Sunday Posts

It's part of the romance of the college: The learner leaves home to join a community of fellow learners, to begin a new stage of life. The imaginary is integral to middle-class life, shaping lifecycles of parents as much as it does for the learner. It is the staple of the popular culture, all those college romance stories, movies and TV series. These expectations also shape how colleges operate, as they battle to restrict tenure but upgrade student accommodation at the same time. In fact, the most profitable part of the whole real estate market is student accommodation, offering better yields than any other segment. But it's also the part which makes the least sense when Higher Education is so expensive. Surely, the romantic notions of college life as a calm commitment to learning are just romantic notions. Envisioning this as a prolonged coming of age party is closer to the truth, at least in most cases. Costs of living outside the home are at least as significant as the...

I have argued elsewhere that the expansion of formal higher education is precisely the wrong thing to do at a time of great technological change, as college lacks the inclusiveness and openness of informal learning, and expansion of college discourages spread and persistence of informal learning opportunities ( see the post here ). This prevents the diffusion of technology, as lack of inclusiveness and openness in learning mean a lot of people are left out, unable not just to take advantage of technological change to improve their economic prospects but also missing out on applying the technological possibilities in solving their own day-to-day problems.  Now, I want to take this argument further: The college does not just fail those which it excludes, but also its own graduates. This is because the college, in its current form, does a really bad job at developing two most critical abilities that one needs to succeed in the globalised and automated workplaces (and societies...

I wrote earlier about the tension between The College and The Coffee-House - between formal and informal systems of education and knowledge sharing - and I intend to focus my attention on this in my work in 2018. My thesis is simple: Most learning is experiential, contextual and situational; however, learning as a socially mandated function must have form, be broadly applicable and based around general principles. This tension is indeed central to the idea of knowledge, between the high ground of theory and field of practice, and it is a dialectical relationship. The societies value both, but often more one than the other, depending on economic and political situations of the time. Generally, stable societies privilege 'scribal' classes and formal learning, but breaking of times and paradigm shifts are generally brought about by ideas emerging out of practice; therefore, when times change, Coffee-houses play a crucial role. In our own time, right now, we have privileg...

There is not much we agree upon these days, except that more and more people should go to college. This has become the self-evident truth of the late Twentieth century, and achieved the status of a divine revealation in the twentyfirst. Contrarian views, voiced from time to time by a few elitist conservatives, who believe college, along with the privileges to govern in perpetuity, should be preserved for a small group of people, look dated and out of place even among the political right. Countries speak of knowledge economy and equate it to the size of college-educated population. Technologists speak of automation and artificial intelligence and see college education essential for producing, consuming and living in the world they wish to make. Economists speak of productivity and equate it to the level of education. Everyone everywhere seems to think more college would mean more progress and well-being. This, without any real evidence! College, historically, has been a system of ...

I wrote previously about the College Trap ( see here ) - how college can't be denied to anyone in a democratic society and yet, the prevalence of college may privilege one kind of learning over others and undermine democracy itself - and, as someone pointed out to me, this is quite antithetical to my own ambitions of setting up a college eventually. At this point, my broad point about the inaneness of college education needed more empirical justification.  For a concrete example, I thought of picking Research Methods, that one thing that legitimises an academic degree, that magic wand that baptises a graduate. My choice is deliberate: I hated it and have long thought about why I hate it. And, the affectionate place that it holds in the academic imagination - in fact, it is itself the academic imagination - makes it a suitable candidate for interrogation.  I shall provide some more justification in case you are wondering what the fuss is about. Let's start with the qu...

Over the last several decades, the politics of college has reached a consensus: Everyone seemed to agree that more people attending college is a good thing. The usual conservative position, that college should educate a gifted minority who would assume the 'commanding heights' of the society, has been undermined by the proven link between 'gift' and wealth, as well as the claims that we live in a knowledge society. The weary refrain indulged in Britain's top universities - that the elevation of Polytechnics as Universities in the 1990s was not the abolition of polytechnics, but rather that of the universities - is considered an elitist view. People like Charles Murray, who complains too many people are going to college, are usually viewed as out-of-date and out-of-touch. What's fashionable is the commitment to expand public access to Higher Education, such as the one Obama declared, and the promises of eliminating college tuition fees, such as the one that mad...

As Post-Secondary Education continues to evolve with time, we are having a good hard look at what the College might look like. So far, we have pursued binary ideas - elaborate campuses that exude solidity or tradition versus virtual, online spaces - but the next College form may be something inbetween: A third place. I use the term in the same way as Ray Oldenberg defines Third Places, a place for community, the coffee shops etc. That community and connection, not tradition and not content, is really at the heart of education is the fundamental reason why this should be such. So, college for me would be one of those converted warehouses with long rows of tables, chairs, sofas, coffee bars and technology gadgets, with designated meeting places and quiet rooms, and perhaps a gym, but never a classroom. There will be no teachers either, just team leaders, and coaches, and those who lead discussion groups. Indeed, the picture is more like Raphael's School of Athens (yes, the one tha...

As we speak to employers about what skills they value, they often talk about Critical Thinking. When we talk to colleges and universities, at least in the UK, Critical Thinking comes right at the top of the list of the things they want their students to be able to do. Someone I know, who has been working on the Educator-Employer interface for more than a decade now, tells me that even if they are using similar language, they mean different things by Critical Thinking. According to him, this creates the disconnect, and this is why while 70% educators may think the students are ready for the workplace, less than half the employers think so. With this in mind, I was engaging with educators and employers to figure out what the different definitions of Critical Thinking may be. It seems that both employers and educators mean the same thing - the ability to test and validate the assumptions that underlie a decision - when they talk about critical thinking. They are both talking about n...

