Sunday Posts

If I thought India was the El Dorado of International Higher Ed - everyone wanted to go there, but no one knew how - it may no longer be true: Reportedly, 17 foreign universities have got permission to open their campuses in India, with more waiting in the queue. At the same time, Indian higher education policymaking continues to send mixed signals. The Prime Minister recently talked about the 'Macaulay Mindset' and the invitation to free India of the influence of the long-dead Lord M. (See here ' Modi wages war against the ghost of British Empire ') In effect, therefore, India is telling the foreign universities that 'we want your brands but none of your methods', when China is doing the opposite - taking their methods and building its own brands!  This is what triggered me to write this post, and I do want to make more posts about the prospects of foreign universities in India. But, as a starting point, it may be worthwhile to understand...

I had a fascinating discussion today which I need to record here.  The point is trivial - which kind of courses are in demand in Indian Higher Ed - but it was a big surprise for me.  In the last several weeks, I have been talking to a lot of people in India. I spent a couple of weeks there, trying to figure out, after a gap of several months, what's exactly is happening so that I can put an India specific business proposition together. These conversations gave me a vague sense that a major shift is underway, but I couldn't quite figure out what that shift really is. Today, the penny dropped! On the surface, the higher ed conversation in India remains the same as before. There is a lot of talk of industry-academia gap, though not much action! The hackathons and boot camps are everywhere. Academic calendars reflect an amazing variety of holidays and excruciating and endless sequence of examinations. Except for some campuses which are more political than any academic instit...

Higher Ed in India is a serious matter.  It should be obvious, given the size of India's youth population, its importance as a major economy and democratic society and the competition it faces from the other rising powers in the region, primarily China. But education in general and higher education in particular were never taken seriously in India, except as an endless series of examinations. The primacy of examinations and middle-class obsession with exam results (Amartya Sen wrote a book titled 'The country of first boys')  Over the last thirty years, the sector has been privatised, de-professionalised and badly regulated. The institutions often became the front for money laundering, and they were run by politicians, either directly or by proxy. There are ghost institutions without any real student, widespread corruption in regulation and ranking processes, fake degrees and professors without qualification: It is a big and profitable market, which c...

I was in India for a week and I heard one word repeated over and over again: Scale!  India is trying to do something unique. It is trying to create a prosperous society with a huge scale. This isn't about a small proportion of a small population of a small European nation becoming rich: This is about hundreds of millions of people being pulled out of deprivation and empowered to shape their own lives. The ambition is staggering. My engagement, I should admit, is only with higher education. I am not as familiar with the workings of the other sectors of the economy. And Indian higher education is, in many ways, peculiar: While the commercial activities of the country have been 'liberalised' and faced global competition and benchmarking, Indian higher education is still very protected. It has been privatised but through a license raj where politicians called the shots. Indian higher education is, therefore, a strange beast: It has the characteristics of the pre-90s Indian busi...