Education As A Commodity(EaaC)

Hola! I hope you're doing fine. That is if you still survived the after effects of my last blog. I don't want to brag but sometimes reality can tickle our funny bones or disturb us. Today I plan to discuss something that I've been watching over the last one decade or so and is seemingly mind boggling. Well you guesed it right- I am going to talk about the commoditization of education. The reason I am writing this is because education in India today has been commoditized , thanks to forces of capitalism. I have absolutely no problem with that. My problem stems from the fact that education in today's world has lost its sheen or its purpose. Obviously education is a broad field and I can't really cover every aspect of it in a blog with 2000 words, so I will take the liberty of talking about technology education and a bit of management education. We all know for a fact that a majority of engineers and managers in this country hail from so called 'Private Colleges'. Now I don't want to shy away from mentioning private colleges is because I too am a by product of a college that took pride in calling itself the holy grail of research. Little did we realise that we were the guninea pigs they were experiementing on. But then that isn't what I plan to talk about in this blog. Maybe I will write a different essay to talk about the state of undergrad education in India. I had written an essay on the state of private engineering colleges earlier(forgive me if you find anything amateurish).

Coming back to the point. I was just passing through Outer ring Road and the scary traffic it brings along and I passed by a few billboards which were asking professionals to come and join their courses on Data Science and get guaranteed placement. Then there was an ad on a newspaper where the education company confidently bragged, how it can make a data scientist out of you in three months. Every now and then I receive emails from a company that has tied up with an Ivy League to provide certifications in data science, machine learning, blockchain, IoT(Internet of Things), VR, AR, full stack programming. There are MOOCs(Massive Open Online Courses) that are now charging a bare minimum money and provide you quality courses on technology, management and several other specializations. The lastest trend that I have lately seen is that some of the top management or technology schools in India have tied up with private vendors and are providing upskilling courses on the same. It's exponentially more larger than one can imagine. But before we dig deep and arrive at a conclusion, let me recite the story of a friend who fell a victim to such shameless or rather black hat marketing in a bid to fast track his career.

Now this friend of mine had an MBA degree and was comfortably placed in a Services company for a close to a decade. In that meanwhile he elevated to the ranks of a Delivery Manager, assumedly a senior designation. His job involved people management with little to no use of Microsoft applications. He found himself devoid of any real world skills as the world started moving fast. For a good amount of time he didn't really understand what he should do. He tried talking to a few folks in his company and they said something about data science. He didn't really know anything about data science so he googled and read extensively about it. He realised that its one of the most lucrative careers in the 21st century and pays a premium. After a few days, he was sold out on data science. He believed he could grow exponentially if somehow he managed to get into one of these courses. He did some digging and found out about an institute that was the talk of the town everywhere.

One could spot their mountain sized billboards all over HSR Layout. The course they were running for data science was worth INR 300,000. He did not have that kinda money with him since he had a family to fend for. So the next obvious step for him, was to knock the bank's doors and apply for a loan with a 12 percent interest. He went ahead and secured a loan and paid up for the data science course. Three weeks into the course he realised, he did not have it in him, to cut it for a top data scientist job. He had no programming background and found running Python or R quite a difficult task despite of a refresher course on Python and R. He did understand the stats and the math part but he clearly did not understand how they could be applied in the context of real world problems. He struggled hard to finish the course and flunked a few tests that were meant to test your technical acumen. Although he completed the course and got a degree certificate, it did not help him much. With the level of knowledge he had, he couldn't get an adequate data science portfolio in his company or outside. He realised he didn't know how to use his newfound knowledge to solve real world problems. Eventually he moved to sales and now he is trying to use his sales chops to crack deals for his company.

The above use case is one among the dozen or more that I have seen over the last 5 years. Technology seems to move at an exponential pace. Most people in India, who at one point in time had elevated to senior positions that mostly required people management and bare minimum technical skills, find themselves in a quagmire. What is disturbing though is that the gap between the skilled vs non skilled is becoming increasingly large. It has more to do with a technology ecosystem that did not spell out the importance of skill building. It did not invest in upskilling their staff and teaching them the skills that the global market required. I would have spoken to a lot of senior executives and all of them seemed to agree on the aforementioned. Let us now take a look at why that happened?

Let us talk about the career of a technology guy who was hired as an engineer. He went forth and climbed the corporate hierarchy and reached middle management after a decade and then perhaps moved to climbing one or two more steps before he found himself stagnated. What is noteworthy is that whatever technical skills he had at a point in time are not relevant today and he is devoid of the skills to move up in the corporate pyramid. That is exactly what millions in India face as we are speaking. At that point in time, many people seem eternally confused about theit careers. They have absolutely no clue about the next steps. No one in the vicinity seems to have the faintest idea about the path to glory. That is what prompts people like my friend to go for courses without giving it a thought and in the process pay heavy premiums. But why is this happening and what could one do to nullify the problem?

