The Four Big Trends: Pecha Kucha Presentation

Here's a presentation I did at the Cork Pecha Kucha event on the four big trends in Higher Education in the 21st Century. The content will be familiar to some readers, but you may find it interesting nonetheless.

Pecha Kucha is a really interesting presentation format if you haven't run across it, it's worth trying. 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, slides advance automatically. No time for Ums and Awws, and you have to cut to your main point on the slide right up front or you'll miss it. The speed also forces you to gloss the details and caveats a little. Challenging. If you haven't tried it, do.

My apologies for the lighting on this piece. I do in fact have a face as well as voice, but the presentation is perhaps the better for my appearance as a Mysterious Shadow.

Thanks to Nicki Ffrench-Davis for arranging the event, taping it, putting it online, and making me do it over again when the tape ran out halfway through my first run.

Book Review: The Great Brain Race

Ben Wildavsky's book 'The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World' is well worth reading. Wildavsky places international education firmly in the context of globalisation. He makes the case for international education as free trade in minds and ideas and as a key piller of globalisation. In the long run, it's more important and more beneficial than the free movement of goods and money that have been the icons of globalisation so far.

The early chapters, looking at the growth of overseas satellite campusus felt a little weak to me. It's largely a story of elite institutions leveraging their powerful brands to draw in the elites of the developing world. It felt like a tale of the top tenth of a percent, globalised institutions training the next generation of Davos Man, which isn't something that I find all that relevant to the longer term future of the sector as a whole. Counterpointing the western institutions reaching out are new institutions rising in "emerging markets". Some, like Saudi Arabias KAUST, seem like towers of gold build on sand. Others, in India and China, have emerged to be real competitors to the first world institutions they in part emulate.

I found the book really found it's stride in the chapter on for profit tertiary education. Much of what is written about the for profit field is either by conventional academics, who are, on principle against it, or business writers, who are equally for it. It's rare to read a more nuanced view. Wildavsky doesn't shy from the critiques of the industry, quality and so on, but makes a strong argument that for profit higher education is filling a gap for people who cannot otherwise access conventional higher education. This is especially the case in places like Mexico, where the higher education system simply can't accommodate the demand. It's also potentially true anywhere the demand for tertiary education exceeds supply. Any academic in a non profit University who isn't seriously concerned about the growth of for profit tertiary education doesn't grasp it's implications, or perhaps is in a field where they can make the jump when the time comes.

My only gripe with the book is the style. In common with many journalists who go on to write full length book's the story is told with a shock and awe bombardment of quote, statistic and anecdote, rather than by boots on the ground narration. Every opinion seemed to be someone else's, and the the clear narrative of the authors own voice and views was hidden until the end. It seems to be a journalism thing, they are locked into the model of reportage rather than storytelling, painting the picture with little dots of fact rather than the impressionistic brush of a more narrative storyteller or a big thinker like Clay Shirky or Neil Postman. The book feels like a collection of in depth feature articles, rather than a coherent book. Nevertheless, they are good feature articles, so it's more of a personal pet peeve than a deep flaw. While I think it could have been a much better book, it's still well worth reading if you, or your institution is really thinking about dabbling your toes into the world of international education.

If you don't fancy buying the book, there's good video material from the author online at the book website and on the facebook page. There's also audio of his talk at the LSE online and on iTunesU.

Fee Fie Fo Fum. The Browne Report

It's out of scope for this blog to assess whether the recommendations of the Browne report are wise or fair. Many others will cover that beat from every angle and political view. Worth reading are Donald Clark, who explains how Browne misses the point, and Charlie Stross, who makes a good stab at putting it all into a larger historical context.

My question is will the recommendations fly, and if it does, will it make any difference to how Universities look in the 2020's and beyond.

My feeling is that they will fly, although I have never followed British politics closely so I'll confess it's only a hunch. The political arcana of Whitehall is a mystery to me. May it ever be so.

Where the UK leads, Ireland will surely follow, and others will take note. It's likely that when my daughter goes to college in 2023 (as of this month, she want to be a vet, by the way) it will be under a funding model quite like Browne proposes, which puts it top dead centre in scope for this blog.

What's driving the thinking in Browne, I believe, is that as attendance at a Tertiary institution slides up into the majority, it's starting to get simply too expensive for the state to support it. Governments have two choices. They can keep funding it publicly, let it go on up to 100% and accept that it will be largely rubbish because it's underfunded. It's very rare that a single purchaser (be it Walmart, or the State) with a broad pool of suppliers to choose from has not bled them white. It only happen when they are all playing too much golf together, or perhaps in Scandanavia. With China and India turning out graduates in increasing numbers, having a high proportion of graduates with fairly indifferent degrees isn't going to be much help. The big IT Offshorers can put 1,000 people on your project tommorow morning. You can't compete on scale.

The other choice is to walk away from directly funding the sector, underwrite it with cheap loans (the education is, after all, a public good, it's the least you can do) and hope that your world class institutions, now student debt funded, can produce graduates of such quality that England Inc. (or Ireland Inc.) will stay in business.

Will it make a difference? Years ago I worked in evaluation of public sector policy, and the experience left (or perhaps found) me cynical about the power of the state effecting real change in the near term. Government politicians like to claim credit, the opposition assigns blame, usually within 12 months of announcing the policy change, and before implementation has even begun. "Major Government initiative might have made a difference, or maybe it didn't, we aren't sure" isn't much of a newspaper headline, especially for an audience who have never heard of a counterfactual. By the time outcomes become clear, all but the hard core policy wonks have forgotten the original initiative. Even big initiatives (the GI Bill comes to mind) often just accelerate patterns of change that were ongoing anyway. That said, this shift probably is big enough to make a change at a generational scale, if the implementation isn't homeopathic, as public policy often is when the rubber hits the road.

