Today I was reading some old new stories about how several of the top colleges around the world are aiming to become global universities, imparting quality education at several places across the world. Examples abound, with Carnegie-Mellon and Harvard globally, and in India, SP Jain with its Singapore Centre, and IIM Bangalore with its planned Singapore centre.

The question that has to be asked though is whether the universities are truly becoming global, or whether the universities are trying to tap into the global brand that they seem to have acquired; almost by accident. An example is George Mason University, that launched an overseas subsidiary in one of the Emirate states (I don’t quite remember which one). With local faculty, and funding from the Emirate itself, the only way the brand is able to sell itself is by claiming that the course curriculum is based on the United States curriculum. But you have to consider whether a course that is designed for students in the United States can be directly imported to another country and culture.

In order for a brand to succeed and be sustainable, it requires to deliver profitable value over a long period of time. So, the brand should make the user pay a premium for the benefits the user perceives he/she gets from it. In educational institutions, I find it hard to believe that institutions can deliver equivalent value. Standardization has not yet managed to go far enough that curriculum and teaching styles can remain constant, or even consistent across the world.

Having said this, can we make this statement reversible. IF the problem is one of distance and cultural difficulties in curriculum, it should be possible to set up education franchisee networks over a region or area that is homogenous. And this seems to be true. This is most visible in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where the Higher Secondary (Grade 11-12) education system is highly corporatised. Here, a Nalanda institution can replicate its business model in IIT mad AP, and try to standardize a curriculum to suit the requirements of its students.

In fact, I have heard that this education has its own tiered system, where students are evaluated on their ability and put into seperate streams to tackle entrance exams of varying levels of difficulty, with the créme de la créme heading for the IIT JEE.

The rights and wrongs of typecasting students who are 15-16 years old are not being debated here. But these education franchisees are rapidly becoming factories, where at one end, you put in a 15 year old, and the other end you get a 17-18 year old entrance exam taking machine.

The education sector is yet another service sector. And if the Software Services Sector can use metrics that ensure repeatable service delivery, should education be far behind? As of now, the local delivery model has been perfected in certain areas. At the end though, I will leave this post with a quote from Oscar Wilde,

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education“