Daybreak - Is turning into a B-school the natural next step for liberal arts pioneer Ashoka University?

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Back in 2014, Ashoka University introduced India to the concept of a liberal arts education. The private research university, tucked away in Sonipat, Haryana, came along at a time when the cracks in India’s higher education system were starting to become pretty glaring. It positioned itself as everything a conventional Indian college was not.  Ashoka promised to offer  ‘holistic, liberal, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary’ education. Simply put, it was offering choice. And that simple yet powerful promise is what made it stand out. But ten years later, it is facing new pressures. The latest phase of the Ashoka story is not one that a lot of people may have seen coming. It's marked by a stronger focus on business and sciences than ever before.  Case in point: the university’s thriving entrepreneurship department. In the last few years, it has become one of the most popular courses on offer. A big reason for its popularity is because students think signing up for courses like these will make them more ‘employable’. And that, fundamentally goes against what Ashoka stands for. So now, Ashoka is facing a dilemma: Should it give in to parental pressure and start acting like a business school, driven by placements and employability? Or should it just stay the course? Tune in. Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at [phone]. For next Thursday's Unwind, send us your recommendations to us as texts or voice notes. The theme is "favourite folk songs."

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10 years ago, Ashoka University introduced India to the concept of a liberal arts education. The private research university tucked away in Sonipat Haryana came along at a time when the cracks in India's higher education system were just starting to become pretty glaring. So, in comes this fancy private. university that positioned itself as everything the conventional Indian college was not. Ashoka promised to offer holistic, liberal, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary education. Simply put, it was offering students a choice.

And that simple yet powerful promise is what made it stand out. At a public university, like for example, let's take St. Stephens or like in Delhi or like St. Xavier's in Mumbai. if I wanted to study a BSE in economics, I will have to choose that from the get-go. And there is no way of changing that once in there. Or like, there may be chances, but it'll be slim. As opposed to Ashoka, you don't choose before coming in.

So that was the major selling point, not just to students, but even for faculty. Like, they get to design courses as per their taste and their requirements, as well as the evaluation methods. That was Nathan Narday. He covers education and electric mobility here at the ken. Nathan also happens to be an alumnus of Ashoka. He says that Ashoka's big promise when it was launched was education for life.

The liberal arts approach was not only really ambitious at the time, it was also completely foreign to most Indians. Their entire premise was that we'll set up a Western liberal art style university. it just happens to be in Hindi Heartland Haryana. That's it. It is. It was like a liberal oasis in like Haryana, you know?

So what sets Ashoka apart is, or basically let's just go back to brass tracks, right? What is liberal arts? Liberal arts is not a subject. It is a pedagogy. In layman's terms, it's a approach to studying where you're exposed to all disciplines first and then you choose what you want to major. Now, how do you do this? At Ashoka, there is this concept known as foundation courses.

Now, when I was at Ashoka, there were nine foundation courses. This kept changing over time, like you need eight or nine or something. But let's just go with these, something there are nine courses, two of which will be critical thinking. If you ask the management or faculty at Tushoca, they will tell you that the ultimate purpose of all of this is to promote intellectual curiosity. And it isn't just anybody teaching you these courses.

Ashoka hires the creme de la creme, the most illustrious historians, authors, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs to teach students. And because of all of that, Ashoka is widely seen as some sort of academic utopia. Even now, 10 years later, choice and intellectual curiosity are still at the very core of the Ashoka model. But the founders and investors behind the university say that this is only the beginning. The university is constantly evolving.

And with that evolution comes new pressures. The latest phase of the Ashoka story is not something that a lot of people may have seen coming. It is marked by a stronger focus on business and sciences than ever before. Case in point, the university's thriving entrepreneurship department. In the last few years, it has become one of the most. most popular courses on offer. So, let's just step back to like 2019. There was a batchmate of mine that I've quoted in this story.

