Sunday Posts

 Photo by Vance Osterhout on Unsplash The standard approach to enhancing employability outcomes in Higher Education takes the form of additional soft skills and technical skills training, internships, career counselling and renewed efforts to ensure campus placement. All of these have their place but the changes in the employer expectations, structures of the professions and breakdown of the traditional career paths demand changes in the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach. As such, there are five key factors why the standard approach isn't enough and must change: 1. Different student motivations: Students in higher education today are different from the students in large, traditional universities. They are often older, from ethnic minority ba...

                                                                 Photo by Lachlan Donald   The idea underlying all my work is this: At the time of great technological and social change, learning by practice gets better results than academic study. Having invested myself in finding better ways to organise learning by practice and in designing better measurements to assess its impact, I am aware of the objections this position might give rise to. At a time of great change - and the resulting uncertainty - it is better to focus on what does not change, human universals, as practice focus may lead to superficiality. The real change, it is true, happens at the fringes. If one really wants to get a sense of what's happening in AI, they are better off at a Research University today than interning ...

When The Economist starts saying that debt levels are unsustainable and a market crash is imminent, one should take notice. This was a lesson I learnt in 2007, before many others woke up to it.  If anything, this time it would be different. In my mind, 2008 was just the beginning of the breakdown. This time, we have multiple bubbles to burst: All those extra money from the bank bailouts, all those extra money from Covid, and all those valuation excesses from AI - the world economy is just several times bigger than what it should be. I am not a doom-monger, and right now, I am terribly unprepared for a market meltdown. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong for me in the recent days and I am not ready for another crisis. But purely intellectually, this appears like the judgement day. That the global financial system works like a giant hoover, sucking labour, time and ideas from people who believe in hard work, good work and honest work, has been clear to me for some time. Thi...

What is an Indian education? I stumbled upon the debate pretty much unknowingly, attempting to call out a hoax ( see here ). Before that, I worked for ten years setting up Computer Education centres in hundreds of towns and cities across the Indian subcontinent but never questioned the cultural significance of my work. After that 2008 post though, I couldn't unsee it anymore. It became the focus of my academic work, which I took up only subsequently.  If anyone asks what my big goal in life is, it will still be to return to India and set up, together in a community of fellow travellers, a truly Indian university. I consider all my current work to be a preparation, daily attempts to understand and to perfect my craft, so that, one day, it can all come together. Periodically, therefore, I get interested in projects in India and excitedly promote projects which show promise. However, within India's current privately driven mass higher education and its crass...

The excitement about AI made it urgent, but it is not about AI. Education systems, in general, and tertiary education systems, in particular, have been operating within a specific environment of ideas since the 1990s, which has now undergone a change. In summary, the entire system functioned as a component of a talent value chain. The industrial thinking has been apparent - the student came in as the input, the graduate came out as the output - and the goal of educational improvement has been process efficiency. The value of the educational intervention sprang not from the process of education itself, but the value that the talent marketplace accorded to the graduate thus produced. Some institutions, particularly top-ranked research institutions, may claim that they haven't been affected by this 'vocational' transformation. They claim that their processes are not attuned to the immediate requirements of the job market, and in the case of Oxford, I was told that their focus ...

A conversation today returned me to the subject of Gen Z! I don't have a great regard for generational labelling and particularly the adulation for Gen Z ( my views  were quite clear).  But a friend trying to discuss a potential PhD subject brought this up: That Gen Z is far clearer about mental health issues, boundaries of what they would do or not do to please the boss etc. We spent some minutes discussing whether organisations should realign themselves to accommodate the Gen Z culture, and my favourite trope that the CEO's job is to define the culture of the company and try to live it. On reflection, though, I am not sure companies should adjust themselves to Gen Z work culture. The label stands for a particular type of thinking and living: Mobile native, with a lingo that includes a lot of TLAs and emojis, defined by the western urban culture and relationships, anxious about many things, etc. These are real attributes and perhaps quite useful for a c...

Indian universities are not known for area studies programmes though there are some shining exceptions. I have been advocating, for some time now, that an open programme - open in terms of who might be able to participate, rather than how it is delivered - for Asian studies may help educate the type of graduate professionals India might need.  For me, it is an old idea - a college of Asia ! I was serious about it in 2014, but that was perhaps the wrong moment. My interest in going back to India and starting again cooled after 2014, with political changes around the world and the focus of my career shifting into a different domain.  It feels like meeting an old friend when I discuss the idea now. I am older, perhaps wiser, and less idealistic than I was then. I have learnt more about education as a business, and more about the concepts such as Asia, about which I had an unquestioning romanticism before. But the idea still attracts me, and I believe its moment has come....