For Universities, it's all good. Effectively deregulated, they can charge what they like, and need dance no more with bankruptcy. This will probably lead to some improvements in teaching on the ground. Alas, it will also lead to US style facilities inflation, with an ever nicer set of student facilities being built to entice and compete new entrants. After all, if you are going to go into tens of thousands of debt, what's a few pounds more. Besides, Student Age 19 isn't paying, some hypothetical adult he will grow into will pay in some dark imagined future.

Some TEI's will pull ahead, and engorged with fat fees will produce more appealing graduates. Some of  this will be due to better funding leading to better teaching, and some, alas, because by being more expensive they filter for the elites that elites like to hire.

Will it change the balance of course provision, casting history, classics and so on into the darkness and forcing those without independent means into more lucrative areas? For good or ill, I don't think so. When I worked in New Zealand, which has a student loan system, all the largest loans were for students who had trained as helicopter pilots. New Zealand needs more chopper pilots per capita than most places, but not that many. I recall one course had trained a substantial number of tourist submarine skippers. Vocational sounding, but they would have better off with a classics degree. Browne notes the importance of career guidance up front in the report, and having a PhD in a discipline I've never worked in, I couldn't agree more.

For students, the prospect of a big debt may deter many who might benefit, but I suspect most will suck in their guts, sign on the line and go. After all what's the alternative? The tills at Tesco? It will slow the growth of tertiary education, perhaps holding it at around the 50% level. The loan model means that people without means can still attend if they are prepared to bear the debt, so Universities will still function as engines of social mobility, which is a substantial part of their overall benefit to society. Big picture, the change isn't nearly as radical as it looks. The middle classes still pay, in loans now, instead of taxes.

Related Posts
Follow the Money: http://tertiary21.blogspot.com/2010/07/follow-money.html

Pay for outcome, not process.

Universities are funded, more or less, for bums on seats. Whether it's paid for by the taxpayers or parents, fees are paid for time present on the premises, It's paid just like day care, but without the Lego.

But what we're paying for - time on campus - isn't what we want to buy. What would happen if Universities were paid for outcomes? What if Universities were paid a balloon payment for each employment outcome, weighted in line with the graduates starting salary. 

Suddenly, pointless degrees that are cheap to deliver but go nowhere are a liability and go out the window. Universities fight tooth and nail for the best and brightest that can be placed quickly. They need to be sharp, and make sure they are teaching the skills employers really need. The careers office moves to the centre of the institution, instead of stuffed into a far corner beside Classics. The Alumni network is no longer simply a set of people to shake down for checks - a lead on a good jobfor an undergrad would be worth much more.

Life skills like communication become central, as they greatly enhance the saleability of the student. Even student activities, often funded but ignored, but a key aspect in rounding out a good saleable CV, take on a new importance.

Timing would become critical. If you have a bright girl in second year who could get a good job, should you try to place her, or convince her to stay for another year, to get a better salary. There are options at the bottom too. Taking in disadvantaged students in large numbers, and making them employable might help the bottom line considerably. Outcome payments could be weighted to favour placing disadvantaged students ('fixer uppers' if you will) over easy to place smart kids from good homes.

The institution that would be produced would be as different from the university of today as the shark from the whale, a lean mean beast ruthless in it's hunt for the best careers for it's students. Would I send my daughter there? I might. Would it be a more effective use of taxpayers money? You bet.

In a sense, this happens for research already. Departments and Institutions which fail to turn out demonstrably good outputs tend to find it hard to  win grants and sustain their funding down the line. Good results help to win the next grant, and success build on success. There are very few disciples which avoid this and manage to produce large amounts of unneeded research ("I have a little list, they never will be missed") but they are the happy exception.

It's a radical idea, but being radical is not itself a fault. Like most such ideas, the devil is in the details. There are a number of obvious problems, which I shall leave as an exercise for the commenter.  But at least it would align what we want - people with useful skills who can find a place in the world, with what we're paying for, and remove the incentive to underfund potentially expensive courses which lead to decent careers, and shortchange important skills, while supporting cheap degrees that shift hundreds of people from lecture hall to exam hall for four years, to no obvious benefit to anyone except keeping them off the unemployment rolls.

Do you see your students as products?

Do you see your students as products? It's ok, really, I'm not going to judge. Lot's of people see it that way. You can use whatever metaphor you like if it helps you get the job done.

Lot's of Universities, implicitly or implicitly, see students as products. School leavers go in, get their school educated heads deprogrammed, learn new stuff, grow up a bit, and go out the other end, ready to take their place in the knowledge economy. You can see Universities as the coal mines and steel mills of the information age churning out the raw feedstock of the knowledge economy.

If you see them as products, that's fine, but maybe you need to follow through with that idea a little bit and see where it takes you.

Firstly, the three and four year production line is a bit long, don't you think. Moves towards shorter, compressed degrees are a step to rectify this. If you feel students need the time to mature, fine, but is that part of what your University is good at? Maybe they can mature better someplace else? If you do want to mature them as well as educate them, is the campus/lectures model the best one? Shouldn't you be giving them credit for other things, like engagement with college life, clubs, societies and so forth?

It doesn't take a Lean Six Sigma guru to figure out that your physical assets, lecture rooms and so forth, are lying idle all weekend, much of the evening and substantial chunks of the year out of term. Summer schools, evening classes and so on help a bit, but some institutions run on two 11 week terms! I can't see Toyota running a plant day shift only for less than half a year for very long. Of course, you'd need to take on an extra shift or two, but that big campus probably costs as much as a semiconductor fab, or a pharmaceuticals plant. There's plenty of people trying to get in. Sweat the asset.

