Bullwhip Effect in Education
Very recently we were able to read about how the economic recovery (not in Spain though! 
) was amplifying the increase in the inventories all along the value chain: the bullwhip effect.
As during the last quarter I’ve been thinking and discussing about the educational value chain (from primary school to continuous education after graduation, mainly at work), I’ve found this bullwhip effect can be in place too. We have to take into account that as part of the educational value chain, we professors are part of the machinery that converts students with X competences, skills and knowledge into students with Y competences, skills and knowledge, where Y > X (I hope!). Is this process totally optimised. Our guess is NO!; (1) we need to analyse how the transformation process is developed, to set goals and effectiveness and efficiency indexes be calculated to allow optimisation of every phase, and (2) coordinate the various phases of the educational life in order to optimise the whole chain.
Overqualification?: that’s what I would call the ‘educational bullwhip effect’, and one of the answers would be it is due to lack of the coordination (above #2).
This year we’re leaving (or, rephrasing, that is leaving us) is more than a dying year, is the end of a decade. Actually, I’d say is not dying but ‘leaving to a better life’. Last century we had to wait until 1929 to fall to our knees; hell awaits!, we managed to start it in 2007 during the 21st century. Even worse, while the rest of the World is awaking, we here at Spain are still walking through the desert, and 2010 will still be low income, high unemployment, high public debt, companies going bankrupt, and the lot. Probably 2012 will not be the Mayan apocalypsis but the New Age’s inflection point.
), and the applied knowledge to my activities at K|P|K’s assignments (
