Reducing regulatory cholesterol in education
The traditional system is past its expiry date and needs complementing with a hybrid, flexible model
This
shift needs bold changes to the current regulatory regimes in education
We don’t live in an economy but a society.
Societies need—and politics is pushed to provide—equality of opportunity.
Society responded to the inequality of high-paying manufacturing jobs of the
industrial revolution with state-funded universal K-12 schooling. Society
responded to the next wave of wage premiums in service jobs with a massive
increase in the number of college graduates—the world has produced more college
graduates in the last 80 years than the 800 years before that. India responded
to IT (information technology) offshoring by raising engineering college intake
capacity from 500,000 to 1.5 million in 10 years.
But automation, longer lives and faster
technological change call for another revolution in education. We would like to
make the case that the traditional 10+2+3+2 system—two board exams followed by
a college degree directly for some and then a master’s degree for some—is past
its expiry date and needs complementing with a hybrid model that has flexible
delivery (classroom, online and apprenticeships), modularity (full mobility
between certificates, diplomas and degrees), and is spread more evenly
(lifelong opportunities and reskilling rather than loaded upfront). This shift
needs bold changes to the current regulatory regimes in education that have
delivered quantity but are inadequate, inappropriate and wrong for today’s
battles of quality and employability.
A college degree has long been a lazy filter
for employers, prospective in-laws and students. This practice has strong
theoretical underpinnings. Michael Spence won the Nobel Prize in economics in
2001 for his work on the signalling value of higher education; how hiring an
employee is like a lottery and education can be a useful screening tool. But it
is becoming a dangerous filter because 60% of US college undergraduates with
fee loans no longer get jobs with wages high enough to repay their loans. Our
guesstimate is that this is now true for 30% of India’s engineering graduates.
And while the UP government receiving 200,000 applications from graduates for
368 peon positions has more to do with the government wage premium, it’s a
testimony to the diminished value of a degree.
Unlike China’s farm to non-farm transition
that involved factories, India’s fastest growing formal jobs are in sales,
customer care and logistics, paying Rs8,000-20,000 per month. Recent
conversations with 1,500 of our customers about their bottom-of-the-pyramid
jobs gave us three insights: (a) The college wage premium is now being replaced
by the school premium because the most important vocational skills are now
reading, writing, arithmetic and soft skills that depend on 12 years of school,
(b) there is a clear preference for hands-on experience or apprenticeships
rather than freshers, (c) they feel new connectivity between skills and higher
education will substantially increase the social signalling of vocational
training.
These insights suggest five policy actions:
(1) Shift the focus of school education from enrolment to learning outcomes,
(2) retain the rigour of testing in our schools but create a focus on soft
skills, (3) lift the ban on online higher education by Indian universities so
students can learn before migration, (4) enable new connectivity between skills
and higher education, (5) catalyse education innovation by separating the roles
of policymaker, regulator and service provider.
The first intervention of shifting from school
enrolment to learning outcomes is obvious; the right to education (RTE) Act
confuses school buildings with building schools. We need amendments to the RTE
Act that nuke the hardware obsession and decentralize to states (somewhat like
last year’s replacement in the US of the centralizing No Child Left Behind Act
with the Every Student Succeeds Act).
The second intervention of broadening of the
school curriculum needs Central and state boards to explicitly target soft
skills by taking inspiration from the learner profile of the International
Baccalaureate curriculum; curious, confident, risktaker, team player, etc.
The third intervention is lifting the unjust,
dysfunctional and arrogant ban on online education by Indian universities. This
ban— rooted in the misinterpretation of a Supreme Court judgement prohibiting
off-campus physical centres— handicaps Indian universities in building a key
capability and gives an unfair advantage to foreign universities that have
signed up more than 400,000 Indian students online. It prevents apprenticeships
morphing into degree pathways. The fourth intervention requires the ministry of
human resource development (MHRD) to acknowledge that norms for small research
universities using classroom delivery do not work for larger vocational
universities using classrooms, apprenticeships and online delivery. The All
India Council for Technical Education (Aicte) is the designated vehicle of MHRD
for skills; it should create space for innovating in connecting skills and
degrees. The final intervention is the most important. MHRD as a policymaker
needs to distance itself from Aicte and the University Grants Commission (whose
policymaking function needs to be taken away) and laws that discriminate
between government institutions and private institutions (like RTE) must go.
Fixing K-12 education, nuking regulatory
cholesterol and massively expanding apprentices will create an education
revolution to complement the job formalization revolution that has begun.
Source | Mint – The Wall Street Journal | 13 February
2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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