Rebranding the Dead Horse: A Higher Education Strategy
Rebranding the Dead Horse: A Higher Education Strategy
Everyone knows it stopped breathing somewhere
around the third accreditation cycle, but nobody is brave enough to dismount.
Instead, the management proudly buys it a designer saddle labelled Innovation
Ecosystem and announces it in a glossy brochure.
When students stop
believing in learning and start believing only in placement posters, the
response is swift: change the rider. A new batch of students is recruited with
even shinier promises. When they also look confused, the faculty is sent to a
development program titled How to Ride Faster Horses in the Digital Age. The horse, meanwhile, remains
gloriously deceased.
Placements are
transformed into a carefully staged institutional ritual. A startup consisting
of three employees and a single operational laptop is elevated to the status of
an Entrepreneurial
Ecosystem Partner. Students are systematically encouraged to accept
any available offer, with lower compensation packages reframed as learning oriented
career entry points.
In cases where placement outcomes fall short of declared targets, the explanatory
framework shifts toward individual deficiency. Students are diagnosed with
inadequate communication competence, insufficient aptitude, weak professional
orientation, or limited employability skills. Corrective interventions are promptly prescribed in the form of
soft skill modules, mock interviews, and personality development workshops. Questions
about whether the curriculum actually matches job requirements, whether the
recruiting companies are genuine, or whether the institution’s training is
effective are quietly ignored. The system is declared perfect.
Innovation
cells are launched every semester, usually in the same room with a new
banner. Hackathons are conducted
where the prize is a certificate and the innovation is a PowerPoint slide
titled AI-Based
Solution for Everything.
Research
output grows not in quality but in quantity, like fast food papers served
with a side of plagiarism check.
Rankings are treated like astrology. If
the position improves, it is proof of academic excellence. If it falls, the
methodology is flawed, biased, and clearly anti-national. Accreditation visits
become spiritual retreats: walls are repainted, files are printed, and suddenly
everyone believes in outcomes based
education for exactly three days.
Student welfare is
addressed through motivational speeches
about resilience, while faculty welfare is handled through circulars on
discipline. Everyone is encouraged to be
world class using third class infrastructure and fourth class salaries.
And when someone
quietly suggests, “Maybe the horse is
dead… maybe we should rethink the system,” a committee is formed to study
the issue. After six months, the report confirms what everyone knew on day one:
the horse is indeed dead but with proper training, it might still win the race.
So the institution
proudly announces New Vision. New
Mission. New Framework. Same Horse.
The tragedy is not
that the horse is dead.
The tragedy is that the riders are still busy adjusting the saddle, taking
selfies, and claiming they have reached the destination while standing
perfectly still.
In higher education, realism is optional. Rankings are
reality.
And the
dead horse?
It has been promoted to Strategic Academic Model.
Crafted By:
UNSTOP - https://unstop.com/u/sanjetha88702
LINKEDIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drsanjeevkumarthalari/
ORCID - https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1634-6017
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