Sunday Posts

How much should one pay heed to cultural issues when planning to deliver education globally? This question has assumed renewed significance as global education is now a reality. Technology has made it possible, financial liberalisation made it desirable. Now, even the last barriers, which were there for mostly political and cultural reasons, are also coming down. Even a country like Bangladesh, which is forever at war with Western influence at home, has now allowed overseas universities to set up shop ( see story ). With a broad global consensus slowly emerging about a regulatory easing of Higher Education, the global online providers never had it better. The technology of delivery has reached a tipping point, the access to computing, through cheap tablets and smartphones, have reached even the remotest parts of the world, and the groundswell of middle class aspirations have far outstripped the traditional modes of supply.  Indeed, there are big hurdles to cross. Chin...

India is the world's most exciting Higher Education market. One may receive this with a tinge of skepticism, simply because one has heard this before. But it would be wrong to think that India was always the world's most exciting Higher Education market. That would have been China in the past, and America before that: India's moment is coming now. Part of it is simple demography: National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030 ( see here ) highlights some of the fundamentals. In terms of what it calls the Demographic Window of Opportunity - the years when the proportion of Children (0 - 15 years) is less than 30% and the proportion of the seniors (65 years and above) is less than 15% - India arrives now: Its DWO stretches from 2015 to 2050 (see page 24). This closes in Russia and the United States in 2015, and China, which remains a relatively youthful country, has only 10 years left (till 2025). The other exciting demographic opportunities may be much smaller ...

Before we talk of the mechanics of how to develop global expertise, we must attempt to answer whether such an endeavour is worth it. The education system as it stands today has changed its goals, from the modernist vision of 'Reason' to the promotion of National 'Culture' in its glory years, to the current idea of Developing 'Excellence', which, as Bill Readings argued, means very little. But even if the efforts to promote a national culture looks spent, and the universities today are multinational corporations with great sophistication, they are decidedly in the business of 'soft power', which is, crudely put, about exporting 'national culture' to faraway lands. The object of the universities, therefore, is grounded on national values and cultures, or what goes in its name, and 'globalism' of the kind we are talking about is quite alien to its DNA. This is not to deny some parts of our education system is more global than others. A...

One of the things I get to do is to talk many UK institutions about their partnership plans in India. This is partly because of my engagements in the India Education Conclave last year, and partly because of my general interest in the area: However, this is not a commercial activity for me, and my interests are primarily educational and of maintaining links with India.  This gives me a rather interesting position of being both an insider and an outsider to these conversations, having just enough knowledge about the negotiations but a disinterested perspective, which is quite beneficial. I have noted my frustrations with the limited perspectives that the UK institutions often take in these partnerships, making the students the losing side in these transactions. ( See the earlier post ) What was left unsaid, however, is that the role the Indian institutions play, which contributes equally to the failures of these partnerships.  Understanding the dynamic of an Indian in...

Vocational Education is in deep trouble. Despite its new-found charm - it is often flaunted as the panacea for development problems - all its existing model is out of date. All the money being poured into it, and quite a bit of money is being poured into it globally, is going down the drain. And, this is not just an implementation problem: There is a deep idea problem here. Vocational Education is currently perceived to be a canon fodder for a non-existent canon. The received wisdom is that all the developing countries of the world would go through the stages of industrial development that the developed world has gone through. And, therefore, they need to build up a skilled workforce, using the lessons learned in these industrial countries. They are lucky, they don't have to go through the trial-and-error, the social upheavals, that the developed nations had to go through: They just have to pay up to buy the ready standards and intellectual properties from these developed nat...

When we initially conceived U-Aspire, our plan was to focus on what we do best: Designing Curricula, assuring quality and managing technology. The plan was to develop a network on learning centres, across different countries and locations, which will market and deliver these training programmes. The underlying assumption was the existence of spare capacity in these institutions, and that it would be inherently attractive for them to market an additional programme, which will lead to better usage of capacity as well as help lift their profile. Several months into the project, we know that this aspect of the plan needs revisiting. We have weaved together an innovative programme in International Management, as a starting point, and built elements of branding, technology and partners around the same. However, our initial focus on India as a market meant that we were to deal with the most complex education market in the world straightaway. The size of the market, its complex regulator...

Vocational Education is designed to be a poor man's thing. It is for those kids who faltered through the school and didn't do okay in the things that matter. Those who couldn't get the right GPA or work out the system of examinations to get a good college. Those whose parents never went to university and didn't know what counts in the game to get to good college. Those who perhaps couldn't pay the tuition for the private school. You get it - those who are not smart enough, not connected enough, didn't know enough. I see this as an opportunity. Because the whole system of exams and colleges are so misdirected. They are almost always preparing people with wrong skills and abilities, for professions that may cease to exist soon. I could see a model of vocational education that could be constructed on the back of various government attempts, vain and pointless as they may be, and provide a disruptive force in the education sector of the developing countries.  ...

Culture, while it is increasingly an issue to be reckoned with in business circles, does not get the same prominence in the discussion about International Education. The reason why business pays heed to culture is perhaps because increasingly the Chinese, Indian and other consumers are 'emerging', and it is no longer the same monolithic world where all purchasing powers were concentrated in the hands of a certain type, Western, consumers. For the same reason, surely, western educators may pay heed to the issue of culture, as the Chinese, Korean and Indian students flock to Western universities.  However, such cultural sensitivities are less likely to take hold in the academia, simply because the demand for an Western education is simply taken as an acceptance of its superiority. Besides, educators usually resist the idea of education being a consumer commodity and see the need to adjust to the needs of different students as a compromise of the standards. And, finally, pra...

