India’s opportunity in higher education
Let universities compete their way to quality — with complete autonomy to do so
The last four decades have seen rapid growth in our higher education system, raising the proportion of the relevant age group in higher education from 6 per cent to 26 per cent. In the mid 2000s, when growth peaked, India opened one engineering and management college each day. This growth has been highly skewed: In professional fields, in undergraduate education, and in the private sector. The net effect of this skew is a massive quality problem.
Consider enrolment in undergraduate engineering programmes, which have grown over 40 times in 40 years. To even keep the quality of engineering education level at what it was in 1980 (hardly an ambitious goal), one would have needed to multiply the faculty base by a like factor. In this same period, graduate degrees in science and engineering have grown 14 times, opening up a wide shortage of qualified faculty.
The New Education Policy (NEP) has correctly identified the quality problem as the key issue to address. It suggests welcome reform for the “what” of reform: 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. Encourage the entry of foreign universities and attract foreign students to study in India. All this constitutes major progress and is welcome. But to have the result on quality we desire, it needs to be effectively implemented, which will demand more state capacity than we usually demonstrate. How can we get superb education quality without needing superb governance?
All higher education systems worldwide look to the US system with envy. A blended state and private system has led the world since the second
World War. US universities attract the world’s best students and faculty, produce the bulk of Nobel Prizes, and are generally acknowledged as the source of the best science. The most enlightened observers of the US university system, such as Gerhard Casper, president emeritus of Stanford University, attribute its success to two factors working in tandem: Competition and autonomy. Autonomy extends across the university system: There is no central education authority or regulator and no national public university. The Federal Department of Education in Washington DC neither determines curricula nor educational standards, and, Wikipedia tells us, leaves even accreditation to “an informal private process”. Neither federal nor state government determines the fees a university can charge. The federal government’s main role in higher education is funding — especially of research in private and public universities through the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health.
As a newly-minted PHD, when I taught my first course at Stanford, there was no oversight of what I taught. No one looked at my course outline, it was left to me to decide how many units of credit students would get for my course, who to let into it, what assignments to set, what assessment criteria were appropriate, and what grades to give. Students rated me on my teaching at the end of the term, and those evaluations were looked at by the department Chair and dean. I was very conscious that I was fully responsible for the quality my students received.
But autonomy is not enough on its own. The US university system is also a hugely competitive system. Universities compete fiercely with each other. As in India, students compete fiercely to get into the right institution. But US universities themselves compete to attract the best students — especially graduate students — by offering funding and going out to sell themselves. They compete in fund-raising, with offices of development staffed by hundreds of people. They compete to attract the best faculty, poaching from other universities with benefits, research funding, staff support — and weather. (Stanford’s favourite tack is to recruit in January, when the contrast with Boston is at its best). Faculty compete with each other in writing research proposals to get funded and to get tenure. And all this competition can be brutal — many faculty members, fine teachers in themselves, do not get tenure and leave the university. And a department that did not rank consistently in the top few in the nation would be merged with another or closed.
The NEP advocates “light but tight regulation” (whatever that may mean!). Instead of trying to regulate our way to quality, we should rely more fully on competition and autonomy to drive change. In professional education, when demand for seats exceeded supply, there was little incentive to improve quality. Supply now exceeds demand in India in many states, and institutes are finally starting to compete on faculty and facilities. All colleges should be free to add fields and seats at will, ignoring complaints from incumbent colleges that there is too much capacity. A few fine state universities can provide an excellent quality control for more expensive private universities, which must either be better or make do with poorer quality students. The state should be generous in funding non-professional fields (such as the arts and social sciences) where markets do not adequately value skills. The IITS, IIMS, IISC and our other public “institutions of national importance” should all be funded to become full service universities — as it is easier to add fields than grow excellence. Progressively shift research funding from independent national laboratories (who absorb over 90 percent of state research funding) to the higher education sector. The NEP is right in advocating a National Research Foundation to allocate funding to both public and private universities on a peer-reviewed basis. But also free all institutions to charge what they wish, so long as it is transparent and student loans are freely available. Private universities should be freely permitted — whether they are driven by philanthropy or profit. Just make their objectives transparent to all. And, as the NEP again says, ensure a compulsory accreditation system, provided by competing public and private agencies. Make the full assessment public to enable parents and students to choose colleges that do a good job and exit those that don’t.
The NEP points in the right direction, but is weak on the “how” of comprehensively addressing our quality problem. It assumes a new, reformed, regulator will be able to bring in quality — ignoring decades of experience to the contrary. Quality in an institution of excellence must indeed be forced — but by competition, not regulation. And competition must be accompanied with the complete freedom to do what it takes to compete.