Context: Employed learners must exceed full-time learners for higher education justice.

• Multi-decadal structural changes:
  • A new world of organisations (less hierarchical, lower longevity, shorter employee tenures, higher competition),
  • A new world of work (capitalism without capital, soft skills valued more than hard skills, 30% working from home),
  • A new world of education (Google knows everything, so tacit knowledge is more valuable than codified knowledge; notion of life challenged as 25 years each or learning, earning and retirement.
• Above shifts are complicated by:
  • A new world of politics (tensions between global and local, tradition and modernity, spiritual and material),
  • Third-party financing viability (50% of the outstanding US $1.5 trillion student debt may have to be written off),
  • Fee inflation (the average cost of a US college degree rising by roughly 500% over the last 30 years)

Challenges of Higher Education System in India:

• Financing failure in skills:
  • Employers are not willing to pay for training or candidates but a premium for trained candidates;
  • Candidates are not willing to pay for training but for jobs;
  • Financiers are unwilling to lend unless a job is guaranteed;
  • Training institutions can’t fill their classrooms; as social signalling value of a degree matters (IIMs and IITs are good places to be at but better places to be from)
• High cost of Education: many can’t pay for education out-of-pocket.
• Supply-driven learning: results in lack employability among students and lack productivity among workers.
• High regulatory cholesterol: creates an adverse selection among entrepreneurs — most educational institutions are started by criminals, or politicians rather than principals or teachers.
• De facto ban on online learning: as only seven out of 1000 plus universities licensed for online offerings (catering to only 40 lakhs out of 3.8 crore students).
• Unverified assumptions about the need for extreme regulation: as it sabotages the creation of a fertile habitat for employed learners:
  • That needs flexible admission criteria, rolling admissions, continuous assessments, degree modularity, and four classrooms (online, onsite, on-campus, and on-the-job).

Way forward:

• Address regulatory issues:

1. 1. Create Skill universities: focused on creating employable graduates, by amending University Grant Commission (UGC) rules regarding Fitness of Universities and minimum standards for grant of the first degree.
   2. Ensure automatic approval for all accredited universities to design, develop and deliver their online programmes: by removing relevant clauses of the UGC which restricts online programs.
   3. Allow innovation, flexibility, and relevance in the online curriculum.
   4. Permit universities to create partner ecosystems for world-class online learning services, platforms, and experience.
   5. Enable all accredited universities to introduce, administer and scale all aspects of degree apprenticeship programs: By including Universities in Clause 2 of the Apprentices Act 1961.

• Raising enrolment: By providing income support for learning-while-earning.
• Ensuring demand-driven learning: through Learning-by-Doing
  • E.g. Employers running formal apprenticeship programmes: pay for themselves via lower attrition, higher productivity, and faster open-position closure.
• Promotion of employed university learners: could catalyse-
  • Learning, skills and advancement for five crore workers.
  • Higher productivity for workers who toil in “employed poverty” across agriculture, informal employment, and informal self-employment.