Sunday Posts

If India is to build up its Higher Education sector, it needs imagination rather than imitation. Its new universities are unlikely to be built in Ivy League model. The success of these new institutions will not depend upon the partnerships they build with the great and the good abroad, but its own vision, strategy, and most importantly, will to do it well. These universities will need less of the shiny buildings and acres of land, and more of an idea what an Indian university should be like. We should be talking less about the valuation and more about values. In one way, these universities must go back in time and embrace the basics: In another way, they must leapfrog into the future. Even the best university projects in India, those sponsored by large business groups, partnered with the best universities in the world, suffer from the glamour trap. The idea is to attract the students somehow through the lure of the facilities or the plaques on the wall: These come at a cost, that...

I have written about Exit and Voice before ( See here ) but not in the specific context of Higher Ed. I believe this merits special mention as Higher Education becomes more business-like. As Businesses try to become more like Knowledge Communities (and build campuses, among other things), the talk in Higher Ed is to turn students into 'customers' and of reigning in costs and instilling 'accountability': This may indeed have an impact on how the students engage with the institutions, and Hirschman's mechanics of Exit and Voice may become as relevant in the classroom. Hirschman's key point is that the organisations can exist and function at a sub-optimal level, something that is an impossibility in classical economics with its obsession with equilibrium and efficiency.  So, if a firm misbehaves or does not deliver, its customers will leave them and the firm will disappear, is the assumption which led mainstream economics to devote so little attention to sub-...

If there is a purpose in what I am doing in Education, it is to develop and implement a model of education fit for the modern economy. This is not just rhetoric, but an article of faith: Despite most of my day-to-day work sorely concerning itself with the industrial era Higher Ed formula, packing students in a classroom studying a pre-defined curriculum, I believe firmly that the days of this kind of education is over. The model is living on borrowed time, sustained by a collective lack of imagination, vested interests and government largesse.   In fact, this model of education may already be past their sell-by dates because its inherent rationale, that one could prepare students for middle class careers through education, is now suspect. The sole reason this lives on is because it is so difficult and uncomfortable to change anything in education: So it must come crumbling down rather than being systematically reformed. The object of my work is to explore what could replac...

India used to be known as a sickly economy, known for its 'Hindu Rate of Growth'. A term originally coined by Economist Raj Krishna, to explain India's lowly rate of growth of 3.5% annually between 1950s and 1980s, the 'Hindu Rate of Growth' was to mean what the Economists call the Secular Rate of Growth, which means just the trend level of growth - the rate at which nothing really changes. India somewhat escaped the Hindu rate of Growth starting 1990s, when freeing up of the entrepreneurial energies of Indians allowed the economy to progress, and some changes did indeed happen, particularly in the Middle Class life and in the Cities. However, lately, this faltered and India returned to an anorexic growth rate.  So, the primary job of the newly elected Hindu Nationalist government in New Delhi is to prevent India going back to its 'Hindu rate of Growth'. But we can introduce another term in the same vain, the 'Hindu Rate of Education', whic...

The Global Innovation Index, produced by INSEAD and others, is built around seven factors - Institutions, Human capital and research, Infrastructure, Market sophistication, Business sophistication, Knowledge and technology outputs and Creative outputs - and measures an economy's ability to innovate. India has continually slipped in the rankings, from 62nd in 2011 to 64th in 2012, to 66th in 2013 and now at 76th in 2014. Indeed, it is useful to contrast India with China, acknowledging the coveted hyphenation that many Indians desire: China has remained on the 29th position during this time, losing and recovering the lost ground during the in-between years (though China includes the territory of Hong Kong, which is treated separately and is a top 10 territory in these rankings). Not that rankings matter much, but they are useful reminders of where one is going. India's decline tells a story in the context of the rest of the world. In the past rankings, India was ranked 2nd...

I allowed my life to drift quite a bit in the last six months and trying now to re-instill a purpose and take back control. It is an appropriate moment, then, to think what happened, which should tell me what not to repeat as I move forward. In short, I am guilty of taking the easy path which leads to nowhere. This is such a common mistake, and I am amazed that I did it when I look at the time since New Year 2014. The story goes like this (almost improbably): I give up my globe-trotting job in 2010 to get into education, and then spend about two years working and building a network in the sector. I was working in a For-profit institution during the time, toiling to fix its operations and build the brand so that it could become the platform for the online education I wanted to get into. This effort came to nought, as the owner of the college decided not to pursue the ambitious goals and sold the business, leaving us to try the start-up route. This is where I made the first mis...

Institute of International Education's (IIE) Rajika Bhandari writes about the roles Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) can play in education of developing nations ( see here ) and highlights five key questions regarding infrastructure availability, relevance in the context of non-formal education, impact on gender gap, impact on the role of the teacher and local relevance. I feel these questions are extremely relevant, but ones that the MOOC enthusiasts often lose sight of. In fact, the biggest danger for the MOOCs is not that it may not work, but rather one puts expectations on it that can't be satisfied, and this becomes another bubble that bursts in time. The questions, as raised here, can help focus the discussion and understand what the MOOCs can and can not do in the developing countries. 1. The Infrastructure Gap Most MOOC advocates have a limited view of the developing country higher education infrastructure. The reason for such limited perspective is this: ...