Sunday Posts

My current work is focused on alternate credentials based on project work. The key idea here is to create credentials based on experience and create a bridge between the academic world and vocational preparation. Therefore, the current excitement about microcredentials at the university corridors is at once a source of hope and also of disappointment (see my rant about microcredentials ).  But, at the same time, I also deal with this persistent doubt about what we are doing: Are we promoting an unsustainable skills fetish which trivialises education and sacrifice individuality and freedom to think at the altar of neoliberal 'paying the bills'? Having spent most of my working life in For-profit education, I know which side of my bread is buttered. At the same time, my life as a historian of higher education, which I pursue with no less zeal or care, I feel burdened with the need to question my practice.  For a start, I know that our idea of university is a historical, rather th...

Apprenticeships seem like one idea whose time never comes. Or, its time may have come and gone, long time ago. Its past makes it appear romantic, just like medieval castles and knights. Its reality, however, might have been very different: Apprenticeships might have been too long and too limiting. There was a reason why it was one of the practises that died off with time. But its passing is mourned, and its memory evokes a time when work meant a long commitment and lifelong engagement. It signifies a different reality from today's uprooted workers and dehumanised workplaces, something we feel nostalgic about. So it is evoked from time to time, as the policy-makers run out of ideas. As job crisis hits countries - an effect of the twin forces of globalisation and automation - college, the enabler of middle class dream, seems to fall short. College's own medieval mystic, that of a detached pursuit of humanistic knowledge, looks out of place - too long, too academic, too ...

The work and careers are changing. As most process-based jobs get automated, it seems the winners will be those with greater intellectual skills. In the meantime, the salary premium for college graduates have risen dramatically - mainly as a result of non-graduates falling precipitously. This is taken as evidence of centrality of college education: Everyone should be able to go to college, has become the political mantra. This is good for colleges themselves and hence, they have promoted the idea. And, as the educated usually takes upon themselves the role of society's critic-in-chief, the conclusion has not really be questioned. However, while the poor countries followed the cue and started expansion of college education - and, because the state does not have money, this means a poorer public education and enormous expansion of terribly bad private education - it is worth looking at the phenomena closely and exploring its wisdom. At one level, work has become more comple...

A few years ago, the then Indian Prime Minister of India proudly announced the biggest skill building initiative in the world, aiming to train more than 500 million people over 10 years.  The reason for such a high profile initiative was obvious. In India, where 69,000 people reach the age of 25 every single day, making sure that they are able to find work was more than important - it was essential for the survival of the republic. The attention that the initiative got, with investments lined up from public and private sources, with high profile committees and the usual lining up with consultants, was unprecedented. Everything and everybody was there, except just one thing. No one knew what this was all about. It may sound nonsensical and it is, but the Government set out this multi-million dollar initiative without knowing what skills need to be trained on. There was little involvement of the industry, and none of the trade unions or communities. The consultancies wrote ...

I have spent more than two decades exploring the Education/Employment divide.  Starting in 1995, when I signed up to set up networks of IT training centres across small-town India, I have been chasing this idea of seamlessly transitioning students from the world of learning to the world of work (a set of terms I picked up on the way). Along the way, I have spent time doing various kinds of training and education - IT Training (1995 - 2004), e-Learning (2004 - 2007), Language Training and Recruitment (2007 - 2010), Higher Education (2010 - 2012) and finally, Competency-based Higher Ed (2012 - 2015) - in various geographies in Asia and Europe. Of all these different experiences, being on the other side of the table - in global recruitment - perhaps had the most impact on how I think about the issue of Education-to-Employment transition. In fact, my engagements in Higher Education started precisely with this agenda - I was employed by a private Higher Education institution to build ...

Finally, the penny drops. The so-touted worlds most high profile skilling mission stumbles. After a highly critical audit report, several top executives of India's National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) resigned. The audit report highlighted a number of things, most crucially various areas of management failure, and that may have triggered the change. But it also crucially pointed out that more than 99% of all funding of this public-private partnership is coming from public funds, and there is indeed no accountability in how it is being spent.  In summary, the government has finally caught up with what almost everyone else knew. That the much vaunted skills mission was a non-starter, a colossal waste of public funds which made a few dishonest businesses rich. One could justifiably claim that this was one of the pet projects of the previous government, and they must shoulder the blame of its failure. And, they should, having set the body up without any plans and ideas. ...

Having worked on the Education-to-Employment gap, I have come to recognise this as a false concept altogether. The metaphor is powerful, and indeed popular, and consultancies and For-Profit schools try to make much of it. But, despite its appeal, it stands on a mistaken assumption - that of education and employment being two distinct stages of life. Indeed, it perhaps used to be, and that is the way we are programmed to think. At the same time, however, the nature of learning has changed - it has become far more of a continuous activity, lifelong as we would call it now - and the demands of employment have been transformed, from a well-defined set of skills and competencies, to a more fluid, more open approach of being adaptable and being able to learn continuously. Seen this way, the ideas are converging - one is expecting the education to go on beyond the school and the employment is reconfiguring itself as a learning opportunity - and the staged metaphor of education and then empl...

