University 4.0

Universities that remain relevant will have to radically change their current thought world

Manish Sabharwal and Shantanu Rooj

https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/nation/story/20180813-university-4-0-1303341-2018-08-03

In 1898 when Jamsetji Tata proposed setting up the Indian Institute of Science (IIS), Viceroy 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 his senior most education officer Giles’s speech that started with “Given my 40 years of experience of Indian education...” with “Sir, it is your forty years’ experience we are here to correct”. More than 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 long; Abraham Lincoln in the 1800s used one word to describe his education in an election form “defective”. Poet W.B Yeats description of “Education as the lighting of fire not filling of a bucket” does not resonate with my school and college experience that was largely the filling of 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 Personalization are needed not for making things easier but 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 everything, 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’s 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 important considerations that increase switching costs (the stickiness of manufacturing in China despite their wage increases is an obvious example). Intangible assets – research, development, brands, culture, values, knowledge, teamwork, etc – are becoming more important than fixed assets in values 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 organizations but even more broadly - is slowly inching over hard skills. But it is clear employers can’t find people capable of doing the jobs they offer. The intersection of education and employment is broken. 

The Indian job market is evolving with four transitions; farm to non-farm, rural to urban, subsistence self-employment to decent wage employment, and informal enterprises to formal enterprises. Our binding constraint has shifted from jobs to wages. Multinational companies no longer have an unfair advantage over Indian employers and start-ups with employer brands. While we will never reach the 45% peak of any country’s labour force in manufacturing (Britain in World War 2), manufacturing can from 11% to 20% driven by domestic consumption (Make-in-India might be Make-for-India). But our services bias will continue and the fastest growing job function in the next decade will be sales, customer service, and logistics across industries that include healthcare, hospitality, consumer durables, and education. India’s development is being driven by our economic complexity; we make everything and do everything (even if we don’t always do it well or at scale). This economic complexity provides a useful habitat, catalyst and user for our University system. 

The purpose of Universities has been debated globally (since the first ones came up 800 years ago) and India (since our first three came up in 1857) for long but becomes important because the world has produced more graduates in the last 35 years than the 800 years before that. A useful framework comes from the great book Building Universities that Matter by Pankaj Chandra; he suggests the first purpose of education is to create good citizens; an educated society usually has higher rule of law, diversity tolerance, and peace. The second purpose of education is to prepare youth for livelihoods and incomes. The third purpose is to help find one’s life-long passion for learning and one’s own meaning in that life. Universities must reflect on how successful they have been in the first and third – they are very hard to measure - but on the second employers are clear that the system often does not work for them. Many graduates agree because Michael Spence’s Nobel prize for his work on the social and economic signalling value of a degree continues to be relevant despite a college degree not being what it used to be; 60% of taxi drivers in Korea, 31% of retail check out clerks in the US, and 15% of high end security guards in India now have a degree. Traditionally signalling value came from tightly managing entry and exit gates; IITs & IIM’s have tight entry gates and wide-open exit gates and the Chartered Accountant exam has wide open entry gates but tight exit gates. But India scale– Kanpur has as many people as Switzerland, UP has more people than Brazil, and Maharashtra’s GDP is more than Pakistan – means our current calibration of entry and exit gates is not giving our employers the quality, quantity, cost and employability they need. The base trade-off between quality and quantity is shown by the differing attitudes of engineering and medical education regulators over the last decade; every year we now produce 13 lac engineers and only 45,000 doctors. Of course, not every engineer is “IIT” quality but everybody who wants to be an engineer can be an engineer and this massive increase became the people supply chain for India’s IT industry (an oasis of high productivity where 0.1% of India’s labour force produces 8% of our GDP versus agriculture where 50% of our labour force produces only 10% of our GDP). But the medical council regulators thought world of quality through restricting quantity means capitation fees are still common in medical colleges and India produces 1 lac less doctors than it needs every year.