Her name is Anjana Ramesh. She was an entrepreneurship. She studied entrepreneurship as a minor at Ashoka. She attended the Expo in 2019 and she pointed it out to me that, you know, when I was attending this, like the room was only half empty, as most entrepreneurs would see it. And this was a tiny 20-seater room. Now cut to 2020-20.

for the like the Ekantho Ghosh from like the Entrepreneurship Department. He's a deputy head of the department. He pointed it out to me that now these same expos are held in 400 like a 400 seated auditorium.

Now that's the sheer scale of growth that the entrepreneurial department has seen. In fact, now the university is also thinking about upgrading the entrepreneurship course from a minor to a major. A big reason in for its popularity is because students think signing up for courses like these will make them

more employable. And that fundamentally goes against what Ashoka stands for. These pressures are external. Like right now also, like I've spoken to like at least four to five professors for this story. They keep pointing out that my job is not to make someone immediately industry ready. It is to like nurture intellectual curiosity for them. And The rationale behind this is that if I prepare them to be industry ready in 2024, what happens in 28 when industry dynamics change? The question about placements, I think, primarily comes from parents and students. So now Ashoka is facing a dilemma.

Should it give in to the parental pressure and start acting like a business school driven by placements and employability? Or should it just stay on its original course? Hello and welcome to yet another special episode of Daybreak. I'm Snigda and I'm Rahil and every week we come together to talk about something in business and tech that interests the both of us. And it won't just be us. Depending on what we're talking about, we will also have some really interesting people on the show. In today's episode, we talk to Nathan Narday about the next phase of the Ashoka story.

So Nathan, the entrepreneurship department, obviously it's been hugely successful, right? in the last few years, just this semester you had mentioned in your story that 1,000 odd students enrolled for the course. Why do you think that it's like, do you think it's because former Ashoka students were struggling to get jobs, or is it just students now

are becoming more conscious of what makes them employable? Right. I think that's how entrepreneurship came into being as well. Like I interviewed someone for like the third of, fourth third graduating badge. Her name is Maria. She's like an investment professional at Omidya Network.

And she pointed out to me that when I was studying economics and finance at Ashoka, we were very tired with this entire theory-based approach. And we really wanted a practitioner's lens to aid our understanding of what we already know.

And that was what was missing. And the entire push towards entrepreneurship came from these original crop of students that graduated later. Like now you'll see them in these high-flying consulting and like finance jobs. But they were kind of, I would credit them for like what entrepreneurship is today. So they had that initial push.

They set up like this investing wing called Bodhi Capital at Ashoka University. So it's like a student arm that basically invest like I think they had one lack that they got from the university that they could invest in like the public markets. So I think that's what it started off as. and now it's grown into something more than that. I'm not really sure about how much they invest now, but I can certainly say that it's grown over a period of time. Ashoka's Entrepreneurship Department officially called the Info Edge Center for Entrepreneurship

had a rather slow start when it was set up a decade ago. Nathan says it was initially facing a classic chicken and egg problem. Students weren't really opting for entrepreneurship as a minor, so the cause pretty much stayed the same. Basically, since student demand was low, it didn't offer more cost. That was still about five years ago. You see, something changed, and I don't mean just at Ashoka.

Across the country, entrepreneurship was the new, cool thing to do. It was once confined to just the big cities like Bangalore or Mumbai. But now, younger people in smaller cities also wanted to go down that path. And around the same time, there was also an explosion of old MBA schools, Stoa, Masters Union, Messer School of Business. the demand for an entrepreneurship-based education began to shoot up. So, Nathan, what exactly does the entrepreneurship department have to offer? Right. What does it look like?

Right. So the entrepreneurial department is unlike other departments in the sense that it works in a visiting faculty model. If you look at the other departments at Ashoka, they have some full-time faculty. At the entrepreneur department, there's only one person, but he's a director of the institute. So he has a more administrative role. So the entire entrepreneurial department runs on the visiting faculty model. And that basically means that these practitioners come in from outside. And for 39 hours over the course of like three and a half months, they'll teach you about their expertise.

