 "Private universities add verve to syllabi, impress recruiters")
Jahanara Rabia Raza speaks well, can be an electrifying dancer, has worked on a documentary on transgenders, and was part of a smiles’ project to make the city happier.
Though Raza, 22, is unclear as to how her personality took on many hues, she is clear that the programme she is currently enrolled in helped a lot. After graduating with an honours degree in History from St Stephen’s, the oldest college of Delhi University, she felt disconnected from the education system -- and directionless.
A post-graduate fellowship sponsored by the upcoming private Ashoka University, founded by big names in business such as Jerry Rao and Sanjeev Bikhchandani, came to the rescue.
Raza is now surer of what she wants to do: make films.
“I wish I could put it down,” said Raza, mass of long curls moving as she gestures passionately, on what changed for her during the fellowship. “It is like life. It happens to you,” she said, listing getting mentored by a documentary film maker to living in a co-ed hostel and interacting with peers as pluses, while she says graduation was all about “sitting in a class”.
She says her parents were supportive of her decision to delay work to attend a relatively lesser known university.
Meanwhile, Ashoka University is gearing up for undergrad students, a permanent campus in Sonepat, bordering Delhi, and a fresh round of funding from people such as Dilip Shanghvi of Sun Pharmaceuticals and Raamdeo Agrawal of Motilal Oswal Financial Services.
The young and the restless, soon to be unleashed on the job market, are not the only ones attracted by private universities. So are new recruiters. Sameer Maheshwari, an IIT-Delhi alumnus who runs healthkart.com, hired from IITs, IIMs and ISB, top-rung technology and business schools.
One of healthkart’s hires was a computer science engineering graduate from Thapar University located in Patiala, Punjab. He clicked, and based on his referrals, the three-year-old company which sells fitness equipment and health products online, now looks favourably at job applications from Thapar University graduates.
Private universities, despite struggling with a regulatory mess, are riding a boom in India. They are offering scholarships to ensure that high fees do not keep out students, they are innovating to teach maths to history students and -- after a wave of tech and management colleges – some are bringing back social sciences and liberal arts into syllabi.
Growth in private education in India is tough to track, not just because of its federal structure. Education was initially an area state governments were responsible for, just like law and order.
Its shift to a concurrent list means both the 28 states and the union government at the centre can set-up schools, colleges, universities, make policy on education, and appoint regulators. Private education is regulated by an age-old “inspector raj” where inspection teams visit colleges and universities and tick off criteria as vague as number of laptops per student.
India’s 12th Five Year Plan document, setting the agenda for 2012-17 in higher education, says “.. central institutions, which account for 2.6% of the total enrolment; state institutions which account for 38.5% of enrolment; and private institutions that cater to the remaining students.” This means one in every two college-going students, and soon more than that, is getting a degree from a private university or college.
Alternative
For some time, private universities such as Amity University and Lovely Professional University’s mega campuses offered the fall-back option where India’s young demographic, whose members did not manage to win seats in state-run universities, found a place.
It may well be that these universities are emerging as a real alternative, sought after by parents, endorsed by recruiters. For Kiran Kamra, who runs a beauty parlour in Delhi, seeing her son graduate as an engineer was a cherished dream. He won an engineering seat, and a scholarship, at Lovely Professional University four years ago, reducing his fees by half but still at a substantial Rs 40,000 per semester. Kamra was ecstatic.
“The atmosphere in the university was good. I felt they will keep an eye on my son,” said Kamra, whose son moved to a hostel in Punjab for his undergraduate course. “The only thing is that he would not get home food”. Private universities are learning to tap into their surplus or funding from angel investors to prevent fees from becoming a barrier.
“For 2011, our entire batch got full fee waiver. Now, 65-70% will get some form of fee waiver,” said Nikhil Sinha, vice chancellor of Shiv Nadar University, which admits a small class size of roughly 650 undergraduate students. The university is funded by annual grants upwards of Rs 250 crore from Shiv Nadar Foundation set-up by Nadar, an information technology czar.
In a well-argued critique of private education, Dhanwanti Nayak, who, ironically, teaches at the private Manipal University, argues in ‘Economic and Political Weekly’ that private education, because of high fees, neither offers a real choice to students nor a diverse-enough environment.
“The kind of courses and degrees young people would be willing to take loans for would unsurprisingly be the ones that will get them the jobs to repay their loans. Loan-driven education thus compromises on the substantive choices that young people may have, sacri?cing educational and other goals to instrumental ones,” writes Nayak.
But bodies such as the World Bank have long believed that for developing economies like India job-linked education is not such a bad thing, as it can lift people out of poverty. Yet, private universities are working at bringing back history, language, fine arts into curriculum.
Both Shiv Nadar University and Ashoka University offer a two-year integrated course as part of an undergraduate programme where students learn all stream before choosing their specialisation. They also offer a flexible combination of subjects, allowing an Economics major to, say, have a minor in dance.