And what about market research? What employers 'buy' your graduates. Exactly what ones. No generalities, names and phone numbers. What do they think of them. You run lots of focus groups with the big employers, don't you? Don't you? You hardly you turn out something that costs tens of thousands of euros with no market research?  We'll, at least you follow up with the graduates every year to see exactly what they are doing and feed the data back into your course design. Don't you? I know they are hard to find, but we have this Facebook thing now, so it's no problem.

I could go on, but see where I'm going here. If you need the mental exercise, take any manufacturing paradigm you fancy and apply to the University. Enough of the insights will be relevant to make it worthwhile.

Seeing your students as products is a powerful, if impolitic, metaphor. Maybe it should prompt you to looking at how great products are really made in the 21st century, and what valid lessons can be taken from that to how your University churns out graduates. Of course, the 'student as product' metaphor breaks down in a bunch of ways, for starters, there is the mismatch between whoever is 'getting' the product and whoeever is paying for it, but that's a whole other post for another time. Just because the metaphor is imperfect doesn't dismiss the ideas it prompts.

Follow the Money

"Follow the Money" Raymond Chandler advised us (via Marlowe), and it's good advice to take when considering how the cost of Tertiary Education effects it's future. It's timely to think about now, as Ireland, from where I write, considers whether to continue with a 'free' fees model, where the state pays, or return to a fee paying model, where some or all of the fees are paid by students directly to the University. How might these choices play out in the long run, and which is the smart one?

All else being equal, the cost of a University education would rise in proportion with inflation. If GDP growth outpaces inflation, as it tends to, University education gets cheaper in real terms. More and more people can afford it, and we all live happily ever after. All else, alas, is not equal. As we get richer, our expectations rise. The school my firstborn starts in on August 31st might as well be on a different planet from the school I started at in '79. It's more reasonable to think of the cost of University education in terms of it's share of GDP.

Whether the cost will rise or fall as a share of GDP depends on who, exactly, is paying.

Where the state funds University education, as in Ireland, it's a single, strong customer with tight pursestrings. That keeps a lid on costs. Unless Universities suddenly get a lot better at picking the governments pocket than they are, the costs can't grow faster than GDP, and will probably shrink as other agendas draw on state coffers. The state will pressure universities to expand enrollments and spend less.  While the slice of national wealth consumed is smaller in relative terms but the cake is growing all the time. So, in absolute terms, Universities do get more money, and deliver a better service. The voting middle classes won't mind them bleeding a little, but won't like to see them bled white, just like schools. While universities command a smaller and smaller wedge of national wealth, more and more people go there, because it's cheap. You end with with near universal tertiary education in the long run excluding only those so already too badly sabotaged by family or school to make it. That's how state funded primary and secondary education works, why should tertiary wind up any different.

Universities won't like this. Having only one paying customer is bad business. Like a pea farmer selling to a big supermarket, you suddenly realize you don't work for yourself anymore, and your profit margin is what they tell you it can be. When they feel a squeeze, you get crushed. Primary schools don't have a lot of autonomy.

Universities would like to work like any other business. They would deliver a service, and charge what it costs, or as much as they can get away with, whichever is more.  As well as helping the top line, making goods more expensive makes them more exclusive. All Universities, deep in their hidden hearts, want to be Harvard when they grow up, and that means being expensive enough to filter out the riff raff, and elite enough to attract the very best talent. Employers, at least ones that potential students would like to work for, like that too. It makes it easy to sort the CV into a slush pile. There are some Universities, who, as a core value, try to keep costs as low as possible, but they are, alas, not economically significant. You can see this model in operation in the US.

Where education is on a fees basis, the prices will rise as fast as the market will bear. Faster, if predatory lending practices, as seen in the US, come into play. If people are borrowing for their education, based on their beliefs around future earnings, fees can logically rise faster than GDP growth. Fees go up, Universities command an expanding slice of the national pie, and (successful) Universities are grand and well resourced, like the US Ivy Leagues. If you can afford to go to the best, or can swing a scholarship, your future is assured. Less and less people can afford to go. Things like community colleges, online and for profit colleges spring up to satisfy that market.

Note that other costs (housing, food, and so forth) are more or less neutral either way. Whether you are in college or not, you've still got to eat and sleep indoors. There is an opportunity cost as well, time spent in lectures and years of earnings foregone while in University. In either model of funding, so long as University can get you a better income than no University it's worth going. That better income might be a better job than a non graduate, or indeed any job. If practically everyone has a degree, not having one would be a fast track to the benefit office, with rare exception.

These two scenarios are of course end members of a continuum of solutions. In Ireland, people suggest an intermediate model, where Universities charge fees but the government provides adequate scholarships to ensure access for people who cannot afford them. This is a great idea, and like many great ideas, it won't fly.  Democracies don't reliably support people who don't vote. Any scholarship programme for the deserving and needy will get whittled away over time. Cutting those programmes keeps them out of college, and not competing for jobs with the children of nice, voting, middle class parents who knows the name of their elected representative and would like the money spent on themselves. Think of the consistent heavy flak affirmative action attracts in the US, and how it survives only because it is supported by a substantial mass of voters who benefit from it.

The other intermediate model is to have some state supported free Universities and some fee paying Universities, so everyone gets what they want. This is not unlike the US system, and has serious consequences for social equity. Your degree will forever record how rich your parents were, and humans being humans, your place in the pecking order is set.

