Abstract
Over the last two decades, the expansion of higher education in India has not only increased access to education but also created new employment opportunities. This has generated lots of hopes for a