International Universities in India: A reassessment

The opening of international university campuses in India has a distinct gold rush feel to it.

There are 17 universities whose applications are already through and the projects are at several stages of implementation. Several are in the pipeline. The British universities were quick to move in, given their historical affinity. The Australians followed suit, taking advantage of the geopolitical bonhomie between the two nations. The Canadian universities, despite Canada being a top destination of Indian students in the last decade, were hampered by the rift between the two nations around an alleged state-sponsored assassination of a Canadian citizen. But they feel left behind, and will soon turn up in force at the India AI Summit in February, looking for deals. And, finally, the US universities, ever so inward-looking (international students at US universities make up only 6% of the population, compared to about a quarter in UK or Australia), are slower, but some, like the Illinois Institute of Technology, has joined the frey.

The logic of the Indian government is clear. Students going abroad meant an outward remittance of $2.3 Billion at its 2021 peak (which has since come down to $1 billion mark in 2025), and the government wants to bring it down. Further, the government wants India to be the 'skills capital' of the world, meaning to supply skilled manpower to an ageing West, notwithstanding the nativist backlash, and thus improving inward remittances.

It is easy to notice that these considerations are framed purely in commercial and transactional terms. Educational aspects are hardly mentioned, given that the Indian government maintains an anti-Western rhetoric (centred around the Nineteenth century liberal Thomas Babbington Macaulay) and wants Indian educational system to become 'more Indian'. Such a paradox - a culture war against western education alongside an open-door policy to western universities - can only be explained by the peculiar, and primarily colonial, Indian approach to higher education: It is seen as a place to get credentials ('degrees') but not to develop moral sense or build character. (see here)

However, even these transactional considerations pre-date some of the geopolitical changes that we are experiencing now. AI is starting to mitigate some of the effects of the ageing workforce across Europe and North America, while fuelling the anti-immigration politics further. India's global alignments are also changing: The recent rupture of US-India relationship may reconfigure their relationship, particularly in the service sector, that developed since the 90s. The Indian government - and the Indian companies - are increasingly looking to diversify its trade flows, with new markets and customers. Of all the areas President Putin wanted to make progress on during his visit to India in 2025, his desire to bring skilled professionals from India (which India doesn't have, due to the shortcomings of its education system) got maximum coverage. 

For the universities committing to campuses, they want to get a share of India's fabled middle class market, without bringing the students in. This has become increasingly difficult to access given the Visa restrictions, cost of living crisis and lack of job opportunities for migrant students. But they are likely to be misreading the situation. The Indian students they get are the Indian students who wish to go abroad. They will be in a different territory, literally but also conceptually, when they open their campuses. They may then discover that India is a very different country than the one they saw from outside, and India's middle class isn't as big as the newspapers make it to be.

To be counted as Middle Class in India, a family needs to have income of $2 - $3 a day whereas the global benchmark is somewhere between $15 and $20. India's GDP numbers are uncertain, but even at their most inflated, it is between one-fifth and one-third of China's GDP. India's export sector is tiny compared to China, which is an important consideration as the foreign-trained usually get an advantage in outwardly-facing sectors. India might lead a hypothetical table of Higher Education vibrancy, as it licenses most new universities every year, but these institutions often have no students. The phenomena of 'ghost colleges', where a university might have buildings and infrastructure but no students, would surprise a Western visitor but is common in India, particularly in some states: They exist primarily to sell credentials to the students who can then encash these to go abroad. And, finally, colleges are closing in India due to low enrollment, and seats are going empty in the public institutions, which happen to be low-cost and with relatively higher prestige than private ones. 

Therefore, the foreign universities opening campuses in India are leaping into the dark. This is not surprising, given that activity, rather than outcome, is more important in the public sector universities. In a different setting, it would be unacceptable for a public university to commit to setting up a campus without any commitment to the local economic development and proper understanding of the student population, but this is a different time and transnational education (TNE) is a business category of its own. And, it is likely that most of these enterprises will be runious failures, not only for the taxpayer footing the bill but also for the students, who will eventually be left in a limbo. At the same time, it is safe to say that if there are some winners, they would define the international education agenda for the next twenty to thirty years, by emerging as models for the whole sector.