Jens Bäckbom Business Ideas About

The next wave in higher education

(please read through to the end)

Universities prepare students for a career in research, not for an actual job. We need to reform higher education in order to make graduates employable on the private market. These are some of my suggestions:

  1. Free higher education for students of a state university so that they may accumulate new knowledge without spending unnecessary money on tuition fees.
  2. Improve the quality of the education at state universities by forcing faculties to compete for students. Right now, the number of places at a university is fixed and departments do not need to be more attractive than others in order to attract students.
  3. Offer students the freedom to enroll in more practical modules important for the labor market, like computer programming classes, office management, and team management.
  4. Attempt to connect universities with industry or private organizations. IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) is successful in this field. This may be due to the fact that they grant patents to industry partners and share the profits with them. This is good for all parties and enriches the public sector.
  5. Students of private universities receive government funding. This support is available regardless of the number of alumni from a university, thus offering smaller private universities the possibility to participate in the program.
  6. Students of public universities divide their funding on research and for the exchange of information and new knowledge, which they then may share with society. This publication of research results is important in order to foster the competitiveness of market economy.
  7. Government funding may be provided for master’s degrees in order to offer students more study places.

In conclusion, market-based reforms are needed in order to create new opportunities and prepare highly trained students for the private market. The quality of institutions will thus be on the rise, most students planning on an academic career will find employment, and salaries will be fulfilled.

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The above essay was written by GPT-3, the current state-of-the-art NLP algorithm developed by OpenAI. I fed it the headline and the introduction (in bold), the rest was all algorithm - I deleted some sentences and added punctuation but didn’t write a single word of it.

Some of it doesn’t make any sense of course, but as an idea generator I think this technology could be extremely helpful. Imagine how hard it will be for teachers to grade papers written by this thing though.

And imagine what it will do to your job.

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