There are, of course, many excellent Moral Arguments for this funding system or that. I'm not concerned in this blog with Moral Arguments, however just. I'm just concerned about what will happen. History has no morals. Nor am I concerned with what decision Society will make. Society does not make decisions, it responds to stimuli.

Universities however, are small enough to make actual choices. Given these two options what should a clever University lobby for? What is likely to ensure your relevance and survival in the long run?

If you are in the top 10%, then lobby for a fees model. You've got a good shot at 'Ivy League like status in the long run. Take it. With the enforced egalitarianism of state funding removed, you can lay claim to the top spot in the public mind. Fees will bring competition, and you're well placed to win it. Call your Minister, book a nice Restaurant and good luck.

If not, think carefully. You're not going to get a big endowment or asset base, like the Land Grant colleges in the US, to cushion you against the hard years. In a free market, they will come. The state might be one big customer, but it's checks don't bounce very often. THe business will start to look a lot like the Private sector. Rising costs will bring in competition, like in the US. Strange movements, like the EduPunks, will challenge your right to exist as an institution. Students incurring big debts are much more likely to cause trouble. If your country grows an Ivy League, and you're not in it, what then?

The Tragedy of the Commons and The Last Consumer

As I warned you in the last post, I'm still a little off piste and at the edge of scope thinking about the economic context universities will operate in as the century wears on. Bear with me, I'll stop soon!

My eldest daughter, previously mentioned, wishes to be a Mermaid Musketeer when she grows up. "Wouldn't it be nicer to be a Vet" I think, but I don't say it. I remember how many of today's jobs were (and remain) inconceivable to my father's generation. Maybe Mermaid Musketeers will be in high demand in the 2020's. What do I know.

The conventional narrative of technological development has been that with successive leap forward some gadget or other removes another piece of drudgery from the Toils of Mankind. The newly unemployed riot a little, and then find more fulfilling careers as Advertising Executives, Psychoanalysts and Personal Trainers. Since the plough and irrigation gave us the first agricultural surpluses and allowed priestly and bureaucratic castes to emerge, it's been one of the key narratives of history. Thus, we assert, it will always be so, just as the autumn turkey is confident of a good winters food and a fine spring to come. It ain't necessarily so.

Come with me, if you will, to the supermarket. Tesco, Sainsburys, Walmart, wherever. They in a key place in our world, bringing stuff we need from the four corners of the world into one convenient place, beyond the dreams of any dead King. All strive, rightly, to do so as cheaply and efficiently as possible, cutting costs where they can so they can remain profitable, and competitive on price with the other supermarket down the road. Nothing wrong with that.

A year or two ago, the automated tills were a novelty. People were reluctant to use them, but they have become accepted. It seems slower than the human till, but for a small basket on a busy day, great. I'm sure it means that the supermarket can cut the number of staff at peak times, with one staffer monitoring six or eight autotills. Of course, now that RFIDs are dropping in price, pretty soon we'll just have our trolleys autoscanned on the way out, we can swipe our payment card to exit and be off in moments. Much faster, and it'll be a no brainer compared to waiting in a queue. They can cut most of the till staff. It looks like a horrible job, good riddance.

Meanwhile, back in the storeroom, we'll start seeing more and more machines helping out. It's a lot cheaper to run storerooms with robots. Companies like http://www.kivasystems.com/ are starting to put in place systems that are faster and cheaper to run. Stacking lemons is a bit more complex. It's taken a long time for robots to be able to do that kind of work, but if a robot can fold towels, how far away can a commercial shelf stacker be? A long long time ago, when I was doing my PhD, I paid part of my way stacking shelves for Coca Cola. Great workout No brainpower required.

So as the century wears on, smart supermarket operators will put in those systems. Driven by sales data from the till systems, warehouse robots will load and unload the trucks (no more tricky health and safety issues in the warehouse - no humans allowed) and specialist packer robots will keep the shelves stocked, working mainly at night to minimise human interaction. You could, conceivably, have a complete supermarket shop without dealing with or seeing one human. A nice Augmented Reality system with voice recognition can show you where the cheese is, no shuffling about looking for staff.

There will probably still be a couple of staff though. So many laws assume a shop will have a shopkeeper, it will be hard to avoid having a bored looking manager or greeter around. Technicians may come and go to fix the odd thing, but in time a good R2 unit could replace them. The trucks will still legally require drivers, but as time goes on they will be more closely monitored by expert systems and central controls so they have little or no autonomy. Industry will lobby for UAV trucks to be allowed between, say, three and six am. The accident figures will make their case compelling, eventually.

Of course, in the meantime, most of your food supply will just arrive, a shopping list mediated between the expert systems in your supermarket, your fridge and pantry, the health assist system your health insurer mandates (no more ice cream!(, with a final approving nod from your bank that the delivery fits within the budget you approved. The milk just appears in the fridge, unpacked by your housebot. No more late night runs to the cornershop for milk. Indeed, no more cornershop,as the few that survived the death of the newspaper close up.

In this future, who actually works in the supermarket? We have a few drivers and perhaps a half dozen staff per megastore so there is enough to cover 24/7 opening, annual leave and so on with always one person instore. We would imagine teeming head office, but as AI's and expert systems improve, we need less and less there. Tasks are hived off to expert systems or outsourced to some up and coming service provider where brains are cheap. Productivity per worker, as measured, becomes immense. There just aren't that many workers anymore.

The supermarket story sounds trivial as presented, but you can, with a little imagination, infer a similar story in many industries. A large proportion of our jobs are semi skilled, and do not really demand much brainpower. All the unskilled and semiskilled people who, even in the first world, make the service sector hum are going to be in trouble.

