Technological advancement, or the “economy of ideas”, has perhaps been the most significant beneficiary of rapid globalisation. Mobile phones, via smartphones, are ceding way to smart wearable devices, and the assembly line is being threatened by 3D printing.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are predicted to displace millions of jobs through automation in the years and decades ahead.
The speed and extent of such disruption in the labour market is highly uncertain, but increasingly the better-skilled tend to thrive in our globalised world, while those lacking sought-after skills tend to feel left behind.
How, then, should education delivery in today’s world adapt or respond to minimise the number of those who lose on account of technological advancement? For India, this question assumes all the more importance on account of the much-touted demographic dividend that its youth is supposed to deliver it unto.
Education and skilling are the implements with which this once-in-a-country’s lifetime demographic opportunity must be reaped, and the risk of not doing so is not merely stagnation.
Today, an Internet connection opens up a world of learning. In an effort to widen participation, prestigious brick-and-mortar universities in developed countries are leading the adaptation wave and experimenting with innovative modes of education, such as online certificate courses, Massive Open Online Courses and collaborative models with local institutions in other countries.
Online courses, an attempt to disrupt the education sector by providing short doses of academic input for the masses, often for free, suffer from very high attrition rates, which can be around the 90 per cent mark – hardly surprising when free courses provide no financial incentive to complete the assessments.
Without peer-to-peer learning or adequate opportunity to clear doubts in person, another casualty of online courses is depth of understanding, and therefore skill levels.
Wise to this, many MOOC providers offer certificates for a nominal fee – when you have spent money you are more likely to persevere with the online tests. Yet, their efficacy as a substitute for offline learning remains untested, even unexplored.
Still, there is plenty of room, and a definite role, for Internet-based education delivery models even at present. Students, be the campus-based or self-studying independent learners, are effectively consumers of educational content.
In contrast, ever more school-dropouts today recognise and appreciate that investing time, money and effort in the pursuit of a traditional degree can, and does, yield returns in the future.
Not only must they be trained extensively, but also intensively, so that they emerge with a globally relevant skill-set in an increasingly “flat” world. This is where collaborative education delivery models, where local institutions work with prestigious international universities, come in, and bear significant promise.
Students require ludicrous percentages in their school-leaving examinations to obtain entry into a handful of top-tier, established institutions in each area of study; even some of these, by international standards, can have significantly outmoded curricula and pedagogy, something borne out by their poor standing in international university rankings.
Those managing anything less, even eminently respectable 90 per cent+ scores in the final school examinations, are mostly doomed to spend these critical skill-building years in sub-par institutions with few processes and quality checks to speak of.
The result, as study after study points out in the Indian context, is remarkably low employability, even among graduates from vocational degree programmes like engineering.
Such a chasm cannot be filled, nor such institutions of high repute and rigour be set up, overnight. As an economic model for the sector, this is arguably superior even to foreign direct investment, which Indian governments have been very open to in this millennium, in various sectors.
It has the key benefit of enabling, in return for a fee which is nominal in the context of the value being added in exchange, the transfer of invaluable intellectual capital from the international partner to the local institution, in the form not just of curricula, programme structure, design and flexibility, syllabi and teaching and learning resources, but also, crucially, quality checks, processes and pedagogical best practices and techniques, themselves the product of intensive research at leading foreign universities.
A case in point is the London School of Economics’ academic collaboration with the Indian School of Business & Finance, under the umbrella of the University of London’s international programmes, where Indian students are exposed, without having to incur the significant expense of living and studying in London, to the same curriculum and level of training, and held to the same academic standards, as are applicable to LSE’s own students in London.
This model would also fit nicely with the incumbent government’s employment-generation initiatives, since in this model faculty members on the local institution’s payrolls are drawn almost exclusively from the domestic labour force.
While Internet-based education delivery models may be the future, there is some way to go before even the leading ones in this space figure out how to add enough accountability and value to create actual, employable skills and be considered a like-for-like substitute for a college education in this respect.
Until then, the continued pursuit of a tangible piece of paper by millions around the world demonstrates the importance of official recognition of a course of study, either for proud display on a resume or to provide a signal to an employer of your greater human capital.
The decision to undertake higher education cannot be taken lightly, for all degrees are not equal. Degrees designed to make graduates think, and to apply their learnings, will inevitably prepare them better for the real world, and are likelier to spill over into entrepreneurial innovations and inventions of the future which defy prediction today.
The next generation should have the opportunity to realise their academic potential to the fullest, in order to ensure the brightest possible future. Intense competition for places at elite foreign universities bears testimony to this, and signals the value students place on the quality of the degree-awarding body rather than merely the degree result.
Yet, resource constraints prevent such universities from being able to absorb the many potential achievers, and settle for the few deemed the best of the best instead.
The proliferation of MOOCs and other online courses also showcases the intent on the part of these leading institutions to be part of a global education commons. In other words, many international institutions are willing to partner with counterparts in developing countries, to build capacity, extend their reach and reputation, and, indeed, to bolster their revenues in the process.
With the coming youth bulge in its demography, 14 million new youth will be joining India’s labour force every year. As the “lump of labour fallacy” suggests, there is not a fixed pool of work and employment in an economy.
Continued globalisation, and increasingly rapid, labour-saving, technological advancement in its wake will, as always, first destroy jobs at the bottom of the skill pyramid.
The writer is professor of statistics, London School of Economics