In his last letter to Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore wrote: “Visva Bharati is like a vessel carrying the cargo of my life’s best treasure and I hope it may claim special care from my countrymen for its preservation.” The school Tagore founded at Santiniketan in 1901 grew into the Visva Bharati university. The motto he chose for Visva Bharati, Yatra Visvam Bhavatyekanidam, “where the whole world can find a nest”, reflected his global and cosmopolitan vision for the institution. Today, when India boasts of almost 1,000 universities and 52,627 colleges, a vast improvement from 1950 when we had only 28 universities and 578 colleges, have we created those 1,000 vessels “where the whole world can find a nest?” Almost three-quarters of those 1,000 universities have been set up since 2000 when India had only 266 universities and 11,146 colleges. In the past two decades, India has built 734 universities and 41, 481 colleges—a very high count of higher education institutions (HEI), an extraordinary record in terms of sheer numbers. Most of these are private institutions churning out engineers and managers.
The Universe’s Nest
Low enrolment ratio, high graduate unemployment and declining standards pose major challenges to India’s surging higher education sector
Three Challenges of Higher Education
Three dilemmas continue to bedevil Indian tertiary education: First, India’s higher education sector cannot yet achieve enrolment ratios anywhere close to those of other middle-income economies. India’s tertiary gross enrolment ratio (GER) is growing rapidly, yet remains 34 points below that of Brazil and 22 points below that of China, two of the biggest competitors. Ahead of South Africa and Pakistan, India stands eighth among 10 countries.
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Second, educational attainment in India today is not directly correlated to employment prospects. Unemployment is very high among university graduates. Kaushik Basu, professor of economics at Cornell University, tweeted on February 7, 2020: “CMIE data shows the unemployment rate in India in the age group 20-24 years has risen to a shocking level of 37 per cent.”
According to CMIE data of January 2020, “people below the age of 30 account for only a fifth of the total employed persons”. An earlier survey of 2017 showed that 60 per cent of engineering graduates were unemployed. The cruel truth is that unemployment among graduates has only accelerated in 2020, the year of the pandemic.
According to another estimate by Statista Research Department in October 2020, “graduates, with a share of 16.3 per cent, made up the highest unemployment rate in 2019. This was followed by individuals with a post-graduate degree or above with a share of 14.2 per cent. Therefore, the unemployment rate in the country was higher among youth with higher educational qualifications.”
Third, a related problem among recent graduates is that of unemployability. “Every year, thousands of engineering students graduate, but only a tiny handful are trained in the skills that employers need now. Over 80 per cent of them are unemployable for any job in the knowledge economy,” said a report by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds. The employability report is based on research conducted on engineering students from India, China and the US. According to industry experts, such a scathing indictment by industry experts raises questions about the quality and relevance of the Indian education system. With the mushrooming of engineering and management colleges due to unbridled commercialisation, this raises another serious question: Have we lost the search for quality in this mindless and mad search for quantity?
The decline of quality in graduate education and large-scale unemployment and unemployability among graduates have resulted in large-scale outmigration of Indian students. According to a report of the National Science Foundation titled ‘Immigrants’ Growing Presence in the US Science and Engineering Work Force: Education and Employment Characteristics’, the number of Indian students enrolled in degree programmes abroad has grown almost fivefold since 1998. There is a pronounced brain drain of skilled professionals—950,000 Indian scientists and engineers lived in the US in 2013, a steep increase of 85 per cent since 2003. India is currently the second-largest country sending international students worldwide after China, and outbound student flows are surging.
Although there was some decline in the outflow of students to the US when Donald Trump was President, because of stricter immigration controls, such trends are bound to change with more open immigration rules that the Joe Biden administration is likely to introduce. There is also a marked increase in outmigration of students to European countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
In 2019, the year before the pandemic hit, more than 750,000 Indian students boarded flights to universities abroad—a staggering rise over 66,000-odd a decade ago. In recent years, Indian students migrating abroad have reportedly spent an estimated Rs 40,000 crore annually on foreign education.
The New Education Policy
In a bid to revamp India’s education system for increasing its GER to 50 per cent by 2035, and given the rapidly sliding standards and lakhs of outmigrating students, the Union ministry of education has introduced the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. It seeks to add about 35 million new places for students and achieve universal adult literacy before 2035. NEP 2020 will facilitate the world’s top-rated 100 universities to come to India, and encourage top-quality Indian universities and institutions to set up campuses in foreign countries. It claims that “a legislative framework facilitating such entry will be put in place, and such [international] universities will be given special dispensation regarding regulatory, governance and content norms on par with other autonomous institutions of India.”
The NEP 2020 reforms are fairly open and flexible. Research collaboration and student exchanges between Indian and global institutions will be promoted. Credits acquired in foreign universities will also be permitted to be counted for the award of a degree in India.
NEP 2020 also reintroduces the four-year multidisciplinary bachelor’s or graduate programme with exit options. In other words, bachelor’s students can exit after one year with a certificate, after two years with a diploma, and after three years with a bachelor’s degree. The policy also aims at “light but tight” regulation by a single regulator for higher education, discontinuation of M.Phil programmes, and higher education curriculum with a multidisciplinary approach based on “flexibility of subjects”. The changes come as part of a policy to increase public spending on education to 6 per cent of GDP from 4 per cent today.
