Sunday Posts

In the last two weeks, my colleagues and I have gone around India, from Mangalore to Meerut, from Mumbai to Kolkata, meeting a cross-section of institutions, understanding the work they are doing and indeed, seeking to establish partnerships to offer our Global/Local programmes. We have visited Central and State institutions, Deemed Universities and State Universities, Technical colleges and Skills training companies, as well as publishers, international schools and corporate training organisations. It was impressive to see the education enterprise in India in action, the massive build up of teaching institutions, the sprawling campuses, libraries, sports facilities and the like. It was educative to understand the nuances of the regulatory system, what these institutions can or can not do, the rhetoric of the policy and the reality of its implementation. We also saw a system in crisis, curriculum that was not changed for many years, a student population focused narrowly on employment ...

I shall be travelling to India in a week's time. This will be my first visit in over a year and few months, which is somewhat strange. I used to go to India every few weeks, and though that was almost three years ago, I am still quite used to the idea, mainly thanks to the tools and technologies of constant touch, such as Linkedin, Facebook, Skype and the like. It indeed seems I never left, or stopped travelling. However, in the intervening three years, India has indeed changed significantly. Outside in, the enthusiasm about India in the media and investment community has dissipated: The bad news kept coming and the promises, if always looked a bit rosy, failed to materialise completely. It is not just about pushing a reset button on the India story - it was about losing hope and feeling lost, which is worse than just going back in time. The debt-fuelled middle class prosperity, which a number of India watchers wanted to pass off for development, reversed awkwardly, not just w...

Finally, the debate everyone wanted to have, has kicked off: Deloitte, a consultancy, has started this round with a new report, India's Higher Education Sector: Opportunities Unlimited, Growth Aplenty , recently, and called for increased foreign investment in the sector. This reflects a shift of emphasis from 2010, when Grant Thornton, another consultancy, was talking about opportunities in Indian Education ( Education in India: Securing the Demographic Dividend ) and highlighted vocational training, backed by increased government spending on skills training, as the growth sector. Grant Thornton report was then predicting a 25% CAGR in the vocational training sector, reaching US $3.6 billion in 2012, which is most likely to be surpassed. Given the high school drop out rates in India, vocational training surely deserves the attention and can potentially Discernibly, the government's focus is shifting, perhaps as the urban middle classes, squeezed by inflation, goaded by 24x7 ...

In India, the number of colleges have more than doubled in the last half decade. So, why do I still think that I should try set up a college? In fact, if anything, there is some sort of oversupply in India's Higher Education, with growth in college numbers as well as the number of degree granting institutions outstripping the growth in student numbers. Coupled with onerous and unnecessary regulation, India's Higher Education is almost an impossible business: Last year, more than 100 approved business colleges notified the regulator about their intent to wind up. My thinking is that India has a distinct quality problem, rather than quantity problem (I have written about this before). India's Higher Education so far is a money-laundering mechanism for politicians, at least in most cases, and hence most of the development in the sector was of poor quality. Besides, everyone jumped into the field wanting to offer Business Administration degrees at Undergraduate and Postgra...

A new trend in Indian Higher Education is that the big business houses are entering Higher Education sector by setting up schools themselves. Usually, this is to be expected: India's thriving industry requires people, and the Higher Education sector can't provide it, not with the right skill level or in adequate numbers, hence one would expect investments from large employers in propping up higher education. However, as things stand now, the corporate involvement in Higher Ed is driven by commercial considerations and bandwagon effect, everyone thinks it is a good business, rather than skills requirement or philanthropy. While this means shiny new schools and increased private investment in Higher Education, this also brings education within control of India's 'tycoon economy', and may be detrimental to education innovation in the country. It is usual for big employers to support Higher Education: Some of the best universities in the world have been set up with...

India's higher education is fast approaching an inflection point, as demographic changes and increasing affluence alter the nature of demand for higher education. The 'new' students will be more discerning, demanding higher quality of educational experience, meaningful knowledge and not just a certificate, and global careers not just employability. The current structure of the sector, failing general education structure, narrow private sector offering and a few world class institutions, is not fit for purpose to handle this demand. New thinking is indeed needed to bring about the changes and create educational opportunities that this new, dynamic, global middle class needs. The Indian policy-makers, mostly products of elite institutions themselves (in many respect, India's ruling classes resemble France's), can anticipate the problems but are clueless about how to solve it. They are acutely aware that India must open its doors to foreign education institutions,...

My recent visit to India, which included a number of meetings with entrepreneurs, academicians and students in a number of business and engineering schools, has been quite helpful in my inquiry into the business models used in the Private Sector Education in India. Indeed, Indian Private Higher education is nowhere as evolved as the American ones, or even the kind one sees in South-East Asia. However, it is immensely important, because the huge young population of this country may decide, euphemistically speaking, whether Capitalism can succeed globally. Failure of Higher and Adult Education system in India at this time is likely to create a demographic time bomb, which will not only wreck India's future, but potentially the whole region's, and by extension - of the global economic system. In context, the Indian government, like the governments in other countries, have decided to leave the expansion of Higher Education to the private sector. The political logic is clear: T...

In course of my visit in India, I am starting to get an idea of its new higher education landscape. This is why I came, and as I see things, I am excited by the opportunities it presents to education entrepreneurs.  Indeed, the Indian higher ed has gone through significant transformation in the last few years, with an expansion of public and private investment, a few significant 'education scandals' and a new aspiring middle class knocking the doors vigorously. India is one major country in the world where the Government is still investing in Higher education: Understandably so, as the country is riding on its demographic dividend and looking to up-skill its huge young population. Indian industry is hungry for skilled workers, and as I understood from my several conversations, there are abundant middle level positions which are still unfilled despite the surge in graduate population.The private sector expansion has been fast, perhaps too fast, but broken legislation and flaw...