IN THE FUTURE, PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES WILL LEAD THE WAY
In the US, many top universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton and MIT are private notfor-profit universities. Most of them are hundreds of years old. In India, the revolution of private not-for-profit universities started only about 25 years ago, when institutions like Amity were established. I have no doubt that in the future, when people name the leading universities in India, many private names will be on the list. Given their young age in India, it is commendable that of the less than 50 Indian universities that are ranked well globally, a third are private institutions.
India has a great advantage moving forward—the number and percentage of our young people. What is necessary to unlock this great potential is the education of our youth—we must impart the skills and knowledge that help them become gainfully employed and lead our country to prosperity. Considering the Gross Enrolment Ratio targets and the numbers of students entering the school system through the Right to Education Act, the government had, many years ago, calculated that another 1,500 universities were needed in India. The realisation that it would be difficult for it to establish so many on its own led to the growth of private universities.
I call the phenomena of private universities in India a revolution because, over the years, everyone, from the government to benefactors of universities, experienced a steep and tough learning curve. They had to learn how to empower private foundations to create and run quality private universities, without stifling them with regulation. One excellent policy is ‘graded autonomy’—universities that perform well on established parameters get increasing autonomy from regulations. I believe that the government should set very high entry barriers for permission to establish private universities. That will allow reputable universities to create, with supervision that is enabling.
In large numbers, there are always those who compromise on quality, especially when there is a major demandsupply disparity. This has always been the bane of serious educationists. But times have changed. Students and parents realise that the parchment of a degree has less value than the transformation of a student through a university. Transformation of students is the underlying value on which basis private universities around the world have led, and will do so in India. In traditional universities, the degree programme is the ‘product’. It is up to the student to absorb it or benefit from it. At universities like Amity, each student is our ‘product’. Each student is given individual attention to ensure that they develop to their maximum potential.
The agility and speed in decisionmaking of private universities is another strong foundation of their success. In an era when technology is advancing rapidly, where current job profiles will be redundant in the future and new skills will be needed, universities that cannot adapt and innovate will not survive. One example is the curriculum—in traditional universities, it is reviewed once every five years. In good private universities, it is in continuous evolution in close cooperation with the industry.
The global pandemic has further highlighted the importance of adaptability and speed. At Amity, our faculty and tech staff across the world worked day and night to ensure that over 150,000 students smoothly transferred to remote online teaching within days of lockdowns being announced. Online youth fests were organised to keep students engaged, where over 25,000 students from hundreds of schools and universities participated. Over 1,900 online guest lectures were organised with Nobel laureates, industry leaders, eminent scientists and spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. The resilience of good universities has shone through in these tough times—an indicator of why there are more universities than companies over a hundred years of age in the world.
When benchmarking against the best in the world, Indian universities have a long way to go. But the future bodes well. As more corporate houses and philanthropists like Dr Ashok K. Chauhan, the founder of Amity, take up the challenge of helping our country prosper through transformational education, the day is not far when the world will come back to India to study, like in the days of Takshila and Nalanda. Private not-for-profit universities that are founded on the true principles of public service will surely lead the way.
THE PARCHMENT OF A DEGREE HAS LESS VALUE THAN THE TRANSFORMATION OF A STUDENT