Sunday Posts

India's employment data is sobering ( see here ). The pandemic has wrecked havoc and the structural problems of the economy - service sector dependence, uneven regional development and health and education challenges - are more evident than ever. Something needs to happen, and fast. To its credit, the government acknowledges the education challenge. Belatedly - it took more than 30 years - India has come up with a new National Education Policy. It is a comprehensive policy, which covers the whole spectrum of education and perhaps overcompensates the previous neglect by advocating radical change. As I commented elsewhere on this blog, it shows a curious mixture of aspirations, cultural revival and global competitiveness put under the same hood.  However, despite its radical aspirations, the policy document often betrays same-old thinking. One of these is India's approach to foreign universities. The NEP makes the case for allowing foreign universities to set up operations in Ind...

India's New Education Policy makes the clearest statement yet about India's intent to attract foreign universities to set up campus in the country. It recognises the need and makes a promise to introduce legislation allowing the foreign universities to set up campus in India in near future. But, at the same time, it betrays a lack of understanding about international education and branch campus dynamic. The barely concealed assumption that all universities must be very interested about Indian 'market' for demographic reasons and the country holds all the cards on who to allow is completely off the mark.  For starters, this offer is for top 100 universities in the world, the policy states, without specifying how this ranking would be determined. The easiest way to do this would be to take one of the global rankings, but choosing one over the other going to be contentious. Besides, rankings have now moved on from simply ranking the world's best universities to all kin...

Universities today are as national as the Flag or the Anthem. They are expressions of the national idea, carriers of national message and embodiment of national achievement. Their places in international league tables make headlines in newspapers and politicians speeches, they form a key part of the national strategy and when they attract students from afar, it's counted as an export.  This is perhaps all too obvious from the outside, but not so much from the inside. One may see, in the university's diverse student bodies, some kind of microcosm of humanity; the faculty may, in keeping with the enlightenment spirit, think they belong to a republic of letters. The international conferences, part of an academic's cycle of life, are portals of those wonderful communities of interest, where a shared disciplinary language - at least temporarily - reconfigure the ingroups and outgroups.  This is all very ephemeral though, a cultivated feeling than a persistent r...

The statement that India's Higher Education sector is in crisis and needs a 90s style liberalization draws the riposte: Education is not commerce. But instrumentality is at the core of India's Higher Education system and 'liberal' education, an education without the immediacy of objective and specificity of purpose hasn't taken roots in India. Even after Independence, no Indian D'Annunzio called for making Indians after India has been made. There is no hiding away from the reality that Higher Education is a significant sector of economic activity, which is a major employer with a long-term impact on productivity and prosperity. The situation in Higher Education is rather like Indian commerce prior to liberalisation, when even car-making was done on ‘national interest’ and the Indian government protected different industrial sectors for the sake of shielding well-connected business groups from global competition. The question of education is more urgen...

I wrote about the case for allowing foreign universities to be allowed to operate in India. In this connection, I mentioned the Foreign Higher Education Providers Bill, which has appeared in different names and versions since the 1990s before the Indian cabinet and parliament and never went anywhere. I argued that though the foreign providers have more or less given up on the Indian government providing a workable legal framework and settled for various expedient semi-legal arrangements with politically influential education barons, the jobs and skills crisis should force Indian policy-makers to rethink the approach.  However, even if this conversation is reopened in the new parliament in 2019, simply passing the bill as it was proposed wouldn't get us anywhere, and this point is worth belabouring. Several reasons for this, including that the bill in its current form is unattractive for any foreign provider, and it is unlikely that anyone would prefer to operate withi...

Whether foreign universities would be permitted to operate in India, the way they do in Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, or even in China, has been one of the most vexing policy questions that never gets a straight answer. On this issue, it is India at its worst - it seems unable to make up its mind: The 'Foreign Universities Bill' remains always on the legislative agenda, but it remained so for more than 20 years now. Even its latest version, which was so restrictive that it would have excited no one, hasn't gone beyond the cabinet. The current Indian government, last great hope of the foreign institutions because it had a parliamentary majority, singularly failed to put this even on the agenda, despite making all sorts of noise about reforming Indian education. The interested foreign universities, after repeated disappointment, have now given up: The topic doesn't excite anyone anymore. And, yet, the case for allowing the foreign universities in India was ne...

We knew this anecdotally: That Engineering graduates can not find a job in India. Now, we have some numbers: AICTE says that 60% of the 800,000 engineering graduates every year remain unemployed. ( see story ) The story above gives out some important data points:  1. That only 15% of the programmes are accredited by the National Board of Accreditation. This means 85% of the Engineering Programmes have no effective quality control. 2. That only 1% of the Engineering Graduates participate in a summer internship. This effectively means that while, in theory, an internship is a part of the programme, in practise most Engineering graduates never participate in one. Of course, one can read more in this data. The fact that programmes are not accredited means many colleges may be offering a degree without having proper laboratory infrastructure. In a sense, it is some sort of miracle - indicating strong demand - that 40% of the graduates actually find a job, because most ...

