Higher education: Struggle or promise?

To realise the potential of our higher education system, policy must do less to achieve more, and reflect its diversity

India has a massive higher education system.  With over 42 million enrolments, we have more students in higher education than the population of three-quarters of the countries in the world.  Thousands of engineering colleges and management institutes, most relatively recent, sit alongside older colleges of arts and commerce.

Not only is our higher education system huge, but it is also by far the most heterogeneous in the world. In the public system, central universities spread around the country coexist with state universities. The IISc, IIT, IISER and IIM operate as separate entities, each with its own acts of Parliament. Medical colleges, the NIDs and NIFT are outside the Ministry of Education. And then we have a huge private system. Many thousands of private (mainly professional) colleges are affiliated to public universities. Some private institutions have morphed into deemed universities. And a recent wave of private universities funded by philanthropy has been set up under Union or state university Acts, with each aspiring to become great national universities.

Policy needs to reflect the needs of this huge and diverse system. The key challenge is quality, a direct consequence of the massive growth in private professional education in the last 40 years. For decades, we have tried to regulate quality into the system and failed. Instead, let institutes decide for themselves what disciplines to start, how many students to admit, fees to charge, and the curriculum to teach.  The state must limit its role to assessing institute quality, dramatically increase research funding for both the public and private system, and increase investment in the humanities and social sciences. So huge and diverse a system requires a much more limited state role focused on just those few areas.

Private and public professional colleges affiliated to universities: 6,000 engineering colleges and 3,000 management institutes largely come under state government universities. Improving their quality needs a compulsory assessment and certification programme that is made public. Then, these institutes can rely on the market to sort the system as students and parents decide which colleges thrive, which survive, and which don’t. The key choice that must be made here is a non-choice: Do not try to improve quality by limiting expansion. Let colleges expand and add fields and students at their choice — and then compete with one another. 

Institutes of national importance: Our IITs, IISc, IIMs, and NIDs are justifiably a source of much pride.  But we need to treat them as we have classified them: As institutes of national importance. This means providing them with the autonomy they need to build their own future. (If they don’t seek autonomy, perhaps it should be forced on them; they must compete with one another for students, faculty and funding.) This government took a very welcome step in 2017 when it freed the IIMs to decide their own appointments for the board, chair and director, allowing them to handle matters independently. The complete reversal of that reform a month ago, with all power over appointments returning to bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education, needs to be reconsidered. Isolated examples of possible wrongdoing should be addressed as the exceptions they are, without tying the whole system up in regulation in response. The government can always appoint an ombudsman to check financial compliance in public institutes. And progressively, for these professional institutions, reduce government funding for operating expenses and fund only capital expenditure.  That will deliver true autonomy.

Full-service universities with the humanities and social sciences: The concentration on professional fields had the corollary of neglect of the social sciences and humanities. Many of today’s most challenging problems — getting to Net Zero, decent health care for all 1.4 billion of our population — demand a perspective that spans technical and non-technical disciplines, so excellence increasingly demands full-service universities. We have two paths to getting there. The most elusive feature of a world-class institute is excellence. Excellence is hard to define. Presidents of universities that have it say it is in the water. But excellence is only an established feature at those same institutes of national importance I spoke of earlier. Creating a culture of excellence in an institution without it is a much harder task than growing new fields in an institution that has it. So an immediate opportunity of creating a few world-class universities is to grow the IITs and IISc into them, where graduate and undergraduate education, and science, engineering, the social sciences and the humanities are all of equal merit.  Some of our best IITs are doing just this, but the effort — and prominence — that the humanities and social sciences receive needs to be substantially enhanced. This should be a collective project of the next 20 years.

Several recent private philanthropic efforts are beginning to change the map of Indian higher education. Ahmedabad University, Ashoka, Krea, Shiv Nadar, Plaksha and a project I’m involved with, Nayanta, are all great projects that should inspire emulation. States should compete to attract these universities by freeing them from all strictures on admissions, recruitment and the types of degrees that can or cannot be awarded. Let these purely privately funded philanthropic efforts be our laboratory for experiments that flourish or fail without regulation. They will collectively deliver the thousands of broadly educated graduates we need each year as our intellectual leadership.

Research universities: A key recent initiative is the setting up of the National Research Foundation. I have written on this twice in these pages (“NRF: A landmark initiative”, Business Standard, July 20, 2023, and “NRF: What research should be funded?” Business Standard, August 17, 2023), so I will not say much here beyond repeating that, done right, the NRF could be transformative.  This requires that the full Rs 50,000 crore be state funded, the NRF be run by academics and scientists and not politicians and bureaucrats, and there be no dilution of the condition that every funded proposal must involve an academic from a public or private institution. Our goal is not just substantively more scientific research. It is also, or even more, better quality graduate education. If our best faculty engage in more research, our postgraduates would learn how to do research as apprentices to the country’s best minds. The resulting flow of talent could power the country’s research effort and begin to build an innovative India. 

ndforbes@forbesmarshall.com. The writer is co-chairman Forbes Marshall, past president CII, and chairman of Centre for Technology Innovation and Economic Research and Ananta Aspen Centre. His book, The Struggle and the Promise has been published by HarperCollins