Experiments in Higher Education Worldwide
Future of higher education around the world
Dear readers,
I write this newsletter once every month or so. It features my reflections on the deployment of creativity to making the world’s economic systems (and by extension social and to some extent political systems) more inclusive and, therefore, fairer. That sounds like a tall order – and it is!
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Senior scholars at Harvard University – the historian of China, Bill Kirby, and the educator Howard Gardner – invited me to participate in a multi-year symposium on the future of higher education around the world. Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, has just published the special issue https://rb.gy/cdgnap.
I found myself reflecting on the myriad experiments geared towards catering to those who traditionally have not been able to access university education meaningfully. Technology plays a role as in the essays on MOOCs and on Minerva University, where experiments with online education have proliferated. Geographic expansion opens up higher education – including experimentation with liberal arts – for newer populations. Harvard alum Kamal Ahmad describes Bangladesh’s Asian University for Women, and my colleague Mariet Westermann, former New York University Provost and now director of the Guggenheim Museum, details how NYU Abu Dhabi, a collaboration between the University and the Emirate, caters to broad swathes of the youth of the global south.
My own essay https://rb.gy/jr6vpk is on the promise and limitations of private sector universities in India. These have provided exciting new avenues for a country where the higher education enrollment ratio is far too low. I found the special issue’s detailing of global experiments enthralling, much to learn from those that have worked, as well as from those that proved challenging.
