Sunday Posts

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...

Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, calls Albert Hirschman's book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States , one of the finest books ever written by an economist. However, while by that description this short treatise stands alongside Keynes General Theory or Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations, it has none of the glamour and recognition of these peers. Yet, in some ways, Hirschman's work has a timeless quality about it - its topic and its exposition appears strangely contemporary despite the frantic transformation of our world and our thinking since the book was published in 1970.  Hirschman was dealing with an unconventional subject in Economics - decline in firms, when they do not do things well - and therefore, his work stood outside the mainstream economics. Mainstream economics, as Hirschman himself pointed out, operates on the basis of 'Consistent Rationality', which means decline of operating pe...

One tends to focus on technological possibilities when debating whether the college has a future. The traditional brick-and-mortar institution often seem too costly and too limiting, from a technological perspective, and therefore, its demise is commonly foretold. But the college continues to defy these death-wishes often by consolidating its prestige and attracting ever more students to it. In most countries in the world, colleges can not take all the students that apply to it, and are often not allowed to charge as much fee as the students are willing to pay to get in, and in such circumstances, the college isn't going to fade out any time soon. The mortal danger of the college, on the contrary, come from another angle, the lack of hope of change. The point of education is change, for better. College education does not stand for a vacant time for the society to figure out what to with its youngsters - it needs to have a specific purpose for all those preparations and troubl...

I have written about Exit and Voice before ( See here ) but not in the specific context of Higher Ed. I believe this merits special mention as Higher Education becomes more business-like. As Businesses try to become more like Knowledge Communities (and build campuses, among other things), the talk in Higher Ed is to turn students into 'customers' and of reigning in costs and instilling 'accountability': This may indeed have an impact on how the students engage with the institutions, and Hirschman's mechanics of Exit and Voice may become as relevant in the classroom. Hirschman's key point is that the organisations can exist and function at a sub-optimal level, something that is an impossibility in classical economics with its obsession with equilibrium and efficiency.  So, if a firm misbehaves or does not deliver, its customers will leave them and the firm will disappear, is the assumption which led mainstream economics to devote so little attention to sub-...

My contention that the idea of the university has changed since last time we noticed and talked about such changes (in works such as Jencks and Riesman's The Academic Revolution) and undergone what amounts to an ' Institutional Corruption ', which undermines the effectiveness of the institution in discharging its public duty and undermines the public trust in the institution in discharging its public duties; and that such changes are primarily due to 'financialisation' of the institution, which can roughly be understood as enabling finance (financial institutions, financial rules, financial prism) to determine the shape, the priorities and the objectives of the institution. Financialisation as a concept is attracting an increasing amount of scholarly interest. While the concept has popular acceptance, and there is a growing unease about the roles financial institutions play in our societies and how they shape the priorities, financialisation as a concept has w...

One of the most troubling questions for me is what is happening to knowledge. Knowledge has been commoditised, I am told. It no longer matters, as one can know by typing a string of words on Google. My interlocutors' point primarily was to say that education must change under these circumstances: It should be about something other than knowledge. That knowledge is easily accessible is a somewhat common-sense observation, but I wonder this is one of those things that we call conventional wisdom. While it may be waiting on the other side of Google, do I always know what to type? And, even before that, do I know what I should be searching for? Would this count as knowledge? However, I must concede that the contemporary discussions about the effect of Google on Knowledge somewhat acknowledge the first issue: Knowing how to search. In fact, this is their precise point, that education will be less about memorising facts and more about the mechanics of fact finding. That has...

It is indeed time that we ask this question and seek an answer. After all, we live in the age of, what some observers claim, an education bubble. Who would have thought, only a couple of decades back, that more education could be seen as a bad thing? However, as the college debts soar in America, and graduate unemployment keeps rising, it seems that some people will indeed go bankrupt for their education, and there is a real fear that it may pull an economy or two down. It is therefore pertinent to ask what the college does to a person, and see if it has, as an institution, any ongoing relevance in the modern society. But, before that, let us acknowledge that it is indeed one of those big hairy questions that no one wants to answer. College is a good thing, we have come to accept. We live in a knowledge economy, we have come to accept. More education means greater productivity, and only a moron can question this assumption. Education has become key to employability, and this shoul...

We have lately discovered that the students want to be consumers. In Britain, where the Government is trying to put the students at the heart of the system by raising, in some cases three-fold, the fees they pay for higher education, the pitch is rather acute. Everyone concerned, including the universities, seem to believe that by this strange play of fate, where the students have to assume the costs of their own education, they will suddenly become consumers; ironically, this means they will turn rather passive - as the consumers do - and disengaged, and expecting the education services to be delivered to them. The manifestation of this belief is plastered everywhere, from what the government counts as the most important aspects of education (contact time, graduate employment rate etc), to what the bureaucrats mandate as the measures of quality of education (adequate and accurate information, communicating what is to be delivered and ensuring the delivery of what is expected), and to...

Paul Krugman makes a point in his NY Times op-ed piece - The Patients are not Consumers . Criticizing the Republican stance on Health care, where they resist state provision and starting to claw back in Medicare in the name of 'consumer choice', Krugman asserts: Medical care, after all, is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made. Yet making such decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge. Furthermore, those decisions often must be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping. It is possible to extend the argument to education and examine whether the new mantra of 'students as consumers' hold true. Education, after all, is a complex decision - and shapes the students lives. A lot of specialized knowledge, and in the case of education, an active participation, is needed from t...