Let me show you the resumes of one of my favourite people Gayle Laakman McDowell- an authority on technology recruitment. Millions have bought Gayle's books on technolgy interviews and product management interviews. Take a look

Now take a look at Ambarish Kenghe's resume who headed the Google chromecast project and is currently spearheading Google Pay.

What made them widely successful is the amount of accomplishments that their profiles contain. But is that what makes them successful or is it more to it? Well it doesn't end here. This is still a hypothesis and I don't have empirical data large enough to substantiate it as a fact but I believe that most successful people had a specialisation in a specific subject. Take for instance Marissa Mayer who had a specialisation in symbolic systems. After joining Google she discovered she had a better shot as a product person than an engineer, thanks to her specialisation. Most successful people tend to be experts in a specific field and then move quite fast up the ladder Might sound cliched but the Gladwelian 10000 hour rule holds. Peter Norvig in his cult essay also elaborates on the same in the context of programming.

If you look at any successful product person or entrepreneur, you'd find that they had a specialisation in a specific subject and moved on to do great in their careers because of that skill they gained expertise in. Steve Jobs took a course in calligraphy that turned him into a design fanatic. Elon Musk from quite an early age took to computers(because of excessive bullying at school and abuse at home) and started building software and selling them. Even for guys who are successful and followed the normal pedigree based route, they all managed to get a specialisation in their post grads on a subject of their choice and then eventually moved to do jobs that used that type of specialisation and the corrresponding skills. Look at Tracy Chou's career curve who manged to grab eyeballs as a poster girl for gender diversity in the Bay Area. She was an ace programmer and worked with some of the top companies in the valley where she got a chance to apply her skills to solve problems. As her career progressed she had all the chops a technology jobs requires. Same holds true for Ruchi Sanghvi, who was apparently the first female engineer Facebook hired. She helped build a host of features that attracted a lot of users to the platform in the initial days. Again Ruchi had used her skills that she had learnt in her specialisation and nothing better than a social network trying hard to scale up and become big.

From the above examples it is evidently clear that subject matter expertise is butt essential in today's world. Unfortunately most people who come out of normal colleges don't seem to either have subject matter expertise in their respective fields or don't go for higher studies. Most people learn about technolgy on the job.Whatever they learn is good enough to do a job but not great enough to do a complex tasks. In computation if you look at the numbers, you'd find that less than 10 percent understand system side programming. I haven't met students or professionals who ever tried building an operating system or a compiler. I am yet to meet people who designed a search engine in their under grads. Most people I have spoken with don't understand alogorithms that well. Traveling Salesman still puzzles a lot of people. Not many professionals understand finite state automata or Turing systems. Even in a programming job the difference between a great programmer and a good programmer is a factor of 100X or 1000X. The high notes that some of the greatest programmers touch is not quite possible for even good engineers with decent technical skills. Now imagine this theory relevant to millions of people in the technology industry who find themselves at existential crisis after spending a decade in the industry. Neither they have the skills required to do cutting edge work nor any necessary accomplishments that could help them steer ahead in their respective careers. How many people are as good as Tracy Chou or Ruchi Sanghvi or Marissa Mayer? A slim percentage. Topcoder or Github stats are dismal when it comes to India.

It's become an epidemic of sorts. Gurus of Indian technical education system never even in their wildest dreams envisioned they would let the genie of mediocrity out by not focusing on excellence. Reminds me of this famous scene from '3 idiots'. Aamir Khan might have unknowingly explained the reason behind the current crisis. Take a look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYx27wWySjI

Most people like my friend in their late thirties realise they really do not have any tangible skills to progress their career further. Call it midlife crisis or whatever you want but it is the sole reason why people tend to go for courses to fill this deficit. The problem is a systemic anomaly. It cannot be solved by temporary workarounds. I have to admit that our education system has failed to instill the necessary skills required to be problem solvers. Remember watching this interview where Musk talks about a school he has created for his kids where kids are taught to solve problems. Take a look at this interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STt0dpgn900

Unlike a lot of students in the West who acquire problem solving skills through their specialisations and the innumerable industry based problems they solve in their internships or as part of an assignment or a hackathon, in India the ability to understand a problem and solve it either using algorithmic thinking or brute force is close to minimal. Most people don't really know how to solve problems. The reason could be attributed to false metrics like grades, degrees, certificates, salaries etc that promote a zero sum game and triggers a rat race. The problem however with a rat race is that even if you win you're still a rat. At one point in time the rat finds out about his true personality and then starts the infinite struggle to upskill and grow. The problem is, its not that easy to do that then with so much going around in your life.

