India and education - the conundrum continues

I wrote about the poor quality of graduates available for hire in India in 2010 here.  Having had personal experience to validate the above, while the only globally top tier Indian academic strength I have worked with have been the India Institute of Technologies and perhaps couple more technology and scientific institutes at most.  Four years on from my blog in 2010, the academic capitalism in India continues to further dilute the already poor pool of capable Indian educated candidates for hire.  See my blog on what I term as academic capitalism here.

The World in 2015 by the Economist's laments:

"If your five-year-old starts school in India in 2015 she will be ready to enrol at university in 2028. That is also the year when India’s population should pass 1.45 billion and become the world’s largest. By then, will there be enough high-quality graduates to ensure the country’s prosperity? No chance—unless a rotten education system is fixed first."

For a country with aspirations for the future, the prospects given current numbers are bleak for sustained economic growth.  The US's economic growth's backbone has been its universities that have defined what scientific research and development, and its engineering applications through education can create.  20th Century is full of these examples.  More poignant is the inflow of talent from across the globe to reinforce this trend.

"Varun Aggarwal of Aspiring Minds, a company that surveys student capabilities, estimates that if university exams were run properly, 70% of students would fail. Of 700,000 engineering graduates in India each year, he reckons only 3% are employable without many months of post-recruitment training. Only 15% of computer-engineering graduates could complete a basic task set in one assessment, he says. Language and other “soft” skills are often poor."

Is India starting to follow the education's commercialization trends I spoke about here what I termed as copy and paste knowledge creation?

As my good friend Dr. Farrokh Mistree emphasizes and I agree, generally speaking of higher education, so does the article conclude for India:

"But still there is no serious funding for research. Only when that is in place will an Indian university make it into a global top 200. Not in 2015, but with luck before 2028."

Copy and Paste Knowledge Creation?

Finland is the popular destination of educators from across the globe these days. Its school system has been rated #1 by Organization of Economic Co-Operation's Programme for International Student Assessment. They are coming to Finland to learn why it is so incredible and then replicate it in their own nation, or perhaps find out why they themselves are unsuccessful. Click here for details on the PISA testing and results.

This begs the question whether one can duplicate the academic excellence of Finland or any other leader in this space? Can one copy Stanford or MIT by merely putting up a campus of such institutions? Can one copy the breakthrough Georgia Institute of Technology has achieved through its Advanced Technology Development Center? Or let’s make it easier, could a nation copy the syllabus and organizational structure of MIT (it is all available online) and achieve the same? What I have learned and seen of the world, duplication is flattery yet self effacing in academia.

Click here for an article from The Economist that explains why the lineage of the people, the environment, history and culture all come to play a role to push academics to excellence.

The trend of copy and paste knowledge creation stations continues across the globe. For example, if ever in Dubai, one must visit what I have come to call the mall of universities i.e. the Knowledge Village. It is over 300 universities from across the world with literally a store front like setup. At the same time though, the American University in Dubai has built a large and open campus that creates a sense of being in an education institution in comparison to the Knowledge Village.

Georgia Tech’s, MIT’s, etc. cannot be duplicated. For the nations that desire such should consider creating an environment first where the knowledge worker and the knowledge creator feel compelled to come and stay. Next, they should work on needs and issues that cannot find solutions from the developed world or existing solutions that must be supplanted to create new paradigms. And finally, for the knowledge creators to perpetuate they must build association to the land – America leads the world in this, it offers the most incredible opportunity in the world to do what one wants while offering the individual to become its citizen. It encourgages competition while rewarding the winners on merit. This is the foundation of a globally diverse society coming together building a nation and continuing to make it great. Otherwise, they will come and then… they will leave. See here an excellent article on America's supremacy in knowledge creation.

I am specifically discussing Finland's leadership in the early education versus USA's leadership in higher education for one specific reason - prior experience is not a guarantee of future success.

Probably one of the most important aspects for the success of the institution is the realization of the knowledge created into a business venture. For example, Georgia Tech’s ATDC enables the intellectual property from the school to incubate and explore the commercial arena. There is a community of funding providers and mentors to further support these ventures.

Lastly, and most importantly, the knowledge creator must be allowed to fail. I am afraid that the large corporate culture of incremental innovation and avoiding or not recognizing failure may creep into the academic institutions, where risk taking is encouraged to create breakthroughs. More on this topic in the near future.

I will discuss how incremental innovation has provided above 10% growth to multi-nationals in the 20th Century while the same recipe may not lead to the same results in the 21st Century in the next few weeks.

See my previous blog on related topic - Academic Capitalism.

Academic Capitalism

During my travels across the globe in the past ten years, I have noticed a larger presence of American Universities in the Gulf region. It is an interesting experience to be driving along the terminus of a distant nation 10,000 miles from home and out pops up George Mason University.

For me in today's ever flattening world, the last bastion of respect among nations and regions is the knowledge giver and knowledge creator. For academia, the two are intrinsically connected and are NOT mutually exclusive. A pure knowledge giver is a consulting company. A pure knowledge creator is a research and development facility. Universities are the roots of the tree on which the above two branches grow.

I will discuss my involvement in the business of knowledge in the upcoming blogs and place links here. For now, see this article from The New York Times reviewing the allure of money for the US academia to go overseas to the ongoing concerns and issues faced by the existing US universities overseas. (note: you may have to get a free log-in to NY Times first)