“The NEP 2020 policy recommendations follow clearly from the diagnosis of the challenges facing the Indian higher education sector,” says Professor Saumen Chattopadhyaya of the Zakir Hussain Centre for Educational Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University. “The issue of the absence of teacher’s and institutional autonomy assumes significance. It was argued in the draft NEP that excessive micro-management stifled teachers and suffocated the institutions in exercising autonomy to innovate and flourish. The steady growth in privatisation did not lead to much improvement in quality because privatisation mutated to commercialisation, which is inimical to the delivery of quality education.”
Will Edtech prove to be a gamechanger?
Has the advent of technology proved to be a gamechanger? “In the short-term, the pandemic has been a such setback for the educational curriculum of prestigious universities like JNU that the advent of EdTech tools have not been much of a help,” says Daya Krishna Lobiyal, professor of computer science at the School of Computer and System Science in JNU. “The administration has neither invested in hi-tech digital tools so that professors can take classes without glitches nor spent enough on training the faculty in various digital e-learning tools. The students have been completely abandoned by the institutions, having to fend for themselves on their smartphones or their laptops.”
According to Lobiyal, beyond the hype of digital education for transformation, the truth is that online education is a necessity today with simply no classes being held in classrooms. “Professors and students are forced to go online without much resources or training,” he adds.
Lobiyal claims that JNU has not purchased any digital apps for the faculty to teach its students, nor has it spent any resources to train anybody from the faculty. “The faculty on its own simply relies on Google apps or Zoom, which are free apps. Since the classes are for one hour and Zoom is free only for 40 minutes, everyone had to shift to Google Meet from Zoom,” he says.
This experience is in sharp contrast to western universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Boston, which uses its OpenCourseWare to publish all its undergraduate and graduate-level courses online, freely available to anyone, anywhere. “The MIT free education apps show you a classroom full of students with a professor and you can join that online. That gives a feel of a virtual classroom experience, while we simply lecture to a computer where we can only see some of the student’s mugshots on the screen. There is simply no comparison between our online experience and that of MIT,” says Lobiyal.
Most JNU students have suffered a great deal during the last year. The majority were forced out of the campus due to the lockdown. Quite a few were not even allowed to collect their laptops while being evicted at short notice. Most of them have had no access to digital tools from their remote homes, in far-flung districts, which have neither robust internet facilities, nor regular 24 hours of electricity. The administration, however, wants parents to pay full fees to be able to pay the staff and maintain facilities.
History of Digital Education
It is not as if the Indian government hasn’t taken any initiative in terms of digital infrastructure. In the past decade, the Indian government took two ambitious initiatives to set up the infrastructure for digital education. First was the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN), which was initiated in 2011 by the UPA-II government and renamed as Bharat Network by the NDA government in 2014. It was funded by Universal Service Obligation Fund to provide broadband connectivity to over 200,000 gram panchayats of India at an initial cost of Rs 200 billion.
The second was the National Knowledge Network (NKN). In March 2010, during the UPA-II regime, the Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure approved the establishment of the NKN at an outlay of Rs 5,990 crore, to be implemented by the National Informatics Centre over 10 years. The NKN was set up as a high-bandwidth, low-latency network to connect all knowledge-creating institutions—universities, the IIMs, the IITs, research laboratories and other e-governance institutions—up to the district level. The aim was collaborative development of universities and other educational institutions, and to create a repository of knowledge in all domains of education.
The vision behind NOFN and NKN was to build an IT-based teaching system that would address the shortage of teachers and lack of education infrastructure at the ground level. For this, free 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps bandwidth was planned at each panchayat level.
Notwithstanding the existence of such a comprehensive IT network across the country, most educational institutions—universities, colleges and schools—have been unable to take full advantage of the existing IT network during the entire pandemic-affected year, says Lobiyal. The majority of educational institutions were simply not aware of the IT network. They either lack technical manpower or simply have no funding to reach the last mile in connectivity or have miserably failed in training faculty. Forced out of necessity into the online classes, most using free apps, both teachers and students have suffered a great deal without reaping many gains.
Can Indian universities become the global knowledge hub?
Although America’s universities have become the envy of the world for their creative energy and their cutting-edge knowledge, few understand how and why they have become preeminent. Columbia University professor Jonathan R. Cole, in his book The Great American University, traces the origins and evolution of the top 100 American universities, emphasising research-based Ivy League institutions. Cole shows how the top US universities grew out of sleepy colleges at the turn of the 20th century into powerful institutions that continue to generate cutting-edge research and help to elevate the American standard of living. Far from inevitable, this transformation was enabled by a highly competitive system that invested public tax dollars in university research, teachers and students, while granting universities substantial autonomy.
Although the NEP 2020’s goals are lofty, it has a very long-term time horizon to attain them. The aim is to do it by 2035, but the only source of public investment seems to be 6 per cent of the GDP. If the American example narrated by Cole is any indicator, making Indian universities the hub of the world and improving quality so they reach the cutting edge of research and knowledge production would require much more than a mere 2 per cent increase of allocation from the current 4 per cent of the GDP. Simply inviting 100 top world universities to open branch campuses in India might not be sufficient, even if they agree to come. Unless a substantial amount of public as well as private funds are invested in university research, teachers and students, while granting institutions substantial autonomy, the goals of transforming Indian education structurally might remain a mere pipedream.