The problem is multidimensional in nature. One part of that has to do with the Indian notion that there is an age for learning and once you cross your 30s, your time should be invested in growing in your jobs and fending for your family. So most people aren't willing to learn new skills. They aren't curious about the application of those skills to solve problems. The other part has to do with self discovery of what skills they like,instead of what skills other people are acquiring. Its a personal choice. Some people like to speak and want to learn public speaking skills. Some people like to lead and go to B-Schools to learn leadership skills(although that is a waste since leadership which has more to do with empathy cannot be typically taught to anyone). The third and most important part would be to find a place where one can learn the skills one wants. That is where a lot of people fall victim to chop shops selling education as a commodity.

Surprisingly such education chop shops have mushroomed over the years. They pick on the latest fads and trends and start offerings that tend to cater to the current demand. I remember a conversation I had once with a telecaller from one of these chop shops. He was trying hard to sell me a data science online course and when I refused and wouldn't budge from my stand, he offered me the same course at half the price. Skill based education in India has become a commodity. Thanks to the marketing dollars these chop shops spend on adverstising themselves, most professionals feel such courses could help them get the next big gig. As Theodre Levitt once said that people are not looking for a quarter inch drill but a quarter inch hole. So what matters is skills related to a specialisation, one has interest in. It's not an easy task and sometimes most can't quite figure it out. That vulnerability is what most chop shops prey on. They create these illusions and cook up numbers that show the number of people who did data science courses and managed to grab a job. That notion reeks extensively of survivorship bias as there are thousands of people who did data science courses and still couldn't get a decent job as a data scientist.

Problem is that education today has lost the altrustic value or sense it once held. It has become a commodity than an experience that can change your life. Its just another capitalsitic product targeted at making more money for the capitalist. Unlike Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, who genuinely wanted to teach young people mathematics in a simple fashion, our colleges and universities have shifted their focus from value or the outcome of education to their bottomlines. Every now and then I see an Ivy League or a renowned university talking about a crash course in technology or management. The courses are exorbitantantly priced and the value is expressed in terms of a degree certificate, an official email ID, a peer network of fellow students and alumni. Surprisingly Indians as creatures obsessed with degrees spend such exorbitant amount of money to be a part of such programs. Most of them realise in due time that they have been bamboozled. Add to that the fact that now they have an additional EMI to pay and the picture suddenly turns grim.

As much as capitalism is needed for running a business, what is more important is the value it provides its customers. Even if we view education as a business, it has to help its customers generate viable outcomes. It has to be an experience that prepares them for all the variables they will encounter in real time. I recently spoke to a researcher who has worked in fluid dynamics his entire life. He has extensively used data to understand fluid motion in his experiments. Most of his research has consumed large datasets over the years to produce an outcome that benefited a lot of companies around the world. He told me that if he were to rate his skills in data science on a scale of 1 to 10, he would perhaps rate himself as 4 or 5. A programming genius and a day time fluid dynamics researcher who has been dabbling in data for close to 20 years cannot claim with confidence that he is a 10 out of 10 in data science then how can institutes or chop shops create a data scientist in 3 months. There is another angle to it. That lies in the irrational job descriptions. Have you ever taken a look at the JD of a company looking for a data scientist. Take a look.

Is this the job description for a single data scientist or a team of data scientists as one thing is for sure. No one on the planet can know all these. Such irrational job descriptions trigger courses that ludicrously claim to convert a non skilled person like my friend to a data scientist in 3 months. Once the course is over , the students realise they have been made. By then its too late to do anything concrete other than putting lacklustre reviews on social media and fretting about it for the rest of your life.

In a time when we are actively marching towards an innovation economy and when the gig economy in today's market has crossed North of 200 B USD, existential crisis is just a few doors away for a majority of people who will go completely jobless in 10 years or so.The reason has nothing to with automation. Automation is natural progression for the technology industry that relied too long on human labour with limited skills. Now when computating power has become cheap, a lot of manual labour can be reduced by automating them. Does this remind you of this famous scene from 'Office Space' ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0tpjs8zflQ

A lot of jobs that were shamelessly paying people for menial jobs inherently simpler in nature would be automated in the next 5 to 10 years. Add the progress in machine learning and its subset deep learning and you could perhaps have sentient AI that could cut down on the bias humans have and use emotions to make decisions far more effective than humans and can work 24* 7 without an element of fatigue unlike humans. Of course its right out of a dystopian world defined in 'Westworld'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEkZdgWu7mM

That speaks volumes about the disaster we are about to face if our current establishment and the industry does not acknowledge the imminent threat we are about to face. Having said that there is still time for educators to focus on outcomes than irrelevant false positives that don't guarantee success. Question is- how prepared is the audience when it comes to working hard to become an expert as opposed to pushing another degree under their belts? The choice is simple- Be smart or perish.