The Education-to-Employment transition is one hot debate worldwide, with a host of endeavours, both within traditional education and outside it, directing enormous amounts of money and innovation towards solving it. And, despite all these efforts, gap is just getting wider, and more and more people are completing education but not getting a job. And, besides, if one looks at starting salaries, the problem is even worse - underemployment is rife and level of jobs that these candidates get often do not need the education they have got. All of us possibly know people who did not get a job after finishing education, and indeed, people who are underemployed. But, chances are, we also know people who found their groove, as one would say, after a few years of drifting around. I almost see a pattern with people who come out of school with a degree in, say, Arts, that they would have a succession of poorly paid jobs and internships, and then, the most resilient of them, would actually sta...

India has spent millions of dollars and half a decade now on Skills Training, but got very little to show for it. Apart from endemic corruption - this is the new source of money for politicians and bureaucrats - the whole enterprise was marred by lack of imagination: Because this became a business of government hand-outs distributed by people who knows nothing about training or education (worse, they actually believe that there is nothing to know about training and education), the various 'skills programmes' helped destroy the successful private initiatives that grew into India in the previous decades.  However, the need for skills training in India is urgent. There are demographic reasons for this: India will have 10 million working age people joining the non-farm workforce every year, and if they are not skilled in the trades, they are likely to join the swelling army of the disaffected. There are economic reasons - many Indian enterprises are crying for skilled workers...

The policy-makers conceiving grand vocational education schemes in developing countries often talk about 'demand-led' education. While their policies are almost always focused on the supply-side - the provision of money, creation of infrastructure, curriculum and teachers - the dream is that the employers would join in and indicate what kind of people they need. Consider India's 'skilling' initiatives: Millions of dollars were spent for 'capacity creation' before figuring out whether and what vocational training is needed, and then, creation of 'sector skills councils', apparently to work with employers to project skills requirements, happened. It was an afterthought, indeed, but seen as the panacea: A 'demand-led' approach will solve the 'education-to-employment' gap. While this may sound common sense, this is as much a good thing as centralised five-year plans would be in today's world. It indeed makes sense for educators ...

I am in India and experiencing a new country from the one I knew last time I lived here, in 2002, as well as very different from the one I experienced when I engaged in 2007. The hope is somewhat muted, the denial is somewhat more obvious and the new India has somehow arrived. It is both sophisticated and coarse: I watched its new Prime Minister deliver the Independence Day speech with great sophistry and touch, but the message he gave out is somewhat nonchalant and pedestrian. His vision for India rested on India grabbing some businesses away from the increasingly expensive China, as the latter finally catch up on Health and Safety and Environmental protection. With rousing language and intense passion, he laid out a case for India which will beat the Chinese in providing cheap labour, and invited the companies of the world to 'make in India'. I have long given up taking political speeches seriously. However, this particular speech was significant not because of the occa...

Les Ebdon, the Head of the Government's Office of Fair Access (OFFA), called for Universities to look beyond the grades and admit pupils based on 'academic potential'. ( See story ) But would that solve the problem? The problem he is trying to address is a usual aspect of British life, students from 20% of the 'affluent' postcode areas are 8 times more likely to go to one of the top 24 universities in Britain than others from plainer areas; and, when everyone takes into account all universities, the lucky winners of 'postcode lottery' are still 2.5 times more likely to get an university offer. What follows is that in most of these 'good' postcodes, house prices and rent have grown significantly over the last decade (and remained sturdy through the recession) and only people with a certain wealth and income could afford to live there. Add to this the fact that almost all white collar jobs, not just the elite ones, where you went to university ma...

Skills education is often seen as a panacea for poverty, and developing countries, in Africa and Asia, pour enormous sums of money to build skills infrastructure. There is an intuitive sense behind all this: The policy makers in these countries look up to the industrialised nations and ask what they need to get even. The need for infrastructure, physical and human, become too obvious both from the study of economic history and a casual walk down Oxford Circus. It also makes a lot of political sense: The government can build elaborate employability programmes to impress its rural population eager to join urban life, and the middle class voters, disappointed with the lack of skilled masons, plumbers and electricians, do not mind. Indeed, all this makes sense if one believes that the world economy is moving in a straight line, but one clearly knows it isn't. Again, a reading of economic history or a casual walk down Oxford Circus makes the central idea quite clear: Things are ch...

I am in the process of advising a friend who is keen to invest in Education space in India, and this made me look closely into the dynamic of the businesses in the Vocational Training sector. The overall, macro, factors look promising indeed. A huge population base - India will have 10 million young people entering the workforce every year from 2015 - and a changing social dynamic, when organised employment expands rapidly, are hugely important drivers. The government has been handing out huge orders for training the rural youth, and the companies we are talking to have large mandates at hand, for 'employability' training. There is a capacity building fund set up through National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC), a sort of a special purpose bank extending funding for companies in the space: Again, the companies we looked into had large NSDC allocations, which they have left unused. Indian government has promoted 'skills' training opportunity with great gu...