Posts

India 2020: Changing The Education Mix

Comparisons are indeed helpful: China and India, two countries with huge landmass and population, both trying to get out of poverty and build a prosperous future, make great parallels to be looked at. Dr Rahul Choudaha in his blog (www.dreducation.com) presents the comparative pictures of Chinese and Indian Post-Secondary education, statistics that by itself highlights the contrasting growth patterns of the two countries. Here is the statistical highlights (I am quoting from DrEducation): 1. India (26.7 million students) and China (29.1 million students) are the biggest post-secondary education systems in the world, bigger than the United States (21 million students).  2. India, however, has more students studying for an Undergraduate degree (19.8 million) than China (12.6 million). 3. In stark contrast, more students study for vocational courses in China (14.9 million) than India (4 million). 4. A similar contrast can be seen at the Post-graduate level too. In...

Breakpoint: About Starting It Over

I am starting it over again. It is a complete reboot, and I feel like I have gone back eight years, or even fourteen; the good thing is, I am enjoying it. People love becoming younger without giving up the accumulated privileges. In my case, it is the other way round - it is indeed about starting from scratch while enjoying being older and hopefully wiser - a bit scary but thrilling nonetheless. Being young, I have come to conclude, isn't about the tautness of skin but feeling the weightlessness that comes with such a plunge to the unknown. I have felt this weightlessness before. In 1998, when I walked out of my job to start a small company, I realised the weight my big company business cards had: Suddenly, even with people I used to deal with in my corporate career, I was somewhat of a non-entity. The feeling was hurtful at the time, but sobering and useful in the long run; I did go back to big company work in a couple of years time, but was never as presumptive as I woul...

Reimagining Higher Education: Making Global-Local Education

All Higher Education is local, because of its structure. Most of it is still delivered in attendance, which limits it to a locally resident community. Its funding is deeply anchored in alumni handouts or government grants, again with a mostly local orientation than not. However, the world of work has changed, and is changing further, and local comfort and global confidence have both become critical parts of skill set for most professions. I shall argue that most Higher Education do not address this need at all. In fact, truth be told, Higher Education often does more harm than good as far as these global-local balance is concerned. College creates prejudices rather than dispelling them. Students are told to see their classroom as a microcosm, a reflection of the wider world, and often impose the stereotypes thereof. The liberal end of this view is a rich country backpackers' view of the world, benign but flawed; at its other extreme, it is bigoted and dangerous: The Higher Ed ...

Does India Need A Different Higher Education Model?

Kapil Sibal, India's Human Resource Minister, estimates India needs 1500 universities, almost three times as much as the current 564, to serve its young and aspiring population, and meet the economic growth expectations of the pundits. This oft-quoted but unofficial observation reflects the scale of ambition of the Indian policy-makers, and the direct connection they make between Higher Education and Economic Growth. Consequently, India is the only major economy in the world where the Government is still spending money on setting up new Higher Education institutions, and building up capacity in the old ones. This effort will get a further boost by the recent appearance of three of the IITs (Kharagpur in 226-250 bracket, Bombay in 251-275 bracket and Roorkee in 351-400 bracket) in the Times Global 400 league table, though none of them made it to the top 200, yet. Some effects of this additional investment, as well as the government's enthusiasm on getting private sector to ...

Reimagining Higher Education: Case for a new Paradigm

It is so fashionable to talk about this being a moment of discontinuity that it must be true: In Higher Education, such discussions have reached a fever pitch. All the forces that make today look different from yesterday are bearing on the change of Higher Education: The recession is transforming the careers and aspirations, the technology is changing daily lives and the institution meltdown is challenging the notions of authorship and knowledge. In the middle of all this, the demand for Higher Education is rising, in fact by so much that it is filling up the institutions and pushing them to expand. But at this moment of supposed glory, most institutions look definitely downbeat and out of sync. I shall argue, this is because the times are discontinuous. For all the talk about creation and dissemination of knowledge, writes Louis Menand, the purpose of the system is to reproduce the system. At the moments of discontinuity, such as this one, there is nothing much to reproduce. The ...

MOOCs: An Alternative Business Model for Higher Education

Let's face it: Higher Education needs a different business model. What we have now is what has been handed down to us from previous generations. This is a model based on reputation, based on the demand for the aspiring classes to be like the previously (and still) privileged classes. But this is snake oil in a sense as no such pathway exists anymore. And, besides, one can't mass supply exclusivity: The more education there is, the less special degrees are. So, we have had an onward and forward arms race, and sadly, this was mostly about things which matter less for plain old teaching and learning. There were things about research, which creates knowledge and informs teaching, only if it is humanly plausible to do a full year's worth of teaching and maintain high research productivity: More often than not it proved very difficult. And, then, the features race descended, or should we say ascended, into absurd - heated swimming pools, professional athletics facilities...

Notes on Employability Training

Employability, in Higher Education, seems to be that one thing that everyone wants but no one knows what it is. Therefore, how to train for employability remains both open to interpretation and a subject of intense debate. I have had the privilege to see two sides of the debate in close proximity: Being in the For-Profit Education sector for many years, where employability is the key selling point, I have noted the disdain for such a trivial thing from the other side of the education divide. Things indeed have changed over time: However, sitting through a focus group on an employability training product very recently, I witnessed how uncomfortable university lecturers still are in acknowledging that it is something that their students may legitimately want as an outcome of their education. To be fair, employability was never a Higher Ed thing: Degrees, at a different time, almost always got a job for those willing. The professors, mostly a product of that era, is slightly perplexe...