UUniversity Without Universities

For most of the last three centuries, the university has been the institution that produced, certified, and gatekept advanced professional knowledge. The model has served the world well in many respects. It produced reliable cohorts of competent professionals. It created durable communities of scholarly inquiry. It mediated, imperfectly but consistently, the transition from generalist citizen to specialist practitioner. The model is not going to disappear, and the analysis that follows is not an argument for its disappearance.

The model has, however, acquired a set of structural problems that make it an increasingly poor fit for a substantial fraction of the professional learning that working adults need over the course of their careers. The university's clock is annual. The university's certification is heavy. The university's curriculum updates slowly. The university's geography is fixed. The university's cost has, in many parts of the world, risen faster than the value it produces.

For young adults entering the workforce, the trade-offs of the university are still favorable in most career paths. For working adults already in the workforce, the trade-offs are often unfavorable, and the gap has been growing. A working professional who wants to acquire a new skill, deepen an existing skill, or pivot into a related field cannot, in most cases, productively go back to a university. The university is not designed for them. The thing they need is something else.

That something else is what I am calling, somewhat provocatively, the university without universities, a learning infrastructure that does the things the university does well, without inheriting the things the university does poorly.

¶What the university does well

To design a substitute properly, the things the university does well have to be named clearly. The university provides a credentialing function that signals to employers and partners that the holder has reached a certain level. The university provides a curated cohort of peers at similar career stages. The university provides access to a senior cohort of scholars who can guide the learner's intellectual development. The university provides a structured curriculum that sequences the learner's exposure to the field. The university provides a physical and intellectual space where the learning happens, separated from the demands of everyday work.

Each of these functions has, in the last decade, become substitutable by alternative infrastructure for many adult learners. The credentialing function is increasingly substituted by demonstrated work in public, open-source contributions, public writing, project portfolios, vouches from respected peers. The peer cohort is substituted by community membership and cohort-based courses. The senior cohort is substituted by community-mediated mentorship. The structured curriculum is substituted by sequenced workshops and reading groups. The space is substituted by online and in-person community infrastructure.

¶How the combination works

The community-based learning infrastructure, taken as a whole, looks like this. A serious professional community provides the membership and the trust-density. Inside the community, smaller cohorts, tables, workshops, study groups, provide the cohort function. The community's senior members provide the mentor function, both formally through assigned pairings and informally through ongoing participation. The community's curriculum is the cumulative library of Asks, workshops, and reading groups that the community has produced over its history. The community's credentialing is the public record of the member's contributions, vouches, and demonstrated work.

The combination is not equivalent to a university in every respect. The credentialing is less branded, less standardized, and less universally legible. The curriculum is less comprehensive in its coverage of foundational material. The senior cohort is less formally structured. The combination is, however, more flexible, more current, more responsive to the actual needs of working adults, and less expensive by one to two orders of magnitude. For the adult who has already received the foundational university education and is now in the long professional life that follows, the combination is, increasingly, the better infrastructure.

¶The Indian context

In an Indian context, the case for the community-based alternative is sharpened by several local realities. The Indian university system is, with a few notable exceptions, struggling to keep up with the rate of change in many fields. The Indian working adult does not have the time or money for a serious return to university in most cases. The Indian professional network is, by historical pattern, community-mediated rather than institution-mediated, caste networks, alumni networks, regional networks, and now intentional professional networks all carry more of the trust load than the university's brand does.

The opportunity for India is to build a community-based learning infrastructure that explicitly takes on the post-university professional development work that the country's universities are not currently set up to do. This is not a critique of the universities; it is a recognition that the work is large enough that even a well-functioning university system would benefit from a community-based infrastructure running alongside it. The community is not a replacement for the university for young adults. The community is the parallel infrastructure for adult learners that the university was never going to provide.

¶What this looks like in practice

The university-without-universities, in its practical form, looks like this for a serious mid-career professional. The professional is a member of two or three relevant communities. The professional attends three or four workshops a year in their field. The professional participates in a standing table that meets monthly. The professional has a small number of ongoing mentorships, both as mentor and as mentee. The professional contributes regularly to the community's library of public work, Asks answered, essays written, workshops hosted. Over five years, the professional has produced a body of public work that constitutes their de facto credential, and a network of community relationships that constitutes their de facto cohort.

This is, by any honest measure, an education. It does not produce a certificate. It does produce competence, network, and standing in the profession. For many professional fields, those three are what the credential is supposed to signal anyway. The community-based alternative gets to them directly.

¶The future of the credential

The credential is not going to disappear. For some careers, the formal credential will continue to be the price of entry. But the share of careers for which the formal credential is the price of entry is, slowly, declining. The share for which demonstrated work in public is the price of entry is, slowly, rising. The trend is uneven across fields and across geographies. The trend is, however, the trend.

The university-without-universities is one of the structures that the next two decades will be built on. The community is the institution. The cumulative public work is the credential. The standing table is the cohort. The workshop is the seminar. The mentor is the advisor. The library is the curriculum. The combination is the education. The university, where it still serves, remains. Where it does not, the community is what serves in its place.