Sunday Posts

I wish to return to India and I am trying to chronicle my preparations for return here. This is not an immediate plan, indeed this journey is as consequential as the one of leaving India and hence need preparation, but this is one thing I would like to do. I have always stated this to be my intention, but let the life take its course, not forcing the agenda in any way. But, now, a break point of sorts, I am inclined to make a deliberate attempt, even over a period of a few years (as it must be), and intend to keep a record of this journey on this blog, so that it helps me to get into a conversation with others planning a similar journey. I have indeed written about both about Reverse Migration in general (see here, Reverse Migration: India's Chance , and later, Reverse Migration: Is India Ready Yet? ) and my particular desire to return (for example, Reverse Migration: A Personal Note , The Question of Return , The Never-ending Question of Return and in Being Non-Resident ) o...

For-Profit Education stands, more often than not, for poor education. At a time when big claims are being made for the potential of For-Profit Education to change entire economies and alleviate poverty ( See Parag Khanna and Karan Khemka in HBR ), one must seek to understand why For-Profit education under-delivers.  Because, it is impossible to turn a decent profit in education, claim some. Alan Ryan claims that minus the public subsidies going into For-Profit education, "outside technical training in IT, law, finance and medicine, there’s not a lot of money to be made out of higher education" (Alan Ryan in Times Higher Education, see here ) This observation may empirically bear out as most For-Profit activities happen in areas with immediate employability, and where cost of delivery is low (For-Profits in medicine have often come up short, and For-Profit Engineering Education has usually been a disaster). There is more. The history of For-Profits has so far been th...

Raphael's painting of Plato teaching is a popular PowerPoint item for Higher Education conferences these days. This is to be seen in the context of today's classroom, somewhat like the MIT's in the other picture here. The point is not the architectural contrast and the drab predictability of today's windowless classrooms, but rather the similarities between the two - indeed, the speakers use these pictures to emphasise that education has changed very little - and the fact that it is still the students in conversation with each other and with the teacher that make education. That, announces the PowerPoint crusaders armed with incontrovertible visual evidence, needs to change. However, one may indeed be able to point out several differences in the two spaces, which directly points to the changes happening in education. To start with, the humble table must not be overlooked, as well as the pen and paper, all pointing to a writing culture to replace the Oral traditi...

The US Government's decision to stop Coursera (and presumably other MOOCs) from delivering the courses in Syria, Iran, Cuba and Sudan is astonishing, if not outright misdirected. Indeed, I come to know of this as I am doing a course 'Constitutional Struggles in The Islamic World' from University of Copenhagen, and the notification tells me that the students taking the course from the above-mentioned countries will be stopped from taking the course. The act of sanction, therefore, appears completely counter-productive in the context. The mail from Prof. Dr. Ebrahim Afsah that bore the notification states: "Let me reiterate that I am appalled at this decision. Please note that no-one at Coursera likely had a choice in this matter! At any rate, rest assured that these are not the values of the University of Copenhagen, of its Faculty of Law, and most assuredly not mine!" The point made in the notification, appended to Professor Afsah's mail, is th...

Vocational Training is supposed to be a big thing. This is heralded as the answer to the problems of productivity, particularly in countries in Asia and Africa with rapidly growing population. The idea is simple: Get the poor people in a classroom for a few months and make them learn something useful and then get them to work in a factory or profession. Once it is done on large scale - India says it wants to train 500 million people in next 10 years or so - the whole economy can change. The trouble is that it does not work. I have articulated my complaints about the Indian vocational training system earlier, and hence I shall not repeat it here. I usually receive a stock answer when I talk about the short-comings of vocational training as it is done in India, that it is all down to poor execution. So, when outdated skills are taught, students do not engage or the trained students do not find a job, it bears down to the flaws of execution. I shall contend that these failures have ...

Yesterday I was speaking at a 'Beyond China' event, arranged by Asia Pacific Technology Network in London. The idea was to look at the reconfiguration of the global economy at the wake of the end of 'cheap' China. There were different presentations, one from CBBC on the changing Chinese economy, followed by presentations on South-East Asia, India, Africa and US. Pratik Dattani, a friend and the current UK Director of FICCI, was speaking about India, though on a personal capacity. I was speaking about Africa, though my exposure to the continent is only through the African academics I speak to and African students that I teach. My case was that the end of Cheap China is only an opportunity for Africa, and that Africa is mainly looking to do things with China rather than moving beyond it. However, as China becomes a more difficult place to invest in - for operational reasons rather than costs - Africa will emerge as an exciting, perhaps the most exciting, place for g...

In 2013, more than 1.4 million students sat the Entrance Examination for Indian Institute of Technology (IITs), competing for the 20,000 odd places up for grabs in various institutions (some in less prestigious NITs): The pressure can be intense, and the suicide rates in Kota, the town famed for its examination coaching industry, worth $50 million a year, reported to have been doubling year on year since 2012. Lady Shriram College in Delhi made news a few years ago by demanding a perfect score, yes 100%, in school leaving examination, as the cut-off for applications: It has now become commonplace in the best colleges in India. During the Gaokao, the annual college entrance examination in China, it is not unusual to divert the traffic away from near the examination centres lest the noise distract any candidate from the chance of the lifetime to enter an elite university. Because India and China (along with most other developing countries) have a 'Tiny-at-the-Top' education sys...

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...

When I picked up this book from the Library shelf, it was Dan Pink's name, whose books on Future Work and Motivation I have read before, that made me do it. I was expecting to read a book on sales: Not that I wanted to, but I must admit that I was intrigued by the literary interest in sales (Philip Delves Broughton's Life's A Pitch appeared around the time this book was published), just as the profession seemed to be dying (see some data here ).  What the book turned out to be is more than I bargained for: This turned out to be a book about persuasion, starting out with a proposition that as sales is dying, we are now all in sales. 'Non-sales Sales', Mr Pink uses the term, is all about the job of persuasion that sits at the heart of almost all the jobs that we are doing now. He cites three main trends - entrepreneurship (that we are all business owners now, either running small businesses, or being self employed), elasticity (that almost all jobs today nee...

In my previous work on Education for Employment (links below), I pleaded the case to shift focus on to the goals and aspirations of the students, most of whom come to education with at least an implicit objective of getting into employment. My argument was primarily that Universities are designed, at least in a large way, to serve themselves, and all too often, the academia's focus is out of sync with that of the students. As a solution, I was arguing about a new paradigm for engagement with employers, keeping the student as the core focus rather than academic ambitions or the immediate needs of a particular employer.  The arguments from among academic colleagues rightly challenged the plausibility of such a shift, pointing that most businesses are driven by here-and-now requirements, while the academia may essentially need to take long run view for the sake of its students. There is indeed some merit in this argument, as the failed attempts to create a successful vocational ...