Gains from a Pandemic: Ed-Tech, Profits and State-Led Corporatisation of Education

Arnab Bhattacharya | December 09, 2022 | Published Online

According to the Dutch media researchers J. Van Dijck, T. Poell, and M. de Waal, “datafication and personalization” is the pedagogical theory that underpins such corporate-assembled online courses. The main selling point of EdTech firms is that they can create personalized education through the use of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, teaching analytics, and learning apps. Predictive analytics, or algorithms that can substitute for the teacher’s expert judgement with “learnification,” are how EdTech firms view learning as individual-centric, tailored, and guided (D Souza, 2022).  

The moment learning as a collective process is taken away, and what D’Souza argued is what NEP 2020 does: For the NEP 2020, higher education will neither involve nurturing citizenship nor aiming to evolve critiques of social and political power. Instead, training for the half-life of skills will be considered central to the learning quest with EdTech companies and other educational-corporate platforms formulating and putting out algorithm-based instructional content. 

It is at this outset, this chapter aims to understand three facets of the Ed-Tech educational firms in the context of the pandemic. Firstly, we would try to bring out how a pandemic, which cost lives to millions, became a profit-making opportunity for Ed-Tech corporations. Secondly, we observe, to what extent monopolization has occurred in the Ed-Tech sphere. Finally, we aim to understand what role does the state play in creating this monstrous move with Ed-Tech.  

Data for this chapter was collected from Statista Digital Market Outlook report 2022. This data is private and was accessed through the library of the University of Strathclyde, mentioned because of copyright purposes. 

Education as a Purchasable Commodity: Some concerns

A consistent feature of the last few years in India has been mass protests in educational institutions across the country, encompassing a variety of issues. Such protests gained further momentum during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, which effectively crippled the aspirations of students hailing from marginalized communities and financially weaker sections of society. This was largely because of the unplanned and unsystematic call for “digitalisation” of education that spurred the growth of private Ed-Tech companies and made education inaccessible for those who couldn’t afford to buy smartphones, laptops, broadband, tablets, etc. The concern here is justified. If monetary capabilities dictate a student’s access to institutes, not only will it result in huge dropout rates but also a chronic shortage of skilled workforce in the forthcoming years.

Ed-Tech Loves a Good Pandemic: An Indian Case Study 

A recent article in The Telegraph (19^th Sep 2022) states that India currently has more than 4,000 Ed-tech start-ups assisting over 300 million school students. By 2025, the Ed-tech industry in the country is estimated to be worth $4 billion. While the post-pandemic period has seen the revenues drop marginally in 2022, the overall profits garnered by the parasitic corporations have accumulated enough capital to push the Ed-Tech sector further. 

The revenues of such companies, as seen in Table 2, have more than tripled over a span of just 4 years resulting from the “forced” migration of students onto “online education”. The number of users of such learning platforms doubled since 2019, adding 45 million more students. WSJ stated that apart from BYJU’s, six other companies have hit the 1 billion USD valuation since the March 2020 lockdown in India. This is hardly surprising in neoliberal India but the normalization of such a mode of learning might spell disaster for a vast majority of students who can neither afford the courses offered by platforms nor the equipment necessary for learning. With hybrid learning and Ed-Tech at the heart of the New Education Policy launched by the government in mid-2020, such neoliberalization of education through private Ed-Tech companies may, unfortunately, become the norm with the State firmly in collusion with private companies.

The revenues earned by the universities offering online courses are not comparable to the revenues racked up by the private companies. Surprisingly, the revenue for 2021 declined with respect to that of 2020 as shown in Table 3.2. This is possibly because of the dual effect of re-opening offline modes of learning and private educational platforms drawing an increasing number of students over the course of the 2020-21 period. It is justified to say that the online university education infrastructure is not prepared to deal with the requirements of “digitalisation” and will, eventually, have to collaborate with private companies. This will perhaps be the beginning of the encroachment of private companies in public institutes – a much-desired goal of the NEP that seeks to commodify education. An article in NewsClick (2^ndAugust 2020) states that “At least 45% – if not more – of school enrolment in India is already in private schools. In higher education, the private sector dominance is greater, and increasing. About 45.2% of college enrolment in India is now in private unaided colleges, and another 21.2% is in private aided institutions.”

How Private Capital became ‘the source’ of education: A Hindu-Neoliberal Agenda

Sivadasan (2022) wrote the goal of the NEP is to lessen the legal requirements for schools so that private business owners can construct them. This is uncannily comparable to the diluted industrial techniques that were used to boost private investment. A whole generation of pupils will be impacted by a dilution of the fundamental norm, which will have terrible repercussions for the country’s future. The RSS and its allied groups can play a bigger role while there is a strong movement to privatize welfare. In order to construct a system that is legitimately supported by the state and operated with state funds but is not subject to societal control or accountability. Such a mechanism has been at the heart of the approach employed by the RSS and its affiliated organizations to seize and hold onto political power by fostering private well-being.

From Equitable to Purchasable: NEP and Post-Pandemic Worries 

Privatization of Indian education, as explained in the preceding chapters, has been integral to the economic process of liberalization. The political economy of such a process is understood once we see the astronomical sums channelled by private enterprises in election campaigns of the recent past. This is a feature of how capital runs the State, broadly speaking. BYJU’s 62% market share, as seen in the chart, is not an aberration but simply emphasizes how online educational platforms can form monopolies. 

In April 2021, BYJU’s acquired test prep firm Aakash Educational Services Ltd – an example of monopolization of the market. UDEMY is another educational service, with 24% market share, which holds considerable power in the field of app-based online learning. Such dramatic transformations have brought inequalities in the distribution of income to the fore – pushing underprivileged children out of the ambits of online learning.

NEP 2020 will exacerbate these post-pandemic worries by privatizing education, while families which are already plagued by unemployment, job loss, and low wages will be unable to afford such education. The growth of BYJU’s and other platforms simply normalizes this phenomenon by hiding such stark realities behind the smokescreen of the neoliberal growth model. In other words, the larger the share of private companies in the educational sector the lower will be the participation of students from financially weaker sections of society. With education becoming a “purchasable” item in the “market” the State has shrugged off its responsibility of providing “education for all”. The worst-case scenario would be a student not being able to afford neither private schools/universities (which now outnumber public institutions) nor online learning platforms (since monopolies can set prices as high as possible). 

Ed-Tech, creates an illusion, as Dhar (2022) puts it. It’s the illusion of choice to many, while the State continues to make sure that education is run by the Ed-Tech companies. 

Plans to allow for the “lateral admission” of “professors-of-practice” at universities and colleges were announced by the UGC chairperson in March 2022. These professors-of-practice wouldn’t need to pass the NET or have a PhD. Thus, it is believed that their domain experience is sufficient for them to forgo the academic requirements that are often required for a university position. 

It is more likely that a ‘BYJUS’ or ‘UNACADEMY’ faculty would soon become the product of the celebrity culture that these companies are pushing towards, eventually, profits would further soar as the NEP does promote self-financed courses anyway. 

It is at this outset, one needs to see the problems of digitalization in the Indian education system, where the State, becomes a facilitator to the profit ventures of private capital, and millions of students’ learning will be at risk: since education is UP FOR SALE. 

About Author

Arnab Bhattacharya is a Junior Researcher at Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM), Milan, Italy.

Acknowledgement

The author prepared this article with the Indian Researcher. We also thank Manikantha Nataraj, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, for his assistance with the STATISTA report.