Now, your local supermarket is still making money. It's still paying people, just much less, more highly skilled people, and of course larger dividends to the owners. Who, exactly, is shopping in this supermarket, and with what? All those unemployed people? Henry Ford is alleged to have paid his workers over the odds, as he felt anyone working for him should be able to afford the cars they are making. What's happening here is a parody of that. With each reduction in workforce, there are less and less consumers who can actually afford to buy very much. It's like the Tragedy of the Commons. In this classic economic fable, it pays each farmer to graze the commons as heavily as possible, even though, in the long run, it will destroy the grazing and ruin them all. Increasing automation to increase productivity and cuts costs is a sensible, responsible decision for any business. Each time it happens, it reduces the pool of gainfully employed consumers until there are none left. So whose left with money to shop? Only a handful of highly paid core staff, and the shareholders, mainly pension plans for people who'll never be able to afford to retire.

Historically, of course, the displaced labour has migrated to newer and more interesting professions, but as the machines get smarter and smarter, the pool of professions that only humans can do gets smaller and smaller. I've already blogged about Emily Howell, the virtual composer and other examples of Artificial intelligences tackling problems long thought to be human only. It's also worth noting the set of problems faced by a business are not all best solved by a brain designed for staying alive on the savannah. Intelligences not as smart as us, but different, might do just fine. Think of chess as an example. Or sorting post, or telephone switchboard operators. The machines may even do better, since they lack some of the human brains many, many cognitive bugs. They don't have to be as smart as us, they just have to be smart enough. And besides, who says we're that smart?

Science Fiction writers readily paint pictures of utopian post scarcity societies, where humans live in abundance. Roddenberry's Federation is the classic example, or more recently Iain M. Banks' Culture Novels. The question unanswered is how do we get there from here. The technological path is clear, tractable, and generally plausible. There is however no guarantee that our economic model will be able to adapt to it. Changing economic models is a somewhat risky operation.

Human history has, of late, been an extraordinary positive narrative. While the History Channel drones on about the great wars of the 20th century, we as a humans live in unprecedented numbers and affluence. Famine, poverty and war, once the global norm, as seen as failures, problems to be contained and solved, not accepted. Much of this prosperity comes from technological change. But there is no guarantee that this will continue. It's conceivable that our economic model, structured around rationing and scarcity, might bring us to some kind of dead end. Increasingly homogeneous government models, where each country operates in much the same way following agreed international norms, limits the capacity for different countries to respond in different ways and for new approaches to evolve.

I'm not advocating a stop on technological development. That is impossible, and unwise. We still need to move fast forward to bring the levels of comfort we have largely reached in the first world to all, and solve some of the problems we've created along the way. But we need to be agile and pragmatic about how our societies are organised, and start keeping a good close eye on numbers like the Gini coefficient, so that things don't get ugly. We need to be open for other ways of doing business, and mindful of how we can keep our economic models flexible and adaptable. I'm not preaching anarchism or socialism. I suspect the exact 'ism we will need hasn't been quite invented yet.

As for what it means for Universities, it's hard to tell. In the long run (and I'm thinking a century out here, at least), I think there will be big shift away from professional/ vocational training we see a lot of now, where the focus is often on getting a job at the other end. In a world where there is no job at the other end, or at least, nothing you or I would think of as a job (is blogging a real job?) what people will do in Universities might look a lot more like recreational activity to us today.

That seems like a big leap, but look at our world through the eyes of an early graduate of Bologna or Oxford. Our Universities might look pretty easy to them. No memorisation, no hand copying books. And the jobs out the other end? I don't know how many hours a scribe to Emperor Barbarossa worked, but I suspect they worked harder and longer than a 21st century middle management white collar type.

We're a little further along the road than we might think.

The Three Economies of Plenty

First, some apologies on two counts. Firstly I'm going to swing to the edge of scope for a post or two, as I'm thinking a little bit about economic context in which Universities will operate as the century wears on. I want to capture some thoughts I have on that, which sit at the edge of scope, both in terms of topic, as they don't address Universities specifically and in terms of time, looking ahead towards the centuries end. Apologies are also due that this topic is at the edge of my expertise, I'm no economist, a point which will no doubt become painfully evident presently.

The 21st century will be a century of 3 economies, material, informational and experiental, or, for short, stuff, ideas and fun. Right now the three economies are entangled, confused and confounded. That will change over time.

The material economy is the most familiar. You buy stuff, you make stuff, you sell stuff. For a long time, it didn't go anywhere much, as the supply and variety of stuff was limited - mainly potatoes in Ireland, it seems.Basic economic constructs like supply and demand curves come from this economy. It started to get interesting a few hundred years ago when industrialization greatly increased the volume and range of goods available. Supply up, cost down, demand up, world economy go go go!

This kind of economy will approach, but not hit, the bumpers over the next century. Environmentalists tell us finite resources and raw material supply puts physical limits on the worlds capacity to make stuff and we must all make do with less. Perhaps. More likely, in my view, is that we will hit the limits of what we can consume. There are only a finite number of cars, phones and shoes we can actually own. Even in my lifetime, attitudes to  material goods have shifted. A house heavy with possessions is an anchor, not an asset. When everything is available, 24/7, there is no need to accumulate your own personal warehouse - you can buy what you need, when you need it. We may continue to buy more expensive objects as status symbols (the Mercedes instead of the Skoda) but the amount of physical goods involved, and the relative functionality of those goods won't change much. To put it another way, there is only so much cake we can eat. It might be very good cake, hand baked in Switzerland by the latest celebrity chef and flown in by SST, but it's still cake. In some cases, the real status is to have less, drowning in possessions in unfashionable. Who wants a GPS, an MP3 player,a portable  a HD handycam and a phone nowadays when you can have them all in one slim device?