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...

Universities are dying, we hear. This is a strange announcement, because more people than ever are going to the universities. The achievement gap between those who go to the university and those who do not are growing. And, going to university has become an universal aspiration, swelling in Sub-Saharan Africa and remote islands in the Pacific alike. This is an institutional form at the peak of its power, prestige and popularity.  The point of pessimism is indeed that the promise this popularity is based on is floundering. The allure of middle class life, that of stable life, job and income, drives the millions to the University. Yet, the middle class escalator is jammed, as Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman says, and not many of the teeming millions going to the university can really realise that dream. The alternate promise, that there will be entrepreneurs, is perhaps all too optimistic - and, in any case, unrelated to the proposition of the university. So, while the universiti...

My objective is to summarise the idea of '21st Century College' and understand the same in the context of education theory, developments in technology and media as well as economic history. This is one project I have taken on in 2015, and chose to turn this blog into a record of my explorations and conversations.  The first question that I deal with is not whether we should be changing with technology - I shall contend that answer is quite obvious and time-tested too - but what really needs to change. More specifically, while we may accept that the '21st Century College' may employ different methods and technologies to educate, should it have different objectives from that of 'traditional education'? Dewey, as usual, is useful here. Writing in 1938, about what he saw as a contest between 'traditional' and 'progressive' education, this was his stance:" The general philosophy of new education may be sound, and yet the difference in a...

I teach leadership. I am not sure leadership can be taught. Semantics aside - I know all that facilitating stuff as opposed to teaching - the question I am really interested in if one can really 'make' leaders through a series of classroom conversations. Some of my colleagues will argue that it should be a series of projects or activities rather than classroom conversations. I am no big fan of the kind of unambitious projects that people usually set up in context of business courses: Review your company's mission statement! I would tend to think those are worse devices than classroom conversations. And, in any case, whatever the method, how does one teach leadership? I am not taking the position that leadership can't be learnt, though! There are born leaders, but the leaders are only born and not made is a fallacious theory: We all know one or two people who were born to be leaders, but were never made. Whether or not leaders are born that way, they have t...

UK's job outlook improved last quarter, with a fall in jobless numbers not seen 'since early 2009', which really means that we are getting close to the figures before this recession began, though not yet there. This is, however, good news: At the least, such news will make businesses invest and hire, making this sliver of good news self-sustaining, hopefully. This will mean a lot to those graduating this year, they may indeed escape the fate of those who landed in the job market precisely at the wrong time, and this makes a world of difference. Yet, the challenge that the job market is fundamentally shifting does not go away (Read Education for Employment: Facing Up The Future ) - we won't ever be back to business-as-usual. So, even if under the weight of recession, increased public scrutiny and public scepticism, educators have belatedly woken up to the fact that a great majority of their students today come to Higher Education seeking a path to a successful car...

It has always been difficult to build an alternative to the universities in the modern times. Even if any innovation in learning happened outside the universities, the system expanded to absorb the new areas: Medical Schools, Business Schools, IT Schools, all started outside universities and prospered for a while as private initiatives, but then the moment university system expanded to absorb the new areas, the challengers withered.  However, at this time, we are approaching a point where these venerable institutions look increasingly open to challenges from outside, and look vulnerable. There are several reasons for this: The universities have less resources to keep expanding, for a start. And, new global possibilities are emerging which publicly funded universities can't do very well. Technologies, not just of learning delivery, but of community building, of measurement and management, are emerging, making 'open source learning' possible. And, besides, universities ...

During my current tour of India, I got involved, somewhat against my will, in a long discussion - argument is a better word perhaps - about the necessity of public funding of Higher Education. This is one debate I usually seek to avoid, because, on this issue, there is little opportunity to have a nuanced position, and I do have a nuanced position. In this particular case, my correspondents were committed defenders of Public Higher Education with a 'you are either with us or against us' stance, and indeed, my reservations about the bureaucratisation of Higher Education (combined with my background in For-Profit education) immediately made me a target of vociferous attacks and compelled me to defend my views. This post is a short summary of the arguments that I made. My first problem with the high pitch defense of public funding of Higher Education is that this is hardly an honest stance. Most of the advocates of public funding represent themselves to be in opposition of m...

Eric Schmidt seems to think that the college is a 'slow dinosaur', on its way to extinction. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, given that more students are going into Higher Education than ever before and the promise of skills, when jobs are disappearing fast, is the only hope that the working class has. In fact, one can argue that the modern society stands at the back of the college - the hope of social mobility that it provides - and without it, there will be no social order. One way to think about this is that for too many people, this is turning out to be a false promise. The college does not lead to redemption, as it is promised to be; it rather leads to the same old place in the social pecking order, now made a bit more difficult and a bit more expensive to achieve. For all the talk of becoming a sentient being and developing a critical consciousness, going to college means turning out huge debt and becoming prudently conformist thereafter. Of course, in sunny ...

I am often told not to bother about content. That is odd, considering that my business is Education. Only a few years ago, the advice would have been the other extreme - Content was the key! And, considering that we are really only a few years into the era of digital content, compared to 500 years of print, content could have been, should have been, exciting business. But it seems common sense that being in the business of content does not make sense any more. Indeed, it is obvious how much open content is out there. And, it is not just the various universities giving away their content, and often videos, for free, and not even YouTube, TED, Vimeo and the like, but the whole array of contributions on SlideShare, blogs, Scribd and the like. In educational content, it seems like Internet's promise to be the great commons of knowledge has been somewhat realised. Against this fascinating array, it is hard to see why a small education company like ours should bother about making co...