Sunday Posts

Culture, while it is increasingly an issue to be reckoned with in business circles, does not get the same prominence in the discussion about International Education. The reason why business pays heed to culture is perhaps because increasingly the Chinese, Indian and other consumers are 'emerging', and it is no longer the same monolithic world where all purchasing powers were concentrated in the hands of a certain type, Western, consumers. For the same reason, surely, western educators may pay heed to the issue of culture, as the Chinese, Korean and Indian students flock to Western universities.  However, such cultural sensitivities are less likely to take hold in the academia, simply because the demand for an Western education is simply taken as an acceptance of its superiority. Besides, educators usually resist the idea of education being a consumer commodity and see the need to adjust to the needs of different students as a compromise of the standards. And, finally, pra...

Jim O'Neill has come up with a new acronym - MINT - and it has already hit the radio waves. Whether this ends up making waves as BRICS did, we will see: Famous as he is with these acronyms, his N-11, a list of 11 countries that were to become the next movers-and-shakers of the world economy, failed to gain traction. Perhaps, eleven countries were far too many to be optimistic about (and for bond traders, to focus on) and therefore, this new catchy shortlist making the memorable acronym, which has a good chance of success. It is interesting to see that people are getting excited about this new set of countries just as the previous set, BRICs, seem to be in some sort of trouble. Indeed, articles such as 'Broken BRICS'   and 'The Great Deceleration ' (with a memorable cartoon of BRICs countries drowning in a quicksand) have appeared during the course of last year, pointing out the many problems these economies faced once their stellar growth rates slowed down an...

The MBA is passé and law school enrolments are plateauing out: The popular professional schools of the future may come in the shape of E-Schools.  E-School as in Enterprise School, on which I wrote earlier (see the posts, The E-School Approach , Global E-School, anyone? and Global E-School: What That Means ). The E-School is essentially built around creativity, enterprise and technology, training a new generation of professionals and entrepreneurs ready for opportunities of the future. This is about avoiding the pitfalls of the B-Schools, which has been built around industrial era big businesses and promoted a mechanistic view of life and work; the E-School, by definition, is less about models and more about invention, creating new possibilities rather than just seeking to exploit arbitrage.  The E-School model, which I started working on in my earlier abortive attempt in the business school in London, is one that fuses together close cooperation with employers ...

The arrest of Indian Diplomat Devyani Khobragade in New York and subsequent diplomatic spat between India and United States is fast becoming tabloid stuff, with supposed hoax videos of Ms Khobragade's strip search doing rounds on the Internet and Indian media changing their story on a daily basis. This affair, however, tells us a few things about new India which is worth taking note of. First, a quick update on what happened. What we know so far is this: Ms Khobragade's housemaid, Ms Sangetha Richards, someone who was recruited from India and was brought to United States, complained of inhuman treatment against her, and also stated that she was never paid the promised salary, the one Ms Khobragade apparently declared in the visa application form that she signed. After Ms Richards formally complained, Ms Khobragade was formally charged by the prosecutors. This much we know, because no one seems to be disputing this. Now, the claims: India claimed that Ms Khobragade was...

Roger Brown's impressive essay in Times Higher Education regarding the quest for prestige in Higher Education is a must read. The fact that the four new universities admitted into UK's elite Russell Group paid £500,000 apiece for the privilege goes on to show how dysfunctional all of this has become, particularly because this only appears so normal. Martin Trow, quoted by Dr Brown, may have said that Higher Education is not an outcome, but a process, but this does not seem to be the message of Higher Education anywhere in the world. Higher Education, instead of being seen as a progression to advanced level of education after school, is usually projected as a 'Higher' thing, a marker for power and prestige. A prestige-obsessed sector wastes precious resources in pursuit of prestige, as observed not just in UK, but in the US, where 'Harvard Envy' (as Andrew Rosen puts it) pushes up the costs and reduces faculty interaction in the unending quest of academic ...

A new paradigm for Global Education is needed. The current model of Global Education, where elite students from developing countries go to developed countries, predominantly UK, US and Australia, to seek out either a new life abroad or prestige and premium at home. This model has worked for more than hundred years. However, the changes in the economy, jobs and careers have challenged this model now. For a start, more people are seeking global education now than ever before. The model that the elite followed to get to the best universities in the world does not apply to the masses: They are often condemned to lesser institutions studying things not relevant to their job markets in the false hope of attaining the life and dreams of the bright eyed boys and girls adorning the prospectuses of various institutions. The life abroad that this global education implicitly promises often fails to materialise, as countries are tightening their immigration regulations trying to keep ...

If one is to set up a new university today, what shape would it take? This isn't a theoretical question. Simultaneously with the predictions of university's demise in the West, which is perhaps overblown, the rate of creation of new universities all over the world has only accelerated. This is particularly true for the newly industrialising countries like India and China, where the governments are keen to create additional Higher Education capacity to accommodate the aspirations of the rapidly expanding middle classes. From the vantage point of the makers of the new universities - these are, it must be made, mostly private endeavours - the questions about its shape and structure are of secondary importance. They are indeed responding to a market of nearly bottomless demand. For example, India's graduate population, already at more than 25 million, is expected to reach the 40 million mark in less than 10 years from now. For the 600 odd universities in India, that w...