For those who accept that the structure of the world economy is undergoing a change - automation and political imperatives in developed countries putting a stop to expansion and even reversing the earlier model of offshoring production and back-offices - Indian Higher Education needs reform. The current system, which has grown out of the large, publicly owned metropolitan universities and technical institutions, has been primarily driven by the growth of private, not-for-profit institutions focusing on Engineering and Business Education. This growth meant that India produces an estimated 1.5 million engineers every year, the largest number in the world, but these engineers are crucially dependent on the Offshoring sector, which has driven the job growth in India for the last two decades. With the expansion of the sector slowing, there is a jobs crisis already: Various reports put the rates of campus hiring anywhere between 15% to 20% of the graduate engineers.  However, this ...

The University Grants Commission (UGC) of India has made news recently by ordering the closure of Pearl Academy, a popular fashion school with more than 4000 students, because they were offering foreign degrees, from UK's Nottingham Trent University, illegally. While some people would see this as an attempt to clamp down on Foreign Education in India, and make Indian Higher Education, already quite parochial, more inward-looking, this particular development may not signify any of that. While the closure of Pearl Academy would make news, especially because it is owned by the global education conglomerate, Laureate Education (something that the Indian media seemed to have overlooked, with some effort presumably), the UGC has been showing teeth and enforcing regulation for some time now.  The infamous IIPM, which operated without any license for years and offered an MBA, Masters Diploma in Business Management, to thousands of students, as well as running the equivalent of an...

Indian Government is in the process of drafting a New Education Policy, which is expected to bring about significant change in education at all levels.  This would be the third time the India has had a 'New Education Policy'.  The Three Education Policies of India The first, in 1968, was really a conscious acknowledgement that education is an important subject worth the attention of the Central government in Delhi. It recommended an uniform school system across the nation, universal non-discriminatory access, the 10+2+3 system that India follows today. The NEP 1968 put emphasis on instruction through mother tongue, which, in case of India, was many and varied, and set up the three language system - State language plus English and Hindi - that most Indian schools follow today. The Second, in 1986, was designed to update India's education for the Information Technology age, and there was a lot of emphasis on technical education at all levels. It did help that ...

In discussing a global education business, someone asked me why one should do India if India is complex and one of the most difficult in the world.  This echoed my own position as it used to be. When I was trying to raise money to do UAspire, if anyone asked which countries we were planning to aim for, my answer used to be - "not India"! It was an awkward answer given my Indian heritage and connections, but one I thought was most pertinent, given that we were raising a small amount of money. And, sure enough, my assumption was right - despite getting most of our time and effort in India, all of our signups came from China, where we spent a lot less time!  However, that was 2012. My views have changed since, not least because of the economic instability in China, and a change in the political environment which has made doing business there a lot more complicated. India, in the meantime, established a demographic pole position - a quarter of the world's new workfo...

Higher Education has become a subject for Prime Time TV in India. This is not because there is a sudden awareness that the system is not working, but rather a string of other events - the closure of a high profile institution which operated without a license for many years (see my earlier post here ), a scandal that exposed Civil Services examinations in one state were rigged for a long time, a Nobel Laureate Economist writing about Government meddling and limitations of Academic Freedom - that brought the subject to the fore. The conversations, stoked by temporary concerns, would almost certainly fade away again, once these issues become old news. But, it is worthwhile to follow it while it lasts. [See one Indian-style talk show, where everyone talks, here ] One could claim that this is not new and the question of Higher Education has got political attention throughout the last decade. The Presidents and the Prime Ministers regularly talked about it. There was a huge expansion w...

A few days ago, I was completely bleak about the possibility of introducing Higher Education innovation in India. ( See earlier post here ) However, my key points were perhaps already cliched, and with the benefit of little more perspective, it is worthwhile to review this topic with a different start point - what shape can Higher Ed innovation in India take? First, there is an enormous amount of corruption in Indian Higher Education sector, and it is growing with commercialisation. The students are justifiably sceptical about anything new or disruptive, and would rather put their faith on tried and tested, despite knowing that these public institutions are quaint and could not care less for them.  Second, while the students know that the choices they have are all poor, the default reaction to this realisation is not to try something new or innovative, but to ensure that one does not do anything foolish. So, while Indian education seems ripe for new and disruptive proposi...

India is looking to fast track the legislation to allow Foreign Universities to set up campuses and even operate as For-Profits, Hindu Business Line claims . Indian media could be excitable, and we have seen such stories before, so this should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt. However, given that this is a story on the Front Page of a respected newspaper, it deserves some commentary. I noted in this blog earlier that I would be surprised if the Government does anything on the foreign education front. This scepticism was based on observations about the general approach of this government to Higher Education, with its urgency to indianise education and introduce, as much as possible, traditional Indian values into it. While this story only confirms some of the feelers I received earlier from people in the know, the consensus was that the Government would bring some new legislation just after the Budget session, it directly runs counter to the approach of controlling Higher Ed...