This economy does have a fair bit left to run - the sons and daughters of Chad have a long walk in the dust, generations, until they reach the point where that third hovercar is just an encumbrance, but their grandchildren will get there.

The second economy is the information economy - books, music, movies and media. For a long time, people thought this was just an annex of the physical economy. From the first Bible at 30 florins to the last DVD Series Box Set at €9.99 in the bargain bin, people thought they were selling physical objects, when they were really selling the information encoded on them. By creating a finite number of copies, you could create an artificially limited supply and slip into the working patterns of the material economy without trouble.

This economy, as you may have noticed, is in trouble. Napster smashed the illusion of scarcity. Now we all understand that the marginal cost of a piece of information is zero. In the age of the eBook, no bestseller can sell out. Because humans have a herd instinct, and like to have something to talk to each other about, there are still hit singles, blockbusters and bestsellers which are valued enough that they can conceivably charge for access - some TV stations make a tidy sum charging people to view soaps online - a day early. Others services charge for convenience - it's easier to pay 99c for a song on iTunes than to hunt for a dubious download. Undercutting the whole process is open content, open to all, distributed at no cost. You may want to be paid for your column in the newspaper, but ten others behind you will blog the topic for purely for glory. Your book may be insightful and comprehensive, but I'll get the gist of the topic on Wikipedia first.

This economy will sort itself out into a working model over the next decade or two, and then hit the buffers of demand. Just like physical goods, there is a limit to what humans can consume. We can only read, watch, and listen to so much in a day. Time is finite. It doesn't matter how compelling your new album is, I'm all compelled out. I don't have time to watch TV, but I keep a list, I call it the Dribble List, of stuff I'd like to watch sometime. When I get to a stage in life when all I can do is dribble, and hit the pause button so I can make a rude suggestion to the RoboNurses, I'll catch up. Maybe.

The third economy is the experience economy. It's the holiday, the restaurant meal, the night at the theatre. It's not like the information economy, for every person having an experience there is a real, often very high, marginal cost. Supply is somewhat elastic  - new restaurants sprout remarkably quickly when the economy improves). Except sometimes it isn't - only a handful of people can climb Everest each year, there are only so many tickets for the Met, and so many unspoilt beaches. Unmet demand is enormous, as we have more and more free time, we increasingly want to do something more compelling with it than watch Big Brother, if we have the money. People in the second economy are smartly moving into the third, if they weren't there already. I'm going to a Suzanne Vega concert tomorrow. I spent more on two tickets than I would to buy her entire back catalogue, and she'll get a bigger cut out of it. Musicians will make more from concert tours, authors from public speaking engagements, TV stars will make more from stage shows and tours.

The interesting thing about these economies is they run on a system designed to manage scarcity in the first, physical economy. If there is only so much stuff to go around, then it makes sense to invent money as a measure of need, and give the stuff to the person who will give you the most. The ideas of supply and demand, fundamental to economic thought and theory, come from this economy of stuff. The rules make no sense in an information economy, where the marginal cost drops to zero. Similarly, in a world without scarcity, these rules make less sense. We have to create artificial scarcity, in a overpriced, designer limited edition batches, to keep prices up. Despite the best efforts of marketing gurus, everything can be had, in quality far better than our parents had, in the bargain warehouse, at the China price.

Healthcare is an interesting example of an experience economy which breaks our economic models. We have trouble, globally, in finding models for funding healthcare that work because our economic models simply don't work when supply is finite and at high marginal cost, but customers have no choice but to get it. You can buy rice instead of wheat, but dialysis is dialysis.

Education, particularly tertiary education, would see itself firmly in the experience economy. Tertiary education changes your brain, your heart, and often your liver. It's an real experience. Let's not forget though, that many Universities still have one large boot in the information economy. Libraries, lectures, course programmes and journals were part of the package of information you bought access to with your fees. Universities who spend a lot of effort on that need to think again. You can't make a buck on something that become free or bulk commodity, unless you have superstar lecturers, the Simon Schamas and Niall Fergusons who will by virtue of their status attract keen students and make you more marketable.

The smart move is to give the information away for free and focus on the experience. Anything else is swimming against the tide. 'Destroy your business' wrote Jack Welch, former celebrity Ego CEO of General Electric. He was wrong about a lot of things (who isn't), but right about that. What he meant was - think what a disruptive competitor could do that would put you out of business. Do it. Do it to them before they do it to you. MIT understood this when they launched their open courseware initiative. Universities who put their very best high value content up on youtube and iTunesU for free understand this. It doesn't matter if it isn't sustainable in the long term. In the long term, as Keynes put it, we're all dead. Another 15 years and the sector will be so unrecognisably scrambled that everything will be different anyway. The 21st century is like being trapped in a burning building. You might not know where to go, but you better drop and crawl as fast as you can, 'cos staying put isn't going to keep you alive for much longer.

Review: DIY U by Anya Kamenetz

"DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education", by Anya Kamenetz, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010.

This is  good introduction to the current state of tertiary education in the United States, the Open Education movement and the potential for technology driven disruption to the sector.

The book is tightly focused on the US situation, the rest of the world gets an honourable mention.

The first half is a fairly critical overview of the state of Tertiary Education in the US.  It's interesting, but the issues are not as valid for Europe where the costs are lower, and social inequality less severe. The Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) for the US is currently around 47, about the same as places like Kenya, and Jamaica, compared to 35 in Ireland, where I write, or 24 in egalitarian Denmark. The extent of the problems in the US system are alarming, and a good warning for those who might ape the American system.

