The government of India has big ambitions for its universities. In addition to more than doubling enrolment to 30 million students by 2025, plans have been drawn up to upgrade 14 Indian institutions to world-class status, emulating the likes of Harvard and Yale in the US, and Cambridge and Oxford in the UK.
Yet a look at the current international rankings tables throws a rather more sobering light on these plans and aspirations. In the 2011 QS World University Rankings®, released in September, there were no Indian universities in the global top 200. While there are 11 Indian universities in the top 700, their progress compared to 2010 is not encouraging: every single Indian university ranked lower than it did in the previous year.
The performance of India’s universities must be reviewed in the global context. The top 20 of the QS World University Rankings is dominated by comprehensive, research-intensive universities of the West. Most of them have spent centuries accumulating world-class researchers and students in the full range of academic disciplines. The comparatively young Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which constitute the Indian elite, in contrast, are limited to the strategically important fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
The IITs fare better in QS World University Rankings by subject, which were released for the first time in 2011, covering 26 narrow disciplines. An impressive ten Indian institutions make the top 200 in at least one of the five engineering and techno-logy disciplines. Of these, four make the global top 50 in civil engineering, India’s strongest discipline — IIT Bombay (30), IIT Kanpur (38), IIT Delhi (43) and IIT Madras (49).
This is attributable to the strong reputation of IITs in producing highly-skilled and work-ready graduates. The QS Global Employer Reputation Survey indicates that several IITs are internationally recognised by employers for producing highly sought-after graduates. This is consistent with their very selective intake, ensuring that IIT graduates are consistently among the most academically gifted students of India.
However, the flipside to this positive employer reputation is the historic lack of emphasis within Indian academia on graduate research. In 2007, there were just 100,000 Indian Ph Ds in a population of 1 billion, compared to over 1,750,000 in the US. Though substantial investment in R&D has since been made by government and private sector, the rapid expansion in research productivity witnessed in STEM disciplines has yet to be replicated in other key areas.
This is reflected in the comparatively weak scores for research citations, with just one Indian university (IIT-Kanpur) ranking among the top 200 for citations per faculty in the 2011 QS World University Rankings. The significant lead of developed Western universities in producing cutting-edge research is being narrowed by higher education institutions in other emerging economic powers such as China and Brazil.
This is not to say there’s no hope of India’s universities becoming internationally competitive in the coming decades. Merely that it will take sustained investment tied with more general economic development, along with adoption of a truly international outlook that characterises universities which currently top the QS World University Rankings.
Indeed, with these factors in place, there are examples of institutions elsewhere in Asia which have successfully built up international profiles despite their comparative youth. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU) broke into the world top 60 for the first time in 2011, just 20 years after it was promoted. Established in 1991, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST — 40) is similarly precocious, and is comfortably the youngest university in the top 50. In Korea, KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology — 90) and POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology — 98), both make the top 100, with POSTECH rising 14 places. Both universities were established in the past 40 years. These young universities are raising millions to fuel further growth and help build state-of-the-art laboratories and facilities.
The progress of these institutions has undoubtedly been helped by adoption of a global outlook. NTU and HKUST have aggressively recruited top-class researchers from East and West, while POSTECH launched a US$150 million (Rs.765 crore) three-year globalisation plan in 2010 which involves making its campus officially bilingual.
In sharp contrast, India is largely an exporter rather than importer of talent. China and India are the two largest exporters of international students, but the one-way nature of the traffic has meant both have suffered a significant brain drain. India has yet to attract international students or faculty in significant numbers. Even its most internat-ionalised university, IIT-Roorkee, fails to make the top 100 institutions in terms of proportion of international faculty or students.
For India, the path to developing world-class universities will be a long one. Yet for attaining its more immediate goal of improving the performance of its elite institutions while expanding participation and developing infrastructure, there are plenty of positive examples to be followed in Asia.
(Nunzio Quacquarelli is the founder-director of Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd, London)