I heard from a friend who is attending the present batch at ISB Mohali that they have all moved to campus. Classes had begun in May’20 but were online. So, this is the surprise; he tells me that classes are still online (at least for a bit). But they are all staying on campus now, and hence all the interactions are in person, socially distanced or not I dont know. …
Education
MERIT schools, national track India, & privilege blindness
This is a long post. Microsoft Word puts it at 4,542 words! Possibly the longest I have written. It explores a diversity of ideas and themes: a moniker called MERIT colleges to replace the inelegant IIT / IIM we use to earmark an elite college in India, the emergence of two parallel tracks of merit, a national consciousness that elite Indians share, and finally their privilege blindness. I hope you …
An article on ‘meritshifting’ and a critique
I write a monthly column for The New Indian Express, a predominantly South Indian newspaper. My column titled Indo-Angliana looks at Indian society, business and culture through the prism of Indo-Anglians, the largely english-speaking, highly educated and largely upper caste Indians who dominate our markets, media and our minds.
My second column was on a concept I call ‘meritshifting’, where elite India is driving a redefinition of merit on subjective …
Defining merit in ways it suits us
This was originally published in The New Indian Express on 18 November 2018.
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In Indo-Anglian circles, no topic gets as much importance as education or specifically higher education. For it is education that creates and defines us Indo-Anglians and remains a key marker of identity. In my (Indo-Anglian) circles, with our kids now reaching teenagehood, talk quickly veers these days to career and college options. Increasingly these days …
Why Does An Uber Driver Earn More Than A Starting Engineer In India?
Recently, Mohandas Pai, the Chairman of Manipal Global Education Services expressed his disquiet about the rather low starting salaries for engineering college graduates, accusing IT companies such as Infy, Wipro, TCS of conspiring to keep salaries of graduating engineers artificially low.
Mohandas Pai and Manipal Global have much to gain from higher salaries, for the promoters of Manipal Global also control the trusts that run Manipal University. Like several …
Why India Needs Online Private Universities
An open letter to Mr T S R Subramanian & fellow committee members drafting the New Education Policy
Dear Mr Subramanian & fellow panelists
Congratulations on being appointed to the panel.
This is only the third time since independence, that an education policy is being drafted. The previous policies, be it the Education Policy of 1968 that resulted in the 10+2+3 system of education that we follow today, or the …
Ryan Craig’s ‘College Disrupted’ – a review
University Ventures (UV) is one of the rare creatures of the VC/PE investment universe; a fund that claims to be the “only investment firm focused exclusively on the global higher education sector”. UV has made some interesting investments over the years, riding the current wave of technology-led transformation in one of the most stodgy sections of the economy. Underlying these plays is a strong and well-defined investment philosophy, expressed in …
How Many Engineers Does India Produce?
I recently came across a post on the migration patterns of engineering students from India to the U.S. It is authored by Dr Rahul Choudaha & Megha Roy from WES Research, well-regarded for their research around international education. The post said that 5.4m engineers are enrolled in undergraduate education, citing Planning Commission data. This implies that about a fourth of this, barring drop-outs and failures, graduate annually.
Assuming a drop-out …
On Bootcamps
A few months back The New York Times wrote about a waiter who became a data scientist, upping his earnings from $20,000 to well over $100,000. There are other examples in the story too, such as the barista who became a coding instructor, and the English major who became an appmaker. The transformations were courtesy coding bootcamps or immersion programs. These are institutions such as Hackreactor or General Assembly…
A Listing of EdTech Investment Themes – Part II
In a previous post A Listing of EdTech Investment Themes I laid out EdTech investment themes into three buckets
- Lifelong education
- Unbundling of the university
- Rethinking existing education business models in light of tech and mobile
In the post, I had shared that I would go into greater detail on bucket #3 in a future post, as to which of the various business models and processes could be rethought, and …