University studies or training with job opportunities?

Juan Pablo Murra is a recognized academic and educational leader in Mexico, which since 2019 has served as Chancellor of Professional and Higher Studies at the Tecnológico de Monterrey. With more than a long experience in the sector, he has led important initiatives in areas such as educational innovation, the training of leaders with a global approach, internationalization and the promotion of scientific research. In this interview, he delivers his ideas on what higher education should be and analyzes why the system developed by the Tec is almost unique in the world.

—How do you assess the actions carried out by the Tec, such as the International Congress of Pedagogical Innovation?

— I think the congress has consolidated. I like to think people are starting to think of it as a communal meeting space, and not just a Tec event. We succeeded in broadening both the vision and the scope. The last edition was a balance between lectures and small group conversations. I believe that the ability not only to be a conference but also to have a network makes it a worthwhile congress.

—What do you learn at a conference like the CIIE that you can then put into practice?

—It’s a place to open your antennae wide to identify concepts and ideas that are relevant where you are. You need to collect ideas or concepts that may not be useful to you now, but will be in two or three years. In particular, I learned about lifelong learning: how universities must be more agile in the development of programs of this type, to be even more connected with industry. I think we have to be careful, even if we don’t know when it will bear fruit. Not everything has to be finished by Monday morning.

—If we talk about education for work, there is a traditional university model with a four- or five-year degree, and there are bootcamps with short courses that provide an almost immediate job opportunity. What is the Tec’s response in both cases?

“There is a risk in the sector, it is that all the universities want to appear too much. Michael Crow, in his book on the fifth wave. Talk about isomorphism. It shouldn’t be like that. I think there should be institutions that are more focused on short term employability issues and there should be institutions that train employability skills but also leadership and personality skills that prepare for his second or third job, to be a good citizen. They are different models. Train people with these more transversal capacities in a training camp six months is not supported.

—But the Tec also has bootcamps.

—Yes, we have courses and we also have training camps. Normally they are taken by people who have already obtained a degree and wish to complete their information. But I imagine that there are people who, upon leaving high school, make a training camp, learn to code and look for a job. Maybe they will have a higher salary than someone who has studied a career with less employability, but what will happen with the second or third job? I think there is no right answer. In contrast, in our case, a training camp costs $5,000 and a ride costs $48,000. It’s a cost-benefit ratio. We have the challenge to see how we can do so that there are better bridges, so that someone who has already made a training camp serve as credit and which, along with other credentials, becomes a full degree.

—He talks about the problem of isomorphism, but the problems are the same in all universities: accreditation, curriculum, speed of content, form of evaluation.

— We share challenges, but I don’t think we should solve them all in the same way because that’s where creativity dies. Regarding accreditation, I would like, as a personal challenge, to promote accreditation to other institutions. And also with our programs: if someone wants to change careers, how much do we accredit them. Sometimes I think we are more demanding than we should be. How do we become flexible? I believe that collectively we need to be much more nimble and open to generate credit transferability that better serves the student.

—I imagine it’s an added complexity since the Tec is present in more than twenty states. How do they reconcile the criteria?

“With lots of talk and lots of work!” A decade ago, the Tecnológico was more like a university like Texas or California, where the campuses are independent in the accreditation and admissions processes. We were a hybrid. Admissions processes were unique, programs were the same, but faculty hiring was individual for each campus. So we decided to be a collection of campuses and to be more of a system. For example, there is a National Dean of the School of Engineering and Science who is responsible for programs, faculty, and research on all campuses. Then there are regional deans and a design with local decision rights and national decision. If you are going to hire a professor per subject, each campus can decide, but if you are going to hire a full-time professor, there is someone at the central level who must give the green light. This allows us to standardize processes. We’re talking about one Tec, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same experience. This means that we make all the strengths of the Tec available to all of our students, wherever they are.

—In this answer, he mentions universities in the United States as an example. Is there a big difference, in terms of system or architecture, with other universities in Latin America?

“I think the fact that the Tec is multi-campus and multi-level – we have middle schools, high schools, graduate schools, continuing education in twenty-six cities – makes us very different. It is not common for it to exist in Latin America or the rest of the world. In Mexico, there are other institutions that have copied the Tec model; In the rest of Latin America, the most common thing is to see universities with a single campus or in a single city. Sometimes they have a second campus, but they are more traditional in their management model.

—Are postgraduate careers ones that perhaps need more updating? How do you respond to what students ask, what companies ask, and what Tec asks as well?

“A challenge for Mexico as a country is that if we are bad at the undergraduate level, we are worse at the postgraduate level. In Mexico, there are four and a half million undergraduate students and there are less than 500,000 master’s and doctoral students. This is one of the lowest percentages in the region, with an interesting phenomenon: there are more students in private schools than in public schools. In the case of the Tec, it’s similar. We have 60,000 undergraduate students and 7,000 postgraduate students. In the first cycle, we don’t want to grow anymore; Graduate, yes. Here, we classify postgraduate studies into three broad categories: postgraduate scientific programs, professional programs – for example, MBAs – and highly specialized medical residencies. I think it is with the professionalizing programs that we need to renew ourselves in a more agile way. And these are shorter programs: there are one-year and two-year programs. And every two or three years we have to add new programs.

—The Tec campus has an outstanding characteristic, which is the feeling of always being ahead of the future, with the presence of cutting-edge technology. But with what educational value is the incorporation of this technology analyzed?

—I came into Tec as vice president of planning and then while at a conference in the US I came across an education company called Pearson. They had a report, which was the reflection of Sir Michael Barber, Tony Blair’s education minister, which said more or less: “I don’t know if our products, I don’t know if my course, or if my technology works: we need to develop the ability to measure learning outcomesthe effectiveness of education. And I wrote to him and told him the same thing was happening to me. He invited us to London and we went there with a team and we worked to design a process for evaluating innovations, so that it was not about innovating for the sake of innovating, but rather about innovating because we improve learning outcomes. It is still very difficult to get out of subjective evaluations, preference evaluations. We do this with increasing rigor and independence and we have invited professors from other universities to help us. It’s getting better, but I think, as a sector, it’s something that’s still on hold.

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