Kamenetz takes the view that much of higher education in the US is a racket. High cost enforces scarcity of space at elite institutions, and filters out students from advantaged backgrounds. The Graduates from elite institutions, filtered by class and economics before their first day on campus, then proceed to do well and form the next generation of the elite. They even promote themselves on the basis of their selectivity:

 "It's like Weight watchers advertising that they only take skinny people."

The system excludes many on grounds of costs, and many more enter the system,  incur student debt and yet fail to graduate to reap the marginal benefits of a degree at a lesser college. She is critical of a system where everyone aspires to go to college, when not everyone needs to, and every college aspires to compete with Harvard. The cheap credit of the 00's drove massive expansion of student debt as people borrowed vast amounts of easy money for degrees they often never completed, driving spiralling fees as people equated cost with exclusivity and quality.

In the second half of the book she moves on to talk about solutions, driven by technology, and the Open Education movement. Why pay fees when you can get the knowledge for free? Why go to such expense to build social networks when we can build networks of people with a common interests faster and cheaper online? She correctly identifies assessment and accreditation as the critical points not easily solved online, and raises the question of whether in the internet age, online portfolios of work could replace conventional accreditation. She cites the idea of open source projects in Software, where a potential hire can be checked out in advance by the quality of their work in open source software projects. Ideas like 'Whuffie' and smart assessments get a mention too.

It's a good overview of the topic. All the main events, players and ideas, from The MIT Open Courseware through to Personal Learning Environments, The University of the People and Massive Open Online Courses are covered in brief. If you've been following thinkers like Stephen Downes, David Wiley and George Siemens online, there won't be much here that is new to you, but if you've only heard the terms Edupunk and Open Educational Resources, then it's an quick primer on what going on in the sector, and what changes it could bring.

It's short, clear and to the point. The author is a journalist not an academic, and it shows. Few academics write so clearly, most would drag it out to 400 pages to little extra effect.  Even if you are familiar with the ground, it's probably worth a read. If you are not, and have an interest, it's a good starting point.





I

The New Centre of the World

"A special report on innovation in emerging markets: The world turned upside down." Adrian Woolridge  The Economist, April 15th 2010.

This article attacks the conventional narrative of globalisation, and suggests that it is the 'emerging markets' and not the old core of developed world that is taking the lead on innovation. The old narrative was that we in the west did the smart, clever work, and places like India and China did the boring, donkey work. The iPod story is the textbook example, supposedly, of the total cost of an iPod made in China, only $4 worth is the actual assembly in China. The lions share of the cost is clever, western engineers and marketing people doing clever things that can't be done in China. Not surprisingly, it wasn't going to stay that way for long. The survey tells us how companies in 'emerging markets' driven by local problems of poverty, poor distribution and so on, are making better, cheaper and smarter products than we do in the West.

It's not in the least bit surprising. I always found the idea that the West somehow had an unassailable lead on cleverness was vaguely racist, and sloppy analysis to boot. It was dramatically disproved at Pearl Harbour (or Tsusima if you were a quick learner).

In Education the old core still has the advantage, it is alleged. The article notes that:

"McKinsey reckons that only 25% of India's engineering graduates...and 10% of those with degrees of any kind are qualified to work for a multinational company."

But that apparent advantage will erode quickly. McKinsey might not think they're good enough, but they are young, hungry and cheap. The sheer volume of graduates being produced is intimidating:

"China produces 75,000 people with higher degrees in engineering or computer science and India produces 60,000 every year"

"Between them, these two counties produce twice as many people with advanced degrees in engineering or computer sciences as the United States every year (more if you allow for the fact the 50% of American engineering degrees are awarded to foreigners, most of them Indians of Chinese)"

India and China see education as a strategic imperative, counting production of graduates as a measure of national power, as the Imperial states of Europe once counted production of Coal, Steel and Dreadnoughts. They have a steep hill to climb to build capacity, but will find workarounds. For example, article mentions the Infosys Campus in Mysore, the worlds largest corporate training facility, training 15,000 people a year. It's "harder than Harvard" notes Fortune magazine, taking only 1% of over 1 million applicants.

This kind of workaround is needed for employers to overcome poor quality and supply of graduates. The steady flow west to earn degrees in Europe or the US is another workaround for the wealthiest.  I imagine there is a lot of  other interesting approaches being taken on the ground - the scale of demand offers no alternatives. Places our parents generation associated with famine and poverty are now the worlds middle class, and in the next generation will transition from having a small minority of education to Tertiary level to majority, perhaps even universal tertiary education. Consider the effects of the (much smaller) scale of the GI Bill on tertiary education in the US as an clue of what it will bring.

Even inside the often freshly build walls of conventional universities, a radically different environment and set of drivers as this transition passes will surely create a model of tertiary education very different from what it might be in Harvard, or the Sorbonne.

The scale of the transition will define a new centre of the world in terms of Tertiary Education (and many other things). It is our first world model that will become the outlier - the unusual. Much like English has been adopted as a world language, and becomes a different, richer thing, so too in education. Innovations in practice from places like Mysore will be brought back to the old core. The language of degrees and credits will be taken up by the new, but beneath the names, built from scratch. Perhaps it will not be built as a parrot copy, but as a very different beast indeed.

The survey text is at economist.com and there is also interview with the Adrian Woolridge, who wrote the piece.

The Four Forces: Driving Change to 2100AD

Four great trends will drive change in Tertiary education to 2100. I've introduced them in previous posts, but let's take a minute to line them up:

Demographics: 10 billion, mostly old people. World population will stabilise at around 10 billion people, and they will be increasingly old. An average age of 55 is not unreasonable by 2100. Longer lifespans will bring more people back for second and third dips into tertiary education, or indeed continuous education.  Overall, the sector might be ten times as large as it is today. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a large portion of the population over 18 might be engaged, in some form, in tertiary education.

