Higher Education for Everyone
(Attery AnandKumar)(PGPEM - 1816004)

Challenge: Higher Education for Everyone i.e. anyone who wants to pursue his/her higher studies should be able to do so irrespective of his/her financial status.

Knowledge has always been a distinguishing characteristic of human beings in the view of their unique capacity to formulate and continuously transmit knowledge from one generation and location to another generation and location. Knowledge society has gained prominence due to advances in Technology and related Applications. Knowledge societies do address issues about how information and ideas are to be created and thereafter adopted at an accelerated speed.

            Anyone who wants to pursue higher studies should be able to do so irrespective of his financial status and his current talent/abilities. The cost of higher education should not be a blocker stopping someone from pursuing higher education. There should not be any entrance exams as well that will filter out the prospective students from pursuing higher education in their respective area of interest.

Metaphor: Wedding Buffet: When you go to a wedding ceremony or a party and start your dinner on a buffet table then you have all the food options in front of you and you can pick whatever you want to eat. No one questions you or checks if you are qualified to take that particular food item or not.

The higher education options should also be made available to everyone in the same fashion as the food items are made available to everyone. Anyone should be able to choose any area of interest, there should be no questions asked and no filter criteria to filter out interested candidates from pursuing what they want to study.

Brain Storming & Coming up with Ideas: After lot of thinking and brain storming with many colleagues, friends, classmates and family members, I came up with the following solutions to the challenge. These ideas are as shown in the below chart diagram.

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When I put the generated Ideas in the Cost-Impact matrix then I get the following image.

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Based on the Cost-Impact matrix the solution is selected which is listed below.

Bright Spot: All the state and central governments have Employment exchange boards where candidates seeking jobs can register and those organisations who have vacancies can approach the candidate and offer the job. Similarly have a central place where candidates can mention their profile and their desire for higher education. The solution is explained in the below section in greater detail.

Solution (Central Portal / Web-Site): Develop and host a portal where students who wants to pursue higher education, but are not able to do so due to non availability of funds,  can register themselves in this portal. NGO's will certify if the candidate actually needs the education that he wants to pursue. Also check if the candidate can pay the fee by himself. If the candidate is found to be genuine then mark the candidate as verified.

               Also Loop-in NGO's, Corporates and Govt Organisations who can go through the list of verified candidates and select the candidates whom they want to sponsor. The institutions can sponsor the candidates as part of their CSR activity or they can even tie up the candidate and ensure that the candidate works for the organisation for few years (this way we also provide employment to the deserving candidates).

      STORY BOARDS

       Before

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       After

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     Looks-Like-Prototype

One Week Low Cost Experiment

The following tasks will be performed as part of my one week low cost experiment.

1. Reach out to any NGO's / Orphanages and collect list of deserving candidates who would like to pursue higher education.
2. Create a list of such candidates from more than couple of NGO's / Orphanages
3. Now reach out to Corporate Organisation and check-out if they would like to fund these candidates as part of their 

Cost: The cost of this experiment is literally ZERO. It only requires few hours of people effort as they would need to go around few orphanages and few corporate organisations.

Hypothesis Testing: This experiment tests the Hypothesis based on which the whole solutions would be built i.e. If there are deserving candidates who are seeking financial support for their higher education then the established organisation will come forward to help these candidates.

Criteria for Success: If we can shortlist least one deserving candidate who is looking for financial support and if we can find an organisation who can sponsor his higher education then we can assume that the proposed solution can work effectively.