There is no alternative to continuous learning! What can colleges do?

Digital Technologies are all set to disrupt education, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this disruption. Before I share my specific suggestions and points to consider, I would like to set the context for these suggestions.

When we refer to undergraduate technical education, we consider students who are of the age between 17 and 22. Extrapolating from demographic trends, I believe that most individuals in this age group will benefit from advances in science and better healthcare and will live past 100 years. Further, simple calculations will show that we have more than 2.5 Crore individuals at every age in this group. Considering the large and healthy population and the population burden in the country, I expect that most of these young people will not be able to retire soon, and will have to work well past 75. Therefore, students we are training now will be pursuing their careers from 2021 all the way to 2080 and beyond!

As I reflect on technology advances from the last twenty years and observing the technology roadmap ahead, it would be fair to assume that the exponential rate of advancement of technology and change will undoubtedly continue for the foreseeable future.

This makes our job as planners difficult. How do we train students so that they can contribute over the next 60 years in a fast-moving and fast-changing world? This is an arduous task!

If this is not enough, there are three other points about the future of work that are worth noting:

1.   Life of Companies is getting shorter. Rapid changes in technology and business conditions have forced Companies to evolve continually. Companies are getting disrupted and going out of businesses at a much faster pace than in the past. A McKinsey study found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. It was less than 18 years in 2015. The research further states that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 in 2015 will have disappeared. I believe that students in colleges today will have a working career longer than the life of Companies they join and hence lifetime employment is an unrealistic promise.

2.  I believe that the gig economy is here to stay, and I anticipate that long-term, full-time employment will be an exception rather than the norm over the next few years.  I believe we will move to a world of the “me enterprise” where each of us will be an entrepreneur, and our employer will be our customer, and we will have many employers concurrently in succession. Think Chris Gayle – he is in IPL, then the Pakistan League, the Sri Lanka League, the Bangladesh League, the Australian Big Bash, Caribbean League, and occasionally the West Indies Cricket Team.  This model is prevalent in the world of movies. The crew is assembled for the film and disbanded once the movie is released. In this model, every individual, and no one else, will be responsible for their own careers and keeping their own skills up to date.  The world ahead will be very different from the world we live in.

3.  Over the last few years, I have had the privilege of attending alumni meets – events hosted on the 20th or the 25th anniversary of graduation. Invariably most of us are not working in areas we were trained in, and most of us had at least half a dozen different kinds of jobs in our 30-year career. Moreover, what is remarkable is that when alumni share their stories and describe what they learned in college that was most useful, they rarely discuss courses that they found valuable. They tend to talk the most about the friends that they made and all the “hands-on” activities they did during their time in college. I observe that we tend to remember people we “waste” time with – thirty years later, we remember those friends who were part of the hang out “adda” doing frivolous activities late at night. 

In this fast-changing and dynamic world, academic institutions must help students focus on 4Cs – Continuous Learning, Collaboration, Communication, and Commerce. I will elaborate on this subsequently.

What can we do as policymakers and leaders in education to ensure that we are moulding our students to be ready to take on the world in their 50-year career? With this in mind, I have the following proposals.

1.   We must encourage students to be self-sufficient and encourage them to learn-to-learn. There is enough research evidence that we remember things better when we do hands-on things.   We must ensure that the balance in the curriculum tips to self-study and hands-on work rather than lectures. Of course, we will need to evolve better evaluation mechanisms to evaluate students for these activities. I am proud to have been associated with the Smart India Hackathon, a very successful experiment to encourage students to build things independently.

2.  I believe that our age-old tradition of sequentially living out life through four ashrams – the first 25 years for learning in the brahmacharya ashram, the next 25 for earning in the grihastha ashram and followed by 25 years of contemplation and giving back through vanaprastha ashram may not be valid anymore. We must learn, earn, and give back concurrently and continuously; all through the working years between the ages of 20 and 75. This is all the more important for technical education and those pursuing technical professions. 

I propose that policymakers consider a model that encourages every class offered by colleges to have at least 25% of the students from working professionals; those working full-time jobs. This model has multiple benefits. Professionals working in Companies must keep their skills updated, and educational institutions can meet their training needs. Being in a class of highly inquisitive young students can be immensely energizing and enriching. Moreover, having a class with a mix of young students and working professionals will enhance learning quality and allow young students to network with professionals in the field. Imagine a class in electric vehicles attended by professionals working in Maruti or Tata Motors. Over the last eight months, we have gotten better at online education and physical presence would not be essential to take a class. We have limited resources, and this is one quick and effective way of creating a self-learning environment. Financially, this also helps educational institutions as their fees now can be supported by working professionals who have access to better resources for their education.

3.  Finally, I believe that we had done immense harm by segmenting education into narrow fields -- Engineering, Medicine, Commerce, Law, etc.   We have done worse than that by expecting 18-year-olds to commit to engineering disciplines in their first year. I believe that it is time to think about true multi-disciplinary education. We must encourage technical institutions to partner with medical colleges, law schools, science institutes, agricultural colleges or the arts colleges. Next-generation of innovation and progress will happen at the confluence of multiple disciplines. Technology will be applied to every walk of life, and isolating disciplines as we have done does us no good. If we are doing a course on medical devices, having some surgeons and legal experts in the class will significantly enhance learning quality.

I believe that there is an excellent opportunity for colleges to broaden their horizon and not restrict themselves to students on campus but broaden their sphere of influence to working professionals and practically everyone as all of us must be continuously learning. Colleges could offer a lifetime education subscription.

To summarize, I believe we are heading to the world of “me-enterprise,” and every student who is in college must think of the four Cs I described earlier. They must

a) Be Continuously Learning and must learn to learn.

b) Collaborate by learning how to work with a diverse set of colleagues. We will work in teams assembled across various disciplines. Students must learn how to “network” with others in the community. Having professionals and students from other disciplines is an opportunity to network with others.

c)  Focus on Communication skills as they will become super important. Everyone must learn to be a salesman. 

d) And finally, pick up Commerce skills. In the gig economy, everyone must be an entrepreneur and must understand how to manage cash, costs and cash flows to survive.