ivan@wine

@ivanatwine4

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Joined December 2021

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Buregyeya Apollo, PhD

@ApolloBuregyeya

about 1 hour ago

The real reason industry is disconnected from education. ======= Every few years, we discover a new culprit for unemployment, weak industrialisation, and low innovation. Sometimes it is the curriculum. Sometimes it is the universities. Sometimes it is lecturers who publish too much and supposedly solve too few problems. The latest fashion is to argue that education must become more practical, more innovative, and more competence-based. While well-intentioned, I believe this diagnosis misses the real problem. The disconnect between education and industry is actually a disconnect between nation planning and nation building. A university does not exist in isolation. It is part of a larger economic system. The skills demanded by graduates are determined not by what universities teach but by what the economy rewards. If an economy primarily imports, distributes and consumes products, it will naturally create demand for traders, distributors, salespeople and manual labour. If an economy designs, manufactures, improves and exports products, it will create demand for engineers, scientists, researchers, technologists and innovators. In other words, the sophistication of skills demanded by an economy is determined by the sophistication of its commerce. This is why I find it strange when we place the burden of industrialisation on universities alone. Every year, governments prepare national budgets worth trillions. Yet how often are those budgets informed by research agendas developed jointly with universities? How many national programmes are translated into funded research questions and communicated to academia? How many government projects deliberately require local technology development, local standards development, or local intellectual property creation? Very few. As a result, government plans in one direction, universities research in another direction, and industry operates in a third direction. We then complain that education is disconnected from industry. The truth is that the disconnect began much earlier. Consider something as simple as an MRI scanner installed in a national referral hospital that requires internet WiFi to function. Most people see a machine that helps diagnose patients. What they do not see is the knowledge system behind that machine. Every scan generated contributes valuable information about disease patterns, equipment performance, software effectiveness and clinical outcomes. Who learns most from that information? Too often, it is not the country using the machine. The manufacturer of the internet enabled MRI machine and its research ecosystem are usually better positioned to collect, analyse and transform that information into improved technologies. Researchers linked to those firms use the data to refine algorithms, improve hardware, develop new applications and create the next generation of products. We provide the data. They develop the technology. We purchase the next machine. They strengthen the next industry. This is not merely a technology gap. It is a sovereignty gap. When people hear the word sovereignty, they often think about flags, borders and armies. Yet modern nations also require sovereignty in knowledge, technology, standards and institutions. Without knowledge sovereignty, others understand our realities better than we do. Without technology sovereignty, others transform our realities into products before we can. Without standards sovereignty, others define quality and compliance for our industries. Without institutional sovereignty, others shape the rules under which we participate in the global economy. This is where the debate about competence-based education becomes problematic. The reform assumes that the primary problem is the nature of the skills being produced. But what if the larger problem is that the economy itself has insufficient demand for advanced skills? No curriculum can create industrial demand. No examination system can build factories. No lecturer can create a national innovation ecosystem alone. A country that mainly rewards importing over manufacturing will not become innovative simply because its students complete more practical assignments. A country that spends little on technology development will not become technologically sovereign because its curriculum contains entrepreneurship modules. The challenge is much bigger. We must begin connecting national planning to research, research to industry, industry to procurement, and procurement to technological capability. National programmes should come with clearly defined research agendas. Research funding should be linked to strategic sectors. Public procurement should deliberately create opportunities for local innovation. Universities should be treated not merely as training institutions but as strategic national assets in the creation of knowledge and technology. Only then will education and industry naturally converge. Until then, we risk endlessly reforming the curriculum while leaving untouched the deeper question of who produces knowledge, who controls technology, who sets standards, who builds institutions, and ultimately, who exercises economic power. The problem is not our universities. The problem is that our education, industry and national plans are not pulling in the same direction. This is the deeper argument I make in my forthcoming book, The Five Levels of Economic Power: that nations do not rise by owning resources alone. They rise when they control production, technology, markets, standards and institutions.

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