Indian Higher Education: Envisioning the Future by Pawan Agarwal; Sage Publications; Price: Rs.895; 488 pp
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A discussion on the evolution and future course of higher education in India is what this book by a senior bureaucrat who spent nearly a decade studying the system — both as an administrator and researcher — sets out to be. It provides a thorough overview of the complexities of the higher education system in the country and covers most key issues including quality and access, funding, regulation, quality management, the growth of private higher education and the role of tertiary education institutions in workforce development.
The book starts with an analysis of the size and structure of Indian higher education. It is perhaps not widely known that India has four times the number of higher education institutions than the US and Europe. Compared with China, the number is seven times. However India’s 431 universities and over 21,000 colleges offer little cause for cheer. Unlike their peers overseas, student enrolment in Indian colleges and universities tends to be small — averaging about 500 students per institution. This makes most of them unviable with woefully inadequate infrastructure, poorly paid and trained faculty, hopelessly outdated curricula and dumbed down standards. The result is the addition of tens of thousands every year to the country’s gigantic pool of unemployable graduates.
Ironically, despite hosting the world’s largest number of higher education institutions, India has one of the world’s lowest gross enrolment ratios (GER) at just 12 percent. This means that only one in every eight Indians eligible for tertiary education, is able to avail it. Against this, the GER is as high as 91 percent in Korea and 83 percent in the US, and even China has made rapid strides in recent years to attain a GER of 20 percent. While the number of students in higher education in India doubled in absolute terms from 4.9 million to 11.7 million between1990-2005, China’s rose nearly six-fold from 3.8 million to 21.3 million. Clearly, having seven times fewer institutions of higher learning than India hasn’t proved to be a handicap for the Chinese. They got around the problem by opting for large fully-equipped and well-run institutions rather than taking the Indian route of promoting a huge number of ill-equipped and poorly managed ones.
The outcome of this higher education development model, as the chapter on Workforce Development highlights, is a mismatch between the education acquired and the skill requirements of Indian industry, which renders it ill equipped for productive employment. As detailed in the same chapter, only 5 percent of the country’s labour force in the age group of 20-24 receives vocational training compared to 96 percent in Korea, and between 60-80 percent in the industrial nations of the West. “Like the US, while the tradition of liberal arts is on decline elsewhere, India continues to hold on to it with a significant proportion of its graduates in the general or liberal arts stream. Most students acquire a degree for its symbolic value for they study subjects without much occupational focus,” notes Agarwal.
The book also traces the rise and growth of private investment in higher education. While the author pays lip service to the role of private players in the field, he remains true to his bureaucratic roots and is reluctant to give credit to the massive contribution private sector education entrepreneurs have made in providing millions of students access to higher education. India’s rapid ascent up the global economic ladder — rising from near the 50th rank in 1980 to the top 10 today — would not have been possible without substantial investments in institutions of higher education — particularly professional education — by private education providers aka edupreneurs.
Therefore unsurprisingly, little mention is made of the numerous court battles private professional college managements were forced to fight against government bureaucracies for the right to establish and administer education institutions of their choice as provided in Article 30(1) of the Constitution. Despite this, nearly 80 percent of all professional colleges in the country have been promoted by edupreneurs. But for these institutions, access to professional education and thereafter to well-paying jobs would have remained a pipe dream for millions of Indians, and the country may well have missed out on the economic resurgence witnessed during the past two decades.
But while the author details the funding problems of tertiary education institutions in India, his solutions are anything but bold or transformative. Advocating greater government allocations for higher education, rationalisation of frozen fee structures by compelling parents/students to pay the costs of education provision, and improving the availability of and accessibility to student loans is tantamount to re-stating the obvious. Solving the massive problem of inadequate funding — which has a bearing on everything from infrastructure provision to quality of faculty and designing improved teaching-learning processes — requires scaling back the regulatory role of government in higher education (something few serving bureaucrats are likely to suggest), and encouraging mergers and acquisitions among the large number of unviable institutions.
Therefore this compendium, which offers a wealth of useful data and statistics, fails to provide a workable model of Indian higher education in the 21st century. Although a reading of this valuable contribution to the on-going debate on the future of Indian higher education is sine qua non, Agarwal has missed an opportunity to detail clear priorities and imperatives urgently required to reform and reshape higher education in India.
Binu S. Thomas