The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2010-11 of 200 universities featured six varsities from mainland China, two from Turkey and none from India. The easiest defence for India is to attack the ranking methodology, but this league table is yet another reminder of the ugly truth of Indian higher education: quality is simply not a priority at the institutional or policy level.
Although there is no dearth of self-proclaimed world-class institutions in India, when claims of world-class faculty, research or infrastructure are benchmarked with global institutions through proxies such as the THE rankings, they fail miserably. Nevertheless, the descriptive ‘world-class’ is loosely used not only by institutions but also by government. Unfortunately, the recent announcement of the establishment of 14 ‘innovation universities’ with world-class standards has yet to move beyond an attractive concept.
Why does India lack world-class universities? It is easy to point to the lack of resources — money and time — needed to build such instit-utions. More importantly, however, Indian higher education fails to adequately acknowledge the value of the most essential resource in quality higher education, viz, talent. Awareness and the practice of attracting best talent — students, faculty and administrators — to deliver quality is sorely missing.
Let’s take a basic compa-rison of research productivity between Zhejiang University, China, ranked 197th in the THE league table and Delhi University (DU), one of the better-known public universities in India. A simple search for ‘University of Delhi’ on Google Scholar produces about 30,000 results, compared with nearly 330,000 for ‘Zhejiang University’. This difference becomes starker when one weighs the relative size of the institutions. Delhi has 138,000 students enroled in formal education programmes against Zhejiang’s 39,000.
Such inefficient research productivity reflects not only a lack of recognition of research as one of the core measures of a world-class university, but also lack of an ecosystem of talent. For example, consider the number of Ph D candidates in the two universities. Only one in 50 students of Delhi University is enroled in a doctoral programme, compared with one in six at Zhejiang.
Most of the ‘high quality’ universities in India, including DU place strong emphasis on undergraduate programmes and have earned a reputation and perception of quality on the grounds of two interrelated factors — early mover advantage and student selectivity. (IITs and IIMs are not ‘universities’ because they aren’t comprehensive in their educational offering). Neither of these two factors is related to the core purpose of a higher education institution but still creates a significant competitive advantage for them. In this context, talent evaluation could create competitive differentiation for new varsities to deliver high quality.
As an engine is to a car, talent is to a university. While every car has an engine, the differing performance of cars is a direct outcome of the quality of engine which harnesses all resources to deliver performance. Likewise, talent is the engine of a university, the sine qua non of high performance and quality. And width of talent is not limited to a competitive student body but must include education professionals — faculty and administrators.
There are very few exemplars in India which have consciously attempted to build a cadre of education professionals. One of the recent initiatives — Azim Premji University — has targeted the very relevant focus area of preparing “a large number of committed education and development professionals who can significantly contribute to meeting the needs of the country”. If it remains true to its mission, the proposed university will make a massive contribution by way of high-quality academia professionals committed to institution building in a comprehensive and quality-conscious manner.
Admittedly, indian universities have at least two major systemic challenges. First, the landscape of Indian higher education is quite complex. Both public and private colleges are affiliated with public universities, resulting in a high variability of quality within institutions. Second, over the past 60 years since independence, India has struggled to mobilise resources for access and quantity instead of quality in higher education.
But although India cannot turn its back on access, it can’t afford to waste education resources by continuously expanding an inefficient system either. Expansion without quality improvement will merely result in a larger inefficient system. Now it’s time for quality considerations to take precedence at the institutional and policy levels.
The well-known Boston-based global higher education commentator Philip G. Altbach defines India as “a world-class country without world-class higher education”. Indian higher education sorely needs exemplars to raise the overall quality of the system and to provide globally benchmarked solutions to the many challenges with which it is confronted. Building excellent universities engaged in simultaneous teaching, research and service, requires a new policy framework which will attract, train and retain top talent — students, faculty and administrators.
(Dr. Rahul Choudaha is a New York-based higher education consultant)