Sunday Posts

While everyone agrees that Higher Education needs new thinking, there is one sacred cow: Degrees! All the private capital flooding into the field with the battle cry to change the world meekly surrender themselves to the alter of the Degrees. To follow the rhetoric, the search is for a better way, not a better credential. The degrees, an early modern invention, look safe and sound, despite the world being claimed to be turned upside down. Or, is it? The recent Udacity Nanodegree Plus, which is an employer-backed credential that comes with a job guarantee (which, in effect, is a guarantee of full refund of fees if the learner does not get a job after graduating), opens up an interesting possibility. After a somewhat faltering start, Udacity, among the various MOOC providers, is now finding its mojo through nanodegrees, which, despite the allusion, are not degrees. In a plain vanilla world, this would be called a Certificate. But this, and other similar credentials like Micro-d...

Employment may not be the only goal of Higher Education, as some educators will justifiably claim, but it is certainly one of the goals.  A good Higher Education have a great impact in building character, making one free, able to appreciate beauty, cooperate with other people and bring change. Wesleyan's Michael Roth will say that the goal of education is to liberate, animate, cooperate and agitate, and Howard Gardner sum it up as the quest for Truth, Beauty and Goodness. But, beyond this ideal of education, the political nature of the education enterprise that also must be acknowledged. After a century and half of expansion of public Higher Education, Higher Ed has a clearly embedded political purpose, that of lending legitimacy to the governments as they thrive on the idea of a Middle Class society, where everyone has access to opportunity in life through Higher Education. Consequently, the enrollments in Higher Education have expanded rapidly, and in a way, what used to be...

What shape would disruption happen in Higher Ed? All the new institutions claim they are disruptive, and indeed, even the old and prestigious institutions are keen on disrupting themselves with the MOOCs. What shape the disruption will take is a guessing game, and here is my two-bits on what this could look like. My conjecture about 'What' is based on the 'Why' question. Why is Higher Education in the risk of getting disrupted? A large part of the answer is clearly linked to the decline of the nation state, the key sponsor of the Higher Education that we see now. And, this is not just about the money that the State gives to Higher Education. It is more about the nation state as a social system and Higher Education's function within the same.  The Nation State should be understood as a Power System, run by an elite with certain ethnic and cultural values. This system, with its set of rules, privileges and relationship, are linked closely to the definition of this eli...