Sunday Posts

Indian universities fail to make it to Global Top 100 in reputation rankings, and this has now caused some embarrassment. Not that we are used to see Indian universities in the top league, but now it happens to be the only BRIC country that does not make it. Indeed, it is a moot point that the universities from Singapore, Korea, Turkey and Israel all feature in the list, but what really matters for India is that it shows, yet again, how India is falling behind China on this aspect too. What should be done? Phil Baty, from Times Higher Education who published the rankings, suggest that India must embrace internationalisation . What this means is to focus on greater global collaborations in research and teaching, and recruitment of international faculty, as the top universities in China have been doing for some time now. He rightly observes that quality and standards have been the casualty in the face of rapid expansion of Higher Education in India, and even the top Indian institut...

Roger Brown's impressive essay in Times Higher Education regarding the quest for prestige in Higher Education is a must read. The fact that the four new universities admitted into UK's elite Russell Group paid £500,000 apiece for the privilege goes on to show how dysfunctional all of this has become, particularly because this only appears so normal. Martin Trow, quoted by Dr Brown, may have said that Higher Education is not an outcome, but a process, but this does not seem to be the message of Higher Education anywhere in the world. Higher Education, instead of being seen as a progression to advanced level of education after school, is usually projected as a 'Higher' thing, a marker for power and prestige. A prestige-obsessed sector wastes precious resources in pursuit of prestige, as observed not just in UK, but in the US, where 'Harvard Envy' (as Andrew Rosen puts it) pushes up the costs and reduces faculty interaction in the unending quest of academic ...