely inadequate now. And, besides, the prediction business does real harm: If the predictions become forceful enough (or are forced on others, as in Russia), it makes us run in directions we shouldn't and makes us ignore stuff that we should be paying attention to. What's happening right now in Higher Education is a clear, time-compressed example of ideas (and predictions) out of sync with reality. Only six months ago we thought the future of Higher Ed was digital. Six months on, there are only a few tru...

For the students in India, 2020 changes everything. It's been a while that the usual formula - entrance examinations, engineering degrees and IT jobs - was looking shaky. But, now, with the economy in a full crisis mode, a new imagination is needed. With the old ways of doing things falling apart, the only safety now is in finding one's own way by being really really good at something.   But how does one know what she can be really good at? A broad education, which allows intellectual freedom of exploration and synthesis, is hardly offered in India. A society obsessed with safe careers, students specialise early: Most peoples' lives are spoken for when they reached secondary school and they start taking special coaching classes with an eye on the profession. The community, the family and the parents decide what the student would do in life: There is very little choice, very little experimentation, to be allowed in a decision that one has to live with all her life. However, ...

As they scramble emergency measures together, the university leaders are gradually coming to the conclusion that the changes will be long-term. If only reluctantly, they are accepting that remote learning is here to stay, if only because the students' direct experience of it makes it far less intimidating. But this is only a part of the change. The economic and political after-effects of the massively stretched state finances are bound to mean accelerating changes in the public-private balance in higher education. Coming together with the expansion of remote learning, shift to digital work and changing geopolitical alignment reconfiguring international education, this is a perfect storm moment for higher education. As with remote learning, the balance has already been changing in public-private higher ed. In fact, this 'new normal' creates new opportunities for private higher education. With their focus on efficiencies, private Higher Ed institutions were ahead in the appli...

Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe: If H. G. Wells meant education only in a broad sense, in this third decade of the third millennium in the common era, the same can be said about specific 'formal' types of education that have pervaded all aspects of our lives and cultures. In the intervening hundred years (almost, as Wells said that in 1922), 'education' has increasingly come to mean formal instruction and recognition, and despite occasional half-hearted attempts by the government and academic dissertations with zero impact, 'informal' education has gotten nowhere. If anything, the thriving ecosystems of 'adult education' that Wells would have seen around him have all but dwindled into a caricature, as mass schooling and formal education reached everyone and degrees came to mean enlightenment. However, even if education has changed, catastrophe remained somewhat steadfast. The social arrangements that emerged in the nine...

As India's universities fail to cling to their already precarious positions on global league tables, old concerns about Indian higher education have been newly voiced. There is much to be unhappy about, not just the position on the league tables. The skewed structure of Indian higher education means the significant number of bright graduates, educated at great expense by the Indian state, leave India every year for fortunes abroad. Despite the overt focus on technology education in India, the technology gap with its neighbour and competitor for global influence, China, is alarmingly wide. And, for the all their swagger, Indian business schools have languished at the bottom of global league tables and their graduates still struggle to find good jobs in India. But I don't want to lament here about the obvious. In fact, I wish to make a point which is its opposite: The obsessions about global league tables, technology lead or employability, the three key factors dr...

The digital economy demands a new form of higher education. This is not just about teaching with or about technology. This is about changing the whole paradigm of how higher education should be done. This is a common claim, often heard at various innovation conferences. The substance of it is, however, unclear. In fact, those who make the claim often portray higher education as a domain stuck in the middle ages, detached from real life and obsessed with texts and received wisdom - and the digital being the route to give it a 21st-century refresh. This view is eminently false as it simplifies and decontextualises - and misses out all that has happened in higher ed in the last hundred and twenty years.  The key change that happened in Higher Education over this period is the rise of research. This was derived from the enlightenment values and scientific frame of mind that came of age in the nineteenth century. This became a central organising theme of the modern unive...