A new paradigm for Global Education is needed. The current model of Global Education, where elite students from developing countries go to developed countries, predominantly UK, US and Australia, to seek out either a new life abroad or prestige and premium at home. This model has worked for more than hundred years. However, the changes in the economy, jobs and careers have challenged this model now. For a start, more people are seeking global education now than ever before. The model that the elite followed to get to the best universities in the world does not apply to the masses: They are often condemned to lesser institutions studying things not relevant to their job markets in the false hope of attaining the life and dreams of the bright eyed boys and girls adorning the prospectuses of various institutions. The life abroad that this global education implicitly promises often fails to materialise, as countries are tightening their immigration regulations trying to keep ...

In my work, I often act as an interpreter, not of the linguistic kind but of culture. Because the two sides of my working equation are my Western colleagues, partners and collaborators, and my Asian clients, students and customers. The fault lines of cultural cross-overs are therefore very real for me. Besides, I often get to play the role of a reluctant India expert, because of my origins, and very regularly the apologist for the country, when various not-so-encouraging stories hit the press. This could be quite an enjoyable learning experience: With more than fifteen years spent outside India, I am getting used to seeing the country and its quirks from outside. Though I still don't think the way my British or American colleagues would do, I have gotten used to see their point of view. I loved my time in Southeast Asia, and always feel more comfortable dealing with people in that region. So, in a way, this role of go-between is the best I can get, which makes my work, love a...

I am writing a course on International Management and that allows me to research and reflect on who a global manager is (and, indeed, how to prepare one). I think many people embark on global assignments with little preparation, which happened to me in the past, and only learn as they go along. Reflecting on my own experience, I think companies can get a lot more out of their staff if they prepare them ahead for such assignments: The problem indeed remains that this is still a fuzzy field and it is hard to agree what one needs to prepare on. The most usual preparation is indeed to talk to someone who had a similar posting before. So, if you are being posted to China, you talk to an old China hand, soaking up as much as you can. This is useful, but if this is the only thing you do, which often is the case, such preparation can be counter-productive. Usually, this means that the presumptions of that mentor gets passed on to you, and unless you are lucky to have a mentor who learnt a...

This is a bad time for globalism. The recession has renewed the fear of the others, and various politicians, from Japan to Italy to United States, are inventing foreign bogeymen to obscure their own failures. Companies, while desperate for ideas and for growth, are receding to respective homelands for safety: The only international bit they would still like to do is to keep their cashes stashed in tax havens. In fact, by doing so, they have given global business more bad press - Starbucks dodging taxes, Wal-Mart paying bribes and various banks, almost all of them, defrauding customers and governments alike. Critics can say that this was bound to happen and globalisation is a sham: But when it comes to climate change, nuclear disarmament, human rights, the issues that the same critics love, they concede that there is no alternative to concerted global action. I shall contend that global connections (or disconnections) are a function of technology and due to progress in transportati...

All Higher Education is local, because of its structure. Most of it is still delivered in attendance, which limits it to a locally resident community. Its funding is deeply anchored in alumni handouts or government grants, again with a mostly local orientation than not. However, the world of work has changed, and is changing further, and local comfort and global confidence have both become critical parts of skill set for most professions. I shall argue that most Higher Education do not address this need at all. In fact, truth be told, Higher Education often does more harm than good as far as these global-local balance is concerned. College creates prejudices rather than dispelling them. Students are told to see their classroom as a microcosm, a reflection of the wider world, and often impose the stereotypes thereof. The liberal end of this view is a rich country backpackers' view of the world, benign but flawed; at its other extreme, it is bigoted and dangerous: The Higher Ed ...

David Willetts, the UK Universities Minister, advised its universities to go overseas in search of students. ( EducationInvestor, 17th May 2012 ) Whether he, like his other colleagues in Government, seems to think that Britain is besieged by student migrants, or this is a statement of exasperation and frustrated acknowledgement that the current immigration policies will drive away the international students, is a matter of conjecture. He may draw comfort from the available data, which showed that in 2011, the 5% growth in the number of students coming to UK (total number 428,225) was far outstripped by a 23% growth in the number of students studying overseas for a British degree (total number 503,795), and particularly in programmes delivered through partner organisations (a growth of 40%) [Source: UKCISA ]. He may also point to various experiments in overseas campuses, the most celebrated being by the University of Nottingham's China campus, which, beyond its symbolic value, was ...

The Cameron government denied that the current immigration policies are hurting the UK Higher Education sector. Despite the precipitous fall in the applications to British universities, particularly from South Asia, and the near-total extinction of the private education sector which used to provide feeder routes to the universities, the government claims that their policies will encourage 'genuine' students to come to the UK, and therefore help protect the brand and the excellence of the British Higher Education. Like so many other things, they are wrong on this count too. But, then, it is difficult to expect anything from this government anyway. Apart from protecting the banks and hobnobbing inappropriately with Murdochs, the government ministers seem incapable of getting anything done. The problem, indeed, is their world view, one so antiquated that they fail to understand or anticipate the aspirations or requirements of a modern society. With their Lib Dem stooges froz...