Yeah. And this could range from anything. Like it would be real estate to accounting to sales. Like I think this is the third iteration of Aditya Ghosh, who was ex-CEO of Indigo and now current founder of Akka. teaching a course on service excellence at Ashoka. That's just a name of you. So students aren't learning about entrepreneurship from academics.

In quintessential Ashoka fashion, they're learning about it from actual entrepreneurs, and extremely successful ones at that. And they are rewarded handsomely for their time. Someone familiar with the matter told Nathan that a visiting faculty member is paid $6 to $7 lakh rupees for a 39-hour teaching stint over a semester spanning. three and a half months.

It is a win-win in more ways than one. Because very often, more so recently, students have actually ended up being hired by one of these professors. Then there's this other incident of like Krisha Vashner. Again, I feature her in this story because she met her to-be employer at a course known as Fundamentals for Investing.

This course was taught by Rahul Bhasin, who's the managing director of bearing the global private equity giants India Outpost. So he's been teaching this I think he will offer this course the third time again in like this upcoming year

and they've already hired four Ashokans in the two times that he's taught this course. So yeah like it's not just an opportunity to learn from practitioners people get to meet their to be employers as well. Right but Nathan that sounds like any other B school right?

So is that really where Ashoka is going? Yes, and that's the evolution of here. Khrusha Vashnav, she's 23 years old. She took this course in 2022. Back then, there was no precedent of getting placed

as a result of taking these courses. People that were genuinely curious would end up in these courses and it was almost incidental if you landed up with a job. Like in her particular case, she was offered an internship and then she managed to convert that into a PPO,

like a post placement offer. Now when I spoke to the younger students, they see entrepreneurship as a lever to increase their employability in the placement cycle. Because now they've seen this happen time and again, right? There's precedent and a track record of people getting placed if you take entrepreneurship courses. So, yeah, they might be seeing entrepreneurship department as a placement cell.

Right. And is a show. kind of leaning into that now? Yes, I would argue so because there is a proposal to make entrepreneurship into a major. But at the same time,

I can't sit here and say that, okay, they're lesser of a liberal arts college because to say that it will basically entail that they are lessening the focus on foundation courses, which really isn't the case.

So it's not that Ashoka has fundamentally changed. It's still a university driven by choice, but now that it is stepping into its second decade. It is expanding that choice. It's also recognising and reacting to what students want from their education. This time around, it is business education. But in the process, Ashoka is starting to look a lot like a B-school's unlikely cousin. Because in the last two years,

the top three campus placements from Ashoka have carried the same titles as those of big B-schools like ISB. The thing is, Ashoka has never really been a university. that was driven by job placements. Providing a quality education, teaching students how to think critically, promoting intellectual curiosity, that is what the Ashoka experience is all about. But clearly, now there is this new pressure

that was not there before. Current professor pointed this out to me, actually. At one of these road shows where Ashoka goes to like colleges in India and just gives them a presentation of what Ashoka is like, what will we stand again, the Q&A section, just dealt with placements and average salaries. And honestly, fair enough.

Yeah. At 47 lakhs for four years, it is the most expensive undergraduate program in India, period. So if you have questions about placements, they are almost par for the course. And I've mentioned this in my story. Like, when I was interviewing Ashish Dhaban as well, he pointed out to me the same thing that the professors told me

without his interference. He's like, our job is not to make. them placement ready. We'd set up a professional school otherwise. They're not in that game. It's just that they will have to constantly try to deal with this push and pull between placements that the parents will want and the students walk in with. And this core belief that we're trying to build a university which withstands the test of time, you know.

So is that why now the whole focus on entrepreneurship? Right. That is the biggest challenge. Like I feel like the rise of the entrepreneurship challenge is. not, yeah, it is kind of a threat to that core idea because another professor, Professor Das from the Computer Science Department, he was at IIT Kharakpur for almost two decades before he recently moved to Ashoka. He point, and he's been teaching at Ashoka for like the past five years now as a visiting faculty, two years he was there for full time. He basically pointed out that despite having the background conditions which you can choose a course from and also having world renowned faculty in like other departments. people still view Ashoka University as a three-department university. By the way, Ashes Havana, who Nathan just mentioned some time ago, is the founding chairperson of Ashoka University.

