Sunday Posts

I switched my career to what I thought was Higher Ed (in reality, private training) about thirteen years ago and never stopped being fascinated about it. My fascination, however, is always about how little Higher Education sector knows about itself and wants to learn. A lot has changed in the last thirteen years though. About when I was getting started, a number of studies started coming out. This was also the time when private investor attention turned to Higher Ed and many 'ventures' were launched. Impacted by the global recession, public universities became more entrepreneurial. India started its rapid - and unplanned - expansion of the sector. New frontiers, Africa mainly, were opened and private Higher Ed moved in. Just predating it was the rapid expansion of International Education, which was driven by the growth of private sector. Soon, private Higher Ed, with its teaching focused, no-frills education, was out in the open.  Yet, when I defended my thesis on the sector se...

Robots are coming for private higher ed. It is usual to toast the rapid automation of work at investor conferences, in the hope that this would break the State monopolies on higher ed and usher in a new era of education innovation. What's left unspoken is that the public higher ed will eventually die, underfunded and unloved, under the sheer weight of its bureaucracy.  However, the collateral damage in this brave new world may not be public universities, the better of which are far better equipped to handle the coming of the Robots, but the private higher education that has grown rapidly worldwide over the last twenty years. Indeed, the same investors have billions of dollars at stake in private higher ed and wouldn't be pleased if the first casualty of the very disruption they celebrate costs them a bomb.  But this seems likely for two reasons. First, the impact of automation will be most felt in the jobs that involve narrow specialisations and process-based jobs, exactly the...

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 ...

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...

Yesterdays rather innocuous news that the University of Law has been bought over by the Global University Systems means more for British Higher Education than it appears. It may be the start of a wholesale transformation of British Higher Education, for good or for worse. For the uninitiated, the University of Law is one of the few private universities in the UK, and the only For-Profit one. It evolved from the College of Law, which was a Not-for-Profit entity, and which was bought over by Montagu Provate Equity, a PE fund with more than 4 Billion Euro worth of assets under management. Montagu buy-out eventually led to the transfer of University charter to a For-Profit entity after some hiccups, justifying the £200 million price tag. However, while this was one of the biggest PE deals in Education, it was also illustrative how little PE investors understand education. The valuation seemed to have solely based on the University license, which was not immediately available, but it ...

Private Higher Ed in the UK, as well as Higher Education in general, took a huge hit from the last General Elections. The Coalition government, over the last five years, effectively destroyed the business model of UK Higher Ed, and replaced it with a badly thought-through model that was stillborn. On the private Higher Education side, which was largely dependent on International students, the ever-changing regulations and poor implementation were catastrophic, allowing only the very crooked and completely dishonest to survive. In a way, the last election and its aftermath demonstrated fully how politicians can damage a whole sector. Hence, with another election due next week, it is worth thinking about what this might bring. In this discussion, the policy towards International students must feature prominently. Several reasons for this. First, the Private Higher Ed in Britain was always dependent on International Students till the last government changed it and made it dependent ...

Despite all our claims of being at the pinnacle of civilisational progress, we have a Global Learning Crisis at hand. We have 57 million primary school-age children are out of school, half of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. 31 million of them are girls, and half of them have never ever set foot in a school. A further 250 million children can not read or write, despite being in school: Out of these, 130 million can not read or write even after spending more than 4 years at school. 90% of the children in Honduras, more than 50% in Uganda and 33% in Mali can not read a single word of connected text at the end of grade two. Among the children who manage to attend Primary School, 25% of them drop out before reaching the Secondary School. 69 million school-age adolescents are not attending secondary school. UNESCO reports that these numbers have hardly decreased in the last three years and the progress has stalled or reversed in a number of countries. Finally, add to that 774 milli...

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...

There is a lot of talk about freedom and tolerance in Chinese Higher Ed. I remember one English University getting into trouble for letting a student writing a dissertation on Pornography in their campus in Dubai. Tales like this are often told by Indian Academics, implicitly highlighting the freedom that a democracy is supposed to guarantee. And, at one level, that's almost taken for granted - no one discusses whether academic freedom could be an issue in Indian campuses.  However, if one needed an ugly incident to start talking about this, we have got one now. Indeed, the case I am referring to relates to basic freedom of expression, a much more fundamental issue than academic freedom, but without which, discussions about academic freedom is meaningless. An event which brings out a picture of India's campus culture that would undermine the smugness about democracy guarantees freedom. I am talking about the decision of Meerut's Subharati University ( the website ...

Times Higher Education reports that two private colleges in London has received more money in public funding than the London School of Economics and School of Oriental and African Studies. ( See story here ) While we may argue on the merits of giving public money to private providers, as is the case in myriad public services, even the staunchest free market advocate may accept that this is perverse. One can't even argue that this is market forces at work: There is no way to explain why British students will prefer almost unknown institutions over the better known universities, except that we have managed to craft a system which has created all sorts of wrong incentives for over-recruitment. It seems that despite all the warning signals of the student loans scandals from the US, the government in England has managed to create a system and break it within barely two years. Indeed, one would argue that stories such as these is a mere case of jealousy of the public sector. But 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....

Times Higher Education reports that the Student Loan Access for 23 Private Colleges have been suspended (See story ). This means that these private colleges will not be able to recruit any more students for the current academic year. Presumably, they would be able to recruit again for the 2014-15 Academic Year, when their numbers will be capped (they have been uncapped so far). Indeed, this should not amount to much as the main recruiting season, Autumn 2013, is already over, and some of these private colleges have recruited more students than they can possibly service. However, this tale of expansion leading to knee jerk reaction from the Government is yet another illustration how little the Policy Makers understand the Private Providers in Education. To be clear, private providers have not over-recruited. This is because there was never a limit set on how many students they can actually recruit, and hence the Government's decision, prompted by 'expansion', may appea...

I wrote about ' How To Build A Higher Education Brand ' yesterday: One email respondent came back saying if there is any practical advice I could give to someone setting up a private university in India. I am therefore attempting an imaginary exercise here, as if you are trying to set up a private university in India. Whether I shall try to do it myself now is a different question, though. I believe this is 'the best of the times and the worst of the times' to set up a private university in India, depending on the context, exact geographic location etc. It is the best of the time because it has now been proved that private universities offer no easy money, so the black money that corrupted the field is somewhat in retreat: It is the worst of the time because such consolidation will invariably shake the students' confidence further. Moreover, context is important: The Indian student demand is at an inflection point, and an university that anticipates and satisfies t...

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 ...

Between May 2010 and September 2012, that's little more than two years, I took on a job which was unlike anything I did before, or will ever again do: I chose to work for a mid-sized private college, offering professional and higher education in the City of London. This was unlike anything I have done before because, at the time I joined, the college was going through massive, even traumatic, change: I was brought in as a part of that change, and spent rest of my time trying to take advantage of the change to drive more change. I shall possibly never have to do the same things again, because, private colleges in Britain, at the time, was mostly proprietary, and small businesses in terms of sophistication and strategy, but was suddenly exposed to a massive market expansion due to the growth in demand in emerging markets: This was a combination of a rather immature enterprise into a fast-growing market, not a rare event, but one that usually occurs once in a while for a given indust...