44 INDIA TODAY AUGUST 13, 2018
EDUCATION SPECIAL
New-age universities must recognise employability as an important objective
and provide more flexibility with on-campus, online, onsite and on-the-job learning1898, when Jamsetji Tata proposed setting up the Indian
Institute of Science (IISc), Viceroy George Curzon asked,
“Where are the students qualified to join and where are the
opportunities for employment?” But Jamsetji persisted and
by 1901 Curzon cut off the speech of his seniormost educa-
tion officer, a Mr Giles, that started, “Given my 40 years
of experience of Indian education...” with “Sir, it is your
forty years’ experience we are here to correct”. More than a
hundred years later, many Indian universities are held back
by this “40 years of experience in Indian education” problem
because the future of universities is very different from their
past. Thinkers about education across time—Plato, Vygotsky,
Tagore, Solzhenitsyn—remind us that humans don’t learn
from experience. But we learn from reflecting on experience.
Indian universities that aspire to remain relevant need to
reflect deeply on their performance versus expectations and
their capabilities relative to the future of work and education.
Problems in education have been around for ages;
Abraham Lincoln in the 1800s used one word to describe
his education in an election form—‘defective’. The poet W.B.Yeats’s description of ‘Education as the lighting of fire, not
filling of a bucket’ does not resonate with our school and
college experience that was largely the filling of a bucket,
but his quote is spot-on in a world where Google knows
everything. Our education metrics need shifting from inputs
(teacher salaries, teacher qualifications, technology-enabled
classrooms, buildings, etc.) to outcomes. Differentiation and
personalisation are needed, not for making things easier but
for making learning accessible by tapping into motivations
and abilities. Assessment needs to shift from annual exams
to regular feedback. Teachers knowing content is not the
same as their ability to create learning. Timetables are an
industrial era model of one size fits all that blunt choices and
learner agency. And while there is an element of ‘eat your
spinach’ in all education, universities mostly work for front-
row students. Lifelong learning needs a continuum between
prepare, repair and upgrade. Employability—or the ability
to finance education with third-party funding and pay it
back after employment—is becoming an important objective
as traditional funding sources focus strongly on outcomes.
Most importantly, if you think formal education is every-
thing, then just look at the president of the United States!
Problems at the intersection of work and education have
also existed for long; when Andrew Carnegie was asked how
many people worked at this steel factory, he said “About half”.
But employment is shifting from being a lifetime contract
to a taxicab relationship that is short, intimate, but finite.
Progress in automation, artificial intelligence and machine
learning mean many of today’s jobs will not exist forever.
Global supply chains mean that company productivity—and
therefore the wage premium—is now benchmarked globally.
Employers like low wages but skills and clustering are impor-
tant considerations that increase switching costs (the sticki-
ness of manufacturing in China despite their wage increases
is an obvious example). Intangible assets—research, develop-
ment, brands, culture, values, knowledge, teamwork etc.—
are becoming more important than fixed assets in values of
companies (chronicled in the great book, Capitalism without
Capital; The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Haskel and
Westlake). The wage premium for soft skills—surely at the
top of organisations and now even more broadly—is slowlyUNIVERSITY 4.0
In
MANISH SABHARWAL & SHANTANU ROOJ