India needs to think harder about the deep connections between education, employment and employability reflected in the work of multiple Nobel Prize winners. Michael Spence got his for cautioning about not being patronising about the pursuit or craving for degrees; vocational training is usually for other people's children, not our children, and going to college seems to rationally matter beyond the traditional "shaadi" requirement of degrees; the signalling value of higher education. Shapley and Roth got theirs for their work on how labour markets that clear on information are different from stock markets that clear on price. Arthur Lewis got his for his work on how countries need to think hard about how policy can accelerate the positive wage impact of the farm to non-farm transition. Gary Becker's work on financing skills and education is particularly important for India; it is unrealistic to expect employers to manufacture their own employees. The broadest case is made by Robert Solow who found that increases in employment and capital stock only explained a tenth of long-term economic growth with the rest being technological innovation.
India's higher education has evolved. College 1.0 was started by the British with the objective of producing an elite class to perpetuate their rule. College 2.0 began with Independence and led to the masterful creation of IITs and Indian Institutes of Management. College 3.0 began in the 1980s with a private sector response to the lack of state capacity expansion. College 4.0 began in the last five years with 30 per cent vacancy in the private sector's capacity in engineering and business.
We believe it is time for College 5.0; the creation of a parallel higher education system that focuses on employability. College 5.0 needs us to do five things.
First, we must fix schools because you can't teach people in three years what they should have learnt in 12 years, in the new world of work, reading, writing and arithmetic are the most important vocational skills, and colleges are often teaching what schools should. This needs our toxic Right to Education Act - that confuses school buildings with building schools - to be amended to become the Right to Learning Act. Second, we must end the dead-end view of vocational educational by creating full modularity between a three-month certificate, one-year diploma, two-year associate degree, and a three-year degree. Third, we need to use recent amendments to the Apprentice Act to rapidly increase our apprentices (India only has four lakh apprentices while Germany has three million and Japan 10 million) and give academic credit for apprenticeship so that learning by doing and learning while earning also enables lateral entry into the degree modularity ladder. Many higher education systems are recognising the power of practical experience and India could be an innovator at scale. Fourth, we should end the apartheid against distance and online learning; all universities must be allowed to freely sign up students nationally. Of course, we all know technology matters in education but we just don't know how and online learning outcomes have been mixed. But as economic historian Carlota Perez suggests in her great book "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital", technology innovations need time and we are probably a few iterations away from something that works. More importantly it is unfair that global MOOC (Massive open online courses) like Coursera, Edx and Udacity can freely sign up students in India but Indian universities cannot operate outside their state. Fifth, the current higher education regulatory regime must end because we need biodiversity in institutional forms, innovation in delivery and massive capacity. Over the last few decades two different regulatory regimes have led to substantially different outcomes because we produce 15 lakh engineers but only 35,000 doctors every year. Quantity is now leading to quality in engineering and this must be replicated across higher education accompanied by a reversal of over-regulation and under-supervision.
India today has two crore kids in a physical classroom, 50 lakh kids in distance education, 40 lakh kids pursuing vocational education and only four lakh kids doing apprenticeships. Skill universities are different from normal universities in three ways; they pray to the one God of employers, only five per cent of their kids are on campus with the balance in apprentices, online or on-the-job and only five per cent of their kids are doing a degree but all of them have the ability to use their certificate or diploma to go all the way to a degree. Skill universities represent a confluence of various stakeholder interests because they are one-third employment exchanges, one-third ITIs and one-third college.
John Gardner, a US education secretary in the 1960s, wrote a great book that asked, "Can we be equal and excellent?" This tension - always in existence in a democracy - is amplified in India where 10 lakh people will join the labour force every month for 10 years. Higher education faces an impossible trinity of cost, quality and quantity and it must resolve this by creating the regulatory space for massive, multi-modular and modular higher education that prays to the God of employability.
The writers are with Teamlease Services