Despite stakeholder unrest most universities have been unable to heal themselves. Many have trapped themselves into incentives that push them to become more expensive, deprioritize teaching over research, diminish the quality of education, deliver poor employability, and lose sight of their purpose. All Universities face the difficult trade-offs between cost, quality and quantity and therefore must think harder about purpose. University 1.0 was driven by religions. University 2.0 was driven by the State. University 3.0 was driven by Philanthropy. But many of them aren’t able to deliver employability at volume; US student loans of $1.1 trillion will not be paid back in full (at least not from the wage premium after graduation), I recently met an BA in English at a Job Fair who couldn’t answer my questions in English and said “maine apna BA English, Hindi mein kiya hai”, and even though Teamlease has hired 17 lac people since we started, we have only hired 5% of those that came to us for a job. All three versions of Universities will continue but will need to accommodate some attributes of University 4.0 (U4.0) that will recognize employability as an important objective (not necessary meaning narrow specialization but higher education at a cost that can justify third party financing which can be paid back from work after graduation). U4.0 will have more flexibility; equivalence for learning on-campus, online, onsite, and on-the-job with most learning having a blended experience. U4.0 will encourage modularity with multiple pathways of vertical and horizontal connectivity between certificates, diplomas and degrees because students need different levels of matching, repair, prepare and upgrade. U4.0 will encourage diverse institutional responses for India’s higher education challenges of affordability, access, equity, and employability because currently the private sector has a trust deficit, the public sector has an execution deficit and non-profits have a scale deficit. U4.0 will target a 30% Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER or number of kids between 18 and 24 that are in college) but strategize to expand GER by shifting from the traditional response of “more cooks in the kitchen” to a “different recipe”. U4.0 will rethink financing (it is not clear that Delhi university meeting only 4% of its costs from fees is the right number to create student accountability). U4.0 will rethink access - higher education participation numbers for outsiders like women, backward castes, muslims, and backward states need addressing – by thinking creatively about separating financing and delivery. U4.0 will rethink the role of apprentices, technology and soft skills and think harder about the needs of employer. U4.0 will fight for the separation of the role of policy maker, regulator and service provider. U4.0 will advocate for school reform such as the Right to Education Act be amended to become the Right to Learning Act because you can’t teach people in 4 years what they should have learnt in 12 years. U4.0 will need Philanthropists to extend their time horizons because building a great University is the work of generations; the youngest institution in a recent list of the Top 10 global universities is 125 years and only 4 institutions in the Top 100 are less than 40 years old. U4.0 needs regulators needs to create the space for diversity among Universities in purpose, structure, financing, delivery, modularity, governance, and much else. In other words, the way for India to handle our higher education challenges and bring employability to the forefront are several statistically independent and genetically diverse tries. 

Economist Surjit Bhalla’s great book Wealth of Nations proposes that education is the greatest leveler of inequality and biggest driver of prosperity; his discounted cash flow analysis suggests that educational wealth of $330 trillion is far more equitably distributed than the financial wealth of $256 trillion. But Universities are under challenge because both the economy and society are demanding more of them. The recent institute of eminence tag to Indian Institute of Science (IIS) a fitting tribute to a dream seeded by a chance encounter of Jamsetji with Swami Vivekananda on a ship voyage between Japan and America in 1893 but nurtured by his generous posthumous endowment (his will divided his fortune equally between two sons and IIS), strong sense of purpose for the institution (research), and inspired leadership (CV Raman, Satish Dhawan and many others). But not every University can be – or needs to be – like IIS. Our Universities need to think harder about purpose, create meritocratic cultures with a fear of falling and a hope of rising, and adopt institutional funding and governance mechanisms for resilience. Dinosaurs did not die because the world changed; they died because they did not change. Indian Universities have many exciting, difficult, and existential choices in the next 20 years. They must choose carefully. 

(Manish Sabharwal and Shantanu Rooj. The writers are co-founders of TeamLease Services and Schoolguru Eduserve respectively)