Economics: The end of scarcity. A continuation of the 20th century trend would bring another tenfold increase in per capita GDP, making the world, on average, as rich as todays richest country (Norway). Only people at the very margins of society will be unable to afford tertiary education. In the first half of the century, vast cohorts in the old 'Third World' will want, and be able to afford, University educations.

Telepresence: The Death of Distance. Increasingly compelling, immersive and reliable telepresent environments will render the idea of bringing people together in one physical space for education or work a quaint anachronism. Teams or classes may come together once or twice a year, for novelties sake, but true telepresence will make geographic distance as old fashioned an idea as posting personal correspondence in physical mail..

Artificial Intelligence: Smarts too cheap to meter. The steady process of Moores law will create machines with processing power to match the human mind relatively early in the century. Distributed processing will allow systems to draw on immense processing power when needed, and present machines as cheaper alternatives to most jobs currently done by humans. User interfaces that can pass a Turing test will make machine staff indistinguishable from humans. Why hire a human receptionist to answer the phone when the phone comes a processor that can do the job, that doesn't need coffee. When a 1000 euro machine is smarter than anyone you can hire, why hire anyone? The consequences for economics and employment is staggering, and managing the transition will be a huge issue from mid century on.

These are simple extrapolations of well established trends, none of which have any major roadblocks in sight. It's difficult to make a compelling case against any of them. As of 2010, these trends have massive inertia behind them -it's difficult to imagine what scale of events could derail them.

That's not to say that nothing else will happen. Few in 1900 would have predicted the ubiquity of Automobiles, air travel or the Internet. But in 1900, the key trends that set the tone of the 20th century - population growth, economic growth and urbanisation, were in motion. Geopolitical events (like the world wars) could not have been forecast in detail, but the logic of industrialisation made it inevitable that great power wars would get bigger, and worse, until they became so destructive and expensive as to be not worth the risk. We could not have predicted the 747, but we could have predicted that economic growth would have made international travel relatively cheap and easy - we might have predicted a super Zeppelin.

Having mapped out these trends, the challenge now is to figure out what the consequences of these trends are for Tertiary Education, not just in isolation, but as these trends interact and interlock. The second challenge is that the future is not path independent. We don't just wake up in 2100, with institutions and people perfectly attuned to it, no more than our institutions  and peopel in 2010 are perfect fits for the world today. As the century plays out, existing institutions will adapt, or maladapt to the changes. Peoples ideas and preconceptions will change, but only in generational slow time. The future is not a destination everyone arrives at once, it's kind of smeared out, as William Gibson said:

"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed"

Live Long and Prosper: Universities at the end of History.

Gapminder.org is great chart candy. Check out this one. Behind the lovely bouncing balls of that linked chart is a fantastic story. Per capita GDP increased by a factor of 10 between 1900 and 2000, despite a great depression, two world wars and the Spanish flu, and all the other ails and woes of the 20th century.  Not only is he richer, but Mr Joe Average Earthling lives much longer than in 1900, and can expect to have less children, and have them all outlive him. It's a remarkable achievement that never makes the newspapers. Quiet victories, won at a few percent a year, don't make headlines.

Extrapolate the graph a bit and by 2100, as the worlds population begins to shrink, Earth will have about 10 billion people with an average per capita GDP in today's money a little shy of 100,000 US Dollars. This is staggering wealth. Only Norway and Luxembourg have numbers like this today. Imagine a whole world, on average, as rich as Norwegians.

The importance of GDP per capita is hotly debated by economists who live in economies with high GDPs per capita. Drawing on their excellent education, they argue it isn't really a good measure of social progress. In warm, comfortable well equipped offices they debate the hidden costs of economic growth. The healthy, long lived, well fed and educated grandchildren of todays 'bottom billion' can debate the matter in 2100.

It sounds like Utopia, the real end of History, the land of plenty. There are plenty of 'black swans': rare events that could be imagined, but given that this vision is just an extrapolation of what happened in the 20th century, we could waste a couple of decades in brutal warfare, have a good plague and throw a few nukes around and still reach the target. Global warming at the extreme end is about the only scenario that could derail the sheer inertia of the trend.

What place will Universities have in this new Utopia? An obvious answer is 'About the same as in Norway' but this isn't so. The currently developed world grew rather slowly at first. Many of it's universities existed in seed form for a long time. When mass tertiary education arrived after the second world war, preexisting institutions grew rapidly to soak the numbers, on a substrate of fairly good infrastructure at secondary and primary level.

The big developing economies are growing faster than the first world did. Places like China, India, Nigeria, Indonesia have huge populations on the cusp of a point where they will need, and their people will demand, tertiary educations. The sizes of the potential cohorts in these countries is staggering. Conventional university models will be simply crushed by the volumes. Even if you could build campuses big enough, fast enough, who would teach the classes? In conventional models, it takes 8 years to turn a smart first year undergraduate into a keen junior lecturer - and the smartest graduates will get a lot of better offers. Expect academics from the first world, with longer pedigrees that may sell well locally, to be poached.

It's in this climate, not in the mature first world markets, that online learning, distance learning and open courseware models will really find traction. Without strong existing cartels fighting for an 18th century status quo, college educated parents and employers with old fangled notions of what a degree should involve, and with huge incentives to deliver, governments in these countries can, and must, leapfrog the current model of a University into something new.

To see the model for the future of Tertiary Education, look south.