India’s Opportunity in Higher Education

Context: In terms of increasing the quality in higher education in India, although the New Education Policy points ‘what’ type of reforms, it remains weak on the “how” of comprehensively addressing our quality problem.

Reason for the degrading quality in higher education in India:

• Skewed growth in higher education:  While the proportion of relevant age group in higher education has risen from 6% to 26%, the development has mostly remained skewed.

• Between 1980 and 2020, graduate degrees in science and engineering have grown 14 times, leading to a vast shortage of faculty.
• In the mid-2000s, when growth peaked, India opened one engineering and management college each day.

The New Education Policy: Suggests ‘what’ reforms are required in pursuit of quality

• Multi-disciplinarity:

• Move from the affiliated college system to larger multi-disciplinary universities of a minimum size
• Combine professional schools with the liberal arts to provide multi-disciplinary education.

• Competition: Encourage the entry of foreign universities and attract foreign students to study in India.
• Light but tight Regulation: to regulate the way to quality.
• Funding: A National Research Foundation (NRF) to allocate funding to both public and private universities on a peer-reviewed basis.
• Transparency: through a compulsory accreditation system provided by competing public and private agencies.

• Autonomy: There is no central education authority or regulator and no national public university.

• Neither federal nor state Government determines the fees a university can charge.
• The role of federal Government is limited to funding.
• Teacher and students are involved in a mutual rating system so as to ensure quality among both the teachers and students’ group.

• Competitiveness: While in India, only students compete to get their choice of university, in the US, rather the whole education ecosystem competes.

• Compete to attract the best students.
• Compete to attract the best faculty, poaching from other universities with benefits, research funding and staff support.
• Faculty compete with each other in writing research proposals to get funded and to get tenure.
• A department that did not rank consistently in the top few in the nation would be merged with another or closed.

Way Forward: Focusing on the ‘How’ of Reforms.  – A blend of state and private system.

• Ensuring Autonomy: Since now that the supply exceeds demand in India, many institutes have finally starting to compete on faculty and facilities.

• All colleges should be free to add fields and seats at will
• A few fine state universities can provide excellent quality control for more expensive private universities
• Private universities should be freely permitted — whether they are driven by philanthropy or profit.

• Ensuring Competition: Make the full assessment public to enable parents and students to choose colleges that do a good job and exit those that don’t.
• Adequate Funding: The state should be generous in non-professional funding fields where markets do not adequately value skills.

• Progressively shift research funding from independent national laboratories (who absorb over 90% of state research funding) to the higher education sector.
• The IITs, IIMs, IISc and our other public “institutions of national importance” should all be funded to become full-service universities

Conclusion: Quality in an institution of excellence must indeed be forced — but by competition, not regulation. And the competition must be accompanied with the complete freedom to do what it takes to compete.