In a curious response to my post, Ravikiran Rao points to an earlier post that draws an analogy between blogs and educational institutions. In particular, it should be easy for people to start educational institutions — just as it is easy for people to start blogs. You have heard about the death of set-up costs, haven’t you?

Students will be able to discover for themselves where the good institutions are, and they will flock to them — just like readers discover good blogs now. Death of transaction costs, too!

I hope a debate is brewing here: Abi reacts to Ravikiran reacting to a recent post of his on regulating private players in higher education. Also, Aadisht has a very interesting post on the examination system in our schools:

There’s another major problem with using the boards as an entrance / selection exam. To be fair, this is a problem with all entrance exams in India. It’s a one-shot exam which happens only once a year. It doesn’t measure how you perform in the classroom, and your long-term ability to learn, which is something that the teacher on the ground is much better placed to judge. And if you mess up a one-shot examination once, you don’t get a chance to make up for it until the next year. And by mess up I don’t only mean fail, I also mean get any score low enough to prevent you from getting the course/ college you want.

So basically, college admissions boil down to this: you get one opportunity once a year to display your excellence through an exam which is designed not to test expertise but minimum competence. As processes go, this is so thoroughly broken that re-engineering consultants would throw up their hands in despair and suggest restarting from scratch.