Reimagining higher education for a digital future

This statement can be interpreted in many ways. Including taking an extreme negative view of college degrees. But that’s not the idea behind this essay. This is more about how the rules of higher education, and their connect with industry jobs is changing. Of course, a good university education serves several social purposes. If we look back, there was a time when large companies installed big enterprise level software at huge cost and spent bigtime to maintain the same. However, today everything is getting smarter. Digital tools of smaller size that cost a fraction of what it did in the past, do the same job in the enterprise. At a global level, as Weiner’s statement above shows, people with MBAs from global schools would be hired at big cost and trained in certain domains, again at a large cost. However today industry – led by digital (such as Cloud Computing, social, mobile, Big Data or smart manufacturing) is looking at much different set of people as employees. This means a new set of competencies are expected at the workplace. ” So what are the millennial generation students doing? They look beyond colleges to gain new and relevant knowledge. Internet and high bandwidth mobile devices are helping them connect with industry experts and professionals to gain contemporary knowledge. Private companies offer industry-validated courses that provide relevant competencies and specific learning experiences. Big Data, network security, 3D printing, UX design, graphics and animation, are such courses which college students and working professionals are enrolling for to gain the new competencies for a digital era. 

Yes. While 3 or 4 year college degree programmes will dominate higher education, but if that is not going to a job, their value proposition for students will come down. In the last two years we see that industry hiring is coming down across sectors. Traditional jobs are getting replaced by automation and robotics. This “disenfranchisement” of graduates by a competence based knowledge economy, driven by digital can lead to serious social problems. 

One way forward is to measure the gap between people skills and what market demands and then reskill existing staff to meet present and future jobs. Secondly, universities have to create a new capability for continuous teaching and learning. They have to design programmes that provide measurable competencies to the youth at different points of their learning journey. Students should be able to move in and out of college to get skills or reskilled by discreet package of courses that combine knowledge, relevant competencies and higher order thinking skills. 

People should be able to take a series of certifications to find a career. To put it concisely, continuous learning and constant certification result in reskilling. The price of not doing this – at least for addressing people who enrol in college for jobs and careers – can be a big drag on the economy, as degrees will remain costly, students will burdened with education loans and industry will keep spending to build competencies of its employees. Clearly, the time for reimagining certain parts of university education is upon us.