[oped of the day] The many structural flaws in India’s higher education system

Context

The furore surrounding fee hikes at the Jawaharlal Nehru University has spurred deeper questions about the quality of university education. 

Higher Education

• • India’s higher education system is structurally flawed and underfunded.
  • This crisis will affect innovation and human capital, the two pillars of labour productivity and GDP growth.
  • It will hurt India’s largest demographic of its potential.

Fault Lines

• • A surge in women’s enrolment does not necessarily imply better outcomes. 
  • ‘India Skills Report’ suggests that only 47% of Indian graduates are employable.
  • India has startlingly low faculty figures.

Faculty shortage

• • Faculty vacancies at government institutions are at 50% on average. 
  • A Deloitte gathering of 63 Deans of top-tier institutions revealed that 80% listed lack of quality faculty as their biggest concern. 
  • The problem lies in increased demand and stagnant supply. 
  • The number of institutions has surged in India since the 2000s, while the number of students doing PhD has remained constant. 
  • There are over a 1,00,000 India-born PhDs in universities around the world. They are kept away by paltry salaries and poor funding. 
  • China attracted Chinese-origin PhDs back home with dollar salaries and monetary incentives for published research. 
  • Tsinghua University is designed on the Western model of teaching and research and is even ahead of MIT in terms of published papers.

The problem of Indian universities

• • Indian universities separate research and teaching activities, depriving students of exposure to cutting-edge ideas. 
  • Monetary incentives for academia are practically non-existent.
  • Indian R&D expenditure at 0.62% of GDP is one of the lowest in emerging economies. 
  • Indian universities rank low in both research and teaching. 
  • The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, at rank 155, was our highest in the Scimago Institutions Rankings (SIR) for research. 6 Chinese institutes figured in the top 50.

Macroeconomic impact

• • These flaws could affect macroeconomic indicators such as labour productivity, determined by innovation and human capital. 
  • The workers of tomorrow need to transition to the formal, non-agricultural sector, with higher education credentials.
  • An increase in research could lead to more innovation in the economy. It might drive up labour productivity. 
  • The Draft National Education Policy (DNEP) proposed ambitious reforms. It aims to double education spending to 6% of GDP and close the research-teaching divide in higher education. 
  • It is coupled with an ‘Institutions of Eminence’ programme started in 2018 that gave increased funding to some research universities. 

Challenges

• • The dramatic increases may not be politically feasible.
  • The implementation of such reforms may go the path of previous NEPs — watered down and eventually shelved.

Way ahead

• • The government needs to ensure that higher education’s role in innovation and human capital is not ignored. 
  • The reforms must be pushed through and must lead to legislation that will fund research-based universities. 
  • Only this can bring a culture of discovery and accountability to India’s higher education institutions.

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Institutions of Eminence

Institution of Eminence Scheme