Disrupting Higher Education

The first step is policy makers accepting that the future of jobs is unknowable. The 50+ reports by various countries predicting where jobs will be in the future have the efficacy of palm reading or astrology (more than 50% of the jobs created in the US in every decade since the 1960’s did not exist in the decade before that). Universities traditionally delivered a wage premium because, a) the Gross Enrollment ratio – the percentage of kids in college – was small and thus signaling value was high; most honest alumni will agree that IIT is a good place to be at but a better place to be from, and b) Economies and companies were more stable and predictable before the advent of globalization, digitization, and automation (the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company has come down from 65 years to 15 years in the last 68 years). Does the future lie in jobs that are blue collar (machine facing) or pink collar (computer facing) or white collar (people facing)? Nobody knows and as change to the world of work accelerate, the job of education policy makers is not to predict the future but to make the system self-healing.

The second step is policy makers accepting that the future of university education is unknowable. Is it Physical classrooms or Online classrooms? Text or Multimedia? Degrees or Apprenticeships? Study before working or Continuing education? Or creative combinations? We recognize that our vision of a future of university education – on-the-go, always-on, on-the-job, on-site, on-demand, crowd-sourced, and gamified – will probably horrify traditional university academics. But nobody knows who is right. Unfortunately traditional academics have captured regulators with their definition of a university that confuses university buildings with building universities. India needs policy space for innovation – allowing a number of statistically independent and genetically diverse life forms in higher education – that is impossible with the current mindset of prohibited till permitted.

These two steps lead to the third; a bold policy agenda that destroys the regulatory cholesterol in the next budget. The legal context of universities must be revamped by separating the policy maker, regulator and service provider. Policy must recognize that large universities that pray to the one god of employers can co-exist with small universities that focus on research and knowledge. This means equivalence for learning delivered on-the-job, on-site, on-line, and on-campus. And involves lifting ban on online education for all Indian universities (state or central, private or public, young or old). The role of policy is not to set things on fire (decide what higher education looks like or pick winners and losers) but create the conditions for spontaneous combustion. Our regulatory cholesterol has not only hindered innovation but created an adverse selection in higher education in both the private and public sector; the hugely prescriptive, subjective, and hardware obsessed norms mean that most higher education entrepreneurs are either criminals, politicians or land sharks. And the lack of autonomy for public institutions mean that there is no fear of falling or hope or rising for teachers or leaders.

A MHRD report last week suggests huge progress in quantity; we have 35 million students in higher education in our 51,000 colleges and 864 universities. Our three-year goal should be 50 million students. But everybody must be employable and pay lower fees. This is impossible without online delivery and vocationalization.

Source: First Published in Business Standard, 19 January 2018