the nearly-free university & the neofeudal higher education cartel

Guest blog post from OfTwoMinds.com of Charles Hugh Smith with an interesting take on Higher Ed.

The blog post was titled as 'The Nearly-Free University' and is sure to stir up some opposition to the complimentary course provisions from the likes of NYU (Read Damodaran), Stanford, and MIT who contribute to Open Course Ware motion (read OCW consortium).

http://www.oftwominds.com/blognov12/nearly-free-university11-12.html

Although this is a radical point of view, it is not a radically new opinion because a similar opinion was presented by NYU's Aswath Damodaran here where he argued that the monopoly based university business model is a failure.

The guest post is highlighting a new trend, which will take time to establish. The displacement of this cartel will take significant time - may be even decades. However, if debt were to shape up the US as it is attempting to shape up the EU region, then the displacement may be expedited.

As an extension to this vision, it is possible that higher education in US will have majority of foreign buyers. Already, there are rants, which are going viral, about 'Asians in the library'

Although the government is actively dissuading the foreign buyers (amounting to $23 billion in just tuition fees) through a policy-oriented attack, they will still come in hoards. Read an article from The Economist here with a sub-text that shutting out foreign brains is a good way to foster mediocrity.

Enjoy the read. Leave a comment or two if you like.

...truly world class? forex prudence is missing...

For Indian service providers to become truly world class, they will need to spend on in-house forex talent. Check out this case where the story suggests "Nishar said that company does not have have any in house expertise to enter into forex deals." from the cnbc article.

This indicates low risk-management maturity of the vendor. If the earnings are in USD and costs are in INR then one cannot ignore forex. In the past, I had blogged about how Infy couldn't manage its forex here.

I extend this hypothesis of managing forex better to any Indian exporter. If you want to have a sustainable business in a global economy, you must have economists and forex specialists at your disposal.

Business case for forex specialists?
Now, in case of Hexaware, Nishar can argue that he cannot afford to have a full-time position for just forex as Hexaware is relatively small. This observation leads to business-case for forex consultants. I am not talking about forex-agents, who sometimes claim to be forex consultants. I am talking about hardcore economists or forex specialists.

Govt intervention?
For India to be truly world class with the nature of companies it is coming out with, GoI policies need to incentivize forex education initially. Traditionally, everyone has been focussed on engineering and medical to such an extent that there is huge dearth of these other functions' personnel.