 "Illustration by Binay Sinha")
It’s debatable whether Chinese internet giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu would be as large as they are without the massive digital and regulatory firewall that protects them from Amazon, Facebook, or Google. Thankfully, India has recognised that animals bred in captivity find it hard to live in the jungle and has chosen consumers over protecting domestic companies in e-commerce. Unfortunately, India’s higher education regulators practice reverse discrimination; their ban on Indian universities launching national online campuses, while being unable to stop global universities from operating in India, means that India is now among the largest markets for these foreign universities. This ban must go because it is unjust, dysfunctional and arrogant.
The ban is unjust because while Indian universities are prohibited from offering online degrees via online campuses, the world of internet makes it possible for MOOCs (massive open online courses) such as Coursera, Edx and Udacity, besides many traditional US and European universities, to sign up Indian students online. Online learning is obviously behind the physical classroom in terms of student experience and learning outcomes but is rapidly catching up and, for sure, works better in certain situations (upgrade and repair) over others (prepare). Indian universities are not asking for protection against foreign universities — most educators believe that more competition is a public good — but the current ban must be lifted to create a level playing field. The longer Indian universities are prohibited from developing online capabilities, the further they fall behind global players. This ban is a dangerous handicap for them in a capability that could surely emerge as the future of education.
The ban is dysfunctional because we believe the massification of higher education requires the vocationalisation of higher education. One of the challenges in skill programmes competing or replacing traditional higher education is the social signaling value of degrees that can be overcome or co-opted with innovation; allowing Indian universities to launch national online campuses will see universities creating programmes that combine certificate and diploma programmes with apprenticeships and higher education to create new life forms that substantially attack the problem of graduate unemployability.
The ban is arrogant because it assumes to know what is possible, what people need, and what people want. College isn’t what it used to be; the world has produced more graduates in the last 35 years than the 800 years before that. Consequently, 60 per cent of taxi drivers in Korea, 31 per cent of retail sales clerks in the US and 15 per cent of high-end security guards in India now have a degree. Education, skills and the wage premium are changing so rapidly that the current higher education regulator model of “prohibited till permitted” is no longer be acceptable. Higher education is over-regulated and under-supervised. Part of the problem lies in judicial overreach — they prohibited national physical operations for private and government universities — but this decision cannot extend to the online world and anyway the decision came in reaction to the lack of strategic thinking about multi-modal delivery. Furthermore, making a distinction between distance education and online education is meaningless and dated.
The three reasons to lift the ban — injustice, dysfunctionality and arrogance — are amplified by the scale of India’s demographic dividend ( one million kids joining the labour force every month) and our anaemic farm to non-farm transition (we have 150 million people already in the labour force with low wages and productivity in agriculture that need to be retooled and moved to non-farm jobs). India has 20 million kids in physical college classrooms, five million kids in distance education and 0.3 million kids in apprenticeship classrooms. While the expansion of physical classrooms must continue, Indian higher education faces the impossible trinity of cost, quality and scale while simultaneously facing a huge speed limit arising from the lack of quality faculty. Recent amendments to the Apprenticeship Act have set things up for a massive expansion but this could be greatly accelerated if we could marry the low-cost, 24X7 and anywhere-availability features of online higher education with the learning-while-earning and learning-by-doing of apprenticeships. MOOCs face huge challenges (only four per cent completion rates) because of learner motivation but we think India has a unique opportunity to combine MOOC like platforms with apprenticeships to present a more employable alternative to college.
Education needs to reinvent itself because the world of work is changing rapidly and institutions are no longer permanent (the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company is down from 65 years to 15 over the last 50 years). Rote learning is less important in a world of always-on-internet, and progress in understanding the brain has led to important second-order effects for education such as the Flynn Effect (rising IQ’s over the last century), Grit (Angela Duckworth’s research on persistence representing intelligence) and Mindset (Carol Dweck’s work on growth vs fixed mindsets). Rapid progress in automation means that the most important vocational skills for the future will be reading, writing, arithmetic and soft skills (a good proxy is the learning profile of the International Baccalaureate school board; curious, confident, risk-taker, team-player, communicator, reflective, etc.)
Vocational education is usually for other people’s children not our children because of social signaling value. Removing the ban on national online higher education will create an explosion of innovation in linking skills to degrees. Why should anybody object?
The writers are with Teamlease Services
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