Like Nathan mentioned, so far this was a university dominated by three departments, economics, computer science and psychology. These were the most popular majors among Ashoka grads. Pretty conventional choices for an unconventional university. Now entrepreneurship is catching up. Like we mentioned before, the management is even considering turning it into a full-blown major eventually.

But that is not the only thing that is changing at Ashoka. The growing focus on business and science is also evident from the university's top leadership. Nathan, if we look back at Ashoka Saka 2014 and Ashoka now, right, in 2024, what has changed, right? How different is it?

is the Ashoka that we see today. Okay. So we can just look at the top leadership position at any university, which is a vice chancellor. Yeah. The first three vice chancellors at Ashoka came from the humanities background. There was Professor Rudy, Rudranchu Mukharji. The very famous professor, actually I think he was more famous for leaving Ashoka.

Professor Pratab Banu Mehta. Right. He, there was a very, he wrote in his letter, he basically made it clear that he was becoming a political liability for the founders, and that's why he exited. Post which we had a English professor, Professor Malabika Sarkar, that was our vice-chancellor. So these were the top jobs were held by the humanities for the first eight years. Now we have Professor Roy Chaudhry. That is a physicist by training.

So when I was speaking to some professors, they were like, the first decade was for the humanities, and the second decade is going to focus on business and technology. Why? Because that answer can be answered because look at the founders background. They're all entrepreneurs by profession. Like they've all set up companies like Ashish Thawan was, he set up one of India's first private equity companies known as Chris Capital. And then he moved into education. Pramat Raj Sina used to be a consultant at McKinsey for the longest time. Sanjeev Bikchandani set up Info Edge.

So he's one of the earliest internet companies in India. The department is named after. Exactly. So the Entrepreneur Department is called the Infoet Center for Entrepreneurship at Ashoka. So yes, it's the founder fit also matches to this. And at the same time, they're ramping up their science department, like the natural sciences. Natural science in the sense of the biosciences, physics, chemistry, as well as the computer science department. So I spoke to Professor Debian Gupta in the story.

he pointed out to me that in 2019 we were almost four professors that number has tripled now like there are 12 professors in the computer science department and they're planning to hire four more in like the upcoming year so yeah that's the prime focus right now

but when I brought this up with Aishish Dhaban he's like our goal is to build a whole university right but Nathan you know when we look at how Ashoka is evolving first eight years it focuses on humanities. Now it's focusing on tech and sciences. But, you know, in the process, what happens

to Ashoka's identity, you know, because it has been this bastion of liberal arts and, you know, intellectual curiosity. But now doesn't it run the risk of, you know, going through a major identity crisis? Yes, I would think so. And personally, I wouldn't blame the founders for this. It is something that the mental model, a student, comes in with. where they treat Ashoka as this three-department university, because the background conditions are not being tweaked that much. Like, you still have the foundation courses and you still have choice. Within this context, you're choosing this.

So, like, if we look at the larger context, right, last year alone, there were 3,000 students that wanted to give the CAT exam. This was the highest it's ever been. So there's also this demand for, like, business education that we're seeing skyrocket in India. Like as recent as like I think two, three weeks ago, ISP, which only had a MBA program for people well into their career, now launched a IIM like B school program for people with one to two years of work X. So everyone is kind of addressing this demand for like younger students wanting more entrepreneurship, education. And entrepreneurship, you can use interchangeably with business for this purpose. So then ultimately it's just a question of doing the balancing act, right?

And that is very difficult to pull off. It is. It is. Like, in a quotable coat, you either die a university or live long enough to become a B-school-like placement cell. That's probably what's going to happen with Ashoka if they don't manage to pull that balancing act off. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings.

A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. Head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by Rahil Filippo's and I, Sinkta Sharma, and it was edited by Rajiv Sien.