Though Raza, 22, is unclear as to how her personality took on many hues, she is clear that the programme she is currently enrolled in helped a lot. After graduating with an honours degree in History from St Stephen’s, the oldest college of Delhi University, she felt disconnected from the education system -- and directionless.
A post-graduate fellowship sponsored by the upcoming private Ashoka University, founded by big names in business such as Jerry Rao and Sanjeev Bikhchandani, came to the rescue.
Raza is now surer of what she wants to do: make films.
“I wish I could put it down,” said Raza, mass of long curls moving as she gestures passionately, on what changed for her during the fellowship. “It is like life. It happens to you,” she said, listing getting mentored by a documentary film maker to living in a co-ed hostel and interacting with peers as pluses, while she says graduation was all about “sitting in a class”.
She says her parents were supportive of her decision to delay work to attend a relatively lesser known university.
Meanwhile, Ashoka University is gearing up for undergrad students, a permanent campus in Sonepat, bordering Delhi, and a fresh round of funding from people such as Dilip Shanghvi of Sun Pharmaceuticals and Raamdeo Agrawal of Motilal Oswal Financial Services.
The young and the restless, soon to be unleashed on the job market, are not the only ones attracted by private universities. So are new recruiters. Sameer Maheshwari, an IIT-Delhi alumnus who runs healthkart.com, hired from IITs, IIMs and ISB, top-rung technology and business schools.
One of healthkart’s hires was a computer science engineering graduate from Thapar University located in Patiala, Punjab. He clicked, and based on his referrals, the three-year-old company which sells fitness equipment and health products online, now looks favourably at job applications from Thapar University graduates.
Private universities, despite struggling with a regulatory mess, are riding a boom in India. They are offering scholarships to ensure that high fees do not keep out students, they are innovating to teach maths to history students and -- after a wave of tech and management colleges – some are bringing back social sciences and liberal arts into syllabi.
Growth in private education in India is tough to track, not just because of its federal structure. Education was initially an area state governments were responsible for, just like law and order.
Its shift to a concurrent list means both the 28 states and the union government at the centre can set-up schools, colleges, universities, make policy on education, and appoint regulators. Private education is regulated by an age-old “inspector raj” where inspection teams visit colleges and universities and tick off criteria as vague as number of laptops per student.
India’s 12th Five Year Plan document, setting the agenda for 2012-17 in higher education, says “.. central institutions, which account for 2.6% of the total enrolment; state institutions which account for 38.5% of enrolment; and private institutions that cater to the remaining students.” This means one in every two college-going students, and soon more than that, is getting a degree from a private university or college.
Alternative
For some time, private universities such as Amity University and Lovely Professional University’s mega campuses offered the fall-back option where India’s young demographic, whose members did not manage to win seats in state-run universities, found a place.
It may well be that these universities are emerging as a real alternative, sought after by parents, endorsed by recruiters. For Kiran Kamra, who runs a beauty parlour in Delhi, seeing her son graduate as an engineer was a cherished dream. He won an engineering seat, and a scholarship, at Lovely Professional University four years ago, reducing his fees by half but still at a substantial Rs 40,000 per semester. Kamra was ecstatic.
“The atmosphere in the university was good. I felt they will keep an eye on my son,” said Kamra, whose son moved to a hostel in Punjab for his undergraduate course. “The only thing is that he would not get home food”. Private universities are learning to tap into their surplus or funding from angel investors to prevent fees from becoming a barrier.
“For 2011, our entire batch got full fee waiver. Now, 65-70% will get some form of fee waiver,” said Nikhil Sinha, vice chancellor of Shiv Nadar University, which admits a small class size of roughly 650 undergraduate students. The university is funded by annual grants upwards of Rs 250 crore from Shiv Nadar Foundation set-up by Nadar, an information technology czar.
In a well-argued critique of private education, Dhanwanti Nayak, who, ironically, teaches at the private Manipal University, argues in ‘Economic and Political Weekly’ that private education, because of high fees, neither offers a real choice to students nor a diverse-enough environment.
“The kind of courses and degrees young people would be willing to take loans for would unsurprisingly be the ones that will get them the jobs to repay their loans. Loan-driven education thus compromises on the substantive choices that young people may have, sacri?cing educational and other goals to instrumental ones,” writes Nayak.
But bodies such as the World Bank have long believed that for developing economies like India job-linked education is not such a bad thing, as it can lift people out of poverty. Yet, private universities are working at bringing back history, language, fine arts into curriculum.
Both Shiv Nadar University and Ashoka University offer a two-year integrated course as part of an undergraduate programme where students learn all stream before choosing their specialisation. They also offer a flexible combination of subjects, allowing an Economics major to, say, have a minor in dance.