 "Business School image via Shutterstock")
Four years ago, Vinith Johnson, 22, left his family surprised when he decided to drop out of a prestigious Chennai college mid-session. He based his decision on outdated course curricula, inexperienced faculty and inadequate infrastructure. He told his parents he wanted to attend a foreign university, which would allow him the flexibility of choosing electives with the main subjects.
Johnson's father assured him of funding his education abroad but the latter was ready to surprise him again. He opted for a year-old Shiv Nadar University (SNU), set up in 2011. It was a bold move, as one had to traverse through dusty, narrow and serpentine village roads in Gautam Buddh Nagar of Uttar Pradesh to reach the sprawling 286-acre campus. Construction is still on in some blocks.
"I am proud of my decision. I am getting to study additional subjects like economics after regular classes. It opens so many fields for me," says Johnson, now a final-year B-Tech student, while seated in the library amid setting of the dusk outside.
Miss the mark
Till a few years ago, Indian students would hesitate before joining a newly-opened college or varsity. Parents would also discourage their children, fearing substandard institutes and fewer job opportunities after education.
Such fears were premised on reports, including the one published by software industry body Nasscom. Its report says Indian information technology firms reject 75 per cent job applications of engineering graduates and 90 per cent of college graduates because they lack presentation, negotiation and time management skills.
"The expansion in higher education has been accompanied by several problems such as proliferation of substandard educational institutions, which cannot fill vacancies with qualified competent teachers and consequently suffer from outdated curricula, lack of motivation and accountability," University Grants Commission (UGC) vice-chancellor H Devaraj was quoted by The Hindu last month.
India has 711 universities, comprising 46 central, 329 state, 205 state-private and 128 deemed-to-be-universities. It added 1,147 colleges, taking the total to 40,760, in the past year.
The other aspect of falling educational standards can be gauged from the fact that around half of all engineering seats go unfilled every year and the All India Council for Technical Education is trying to lower the total number from nearly 1.7 million to 1.1 million by next year.
Course correction
Amid mistrust, students such as Johnson are quitting mid-course and taking chances with universities such as SNU, Ashoka and OP Jindal Global University (JGU), which have recently come up in the National Capital Region.
Sector experts say while SNU has managed to create a niche for itself with its engineering courses, Ashoka is well regarded for its liberal arts course, something new to India. JGU has made a mark with its law school, increasingly popular among children of top lawyers.
These new universities aspire to be India's answer to Harvard or Columbia in the next 10-15 years, and attribute their current success to research-based education than only classroom training. Students are given a choice to study electives which are entirely different from their course curriculum.
What sets them apart from other centres of excellence in the government's domain is less administrative control and more autonomy to the institutes. For instance, the prestigious Nalanda University grappling with financial and administrative issues. Private varsities, on the other hand, enjoy greater flexibility in designing courses.
"I designed the economics course here and now people prefer us over Jawaharlal Nehru University when it comes to computational economics," says Partha Chatterjee, who heads the department of economics at SNU. He joined after having taught economics at the National University of Singapore for six years and a brief stint with a prestigious management school in Delhi. "I met with a lot of resistance when I tried to change the outdated economic course in Delhi," he adds.
Like Chatterjee, many Indians have left a cushy profession abroad and taken up teaching assignments with these new universities. One of them is Vinita Shastri, dean of undergraduate programme at the Ashoka. Besides Indian professors, these three universities have managed to attract good faculty from abroad by offering a handsome pay package. This at a time when Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management are struggling to fill vacant posts.
"We pay our professors much more than the prescribed rate of the UGC. The starting salary is around Rs 1.2 lakh. Besides, we are liberal in giving research grants to our professors," says Sanjeev P Sahni, principal director of the Jindal Institute of Behavioural Sciences at JGU. A campus visit revealed state-of-the art infrastructure and classrooms fitted with projector and video-conferencing screen.
"Students in India don't interact much in the classroom. Our biggest emphasis is on improving their writing and presentation skills," says Kathleen A Modrowski, dean of liberal arts and humanities at JGU. A US national, she stays at the fully residential campus.
Currently, JGU has 160 full-time faculty members in its five schools. It claims 40 per cent of its faculty has degrees from the top 50 global universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Berkeley. There are four Rhodes scholars as well.
JGU has a tie-up with around 100 universities in 34 countries. The teacher-student ratio for its law school is 1:15 and for other schools is 1:8. Similarly, SNU has 184 faculty members and 1,797 students, a teacher-student ratio of 1:10. It claims to have spent Rs 1,500 crore on six research centres. Ashoka has 35 full-time faculty members and is supported by 20 visiting faculty, including professors of international repute.
Some of its academic partners include the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; University of California, Berkeley; University of Michigan; Sciences Po, Paris; Carleton College; King's College London, Yale University and Trinity College, Dublin. The total of students is 570.
These universities either stand at par or fare better than the top-ranked Indian universities on account of the teacher-student ratio. The other way to judge is through citations in international journals and number of research papers. JGU says its faculty produced 450 research articles in the past five years. SNU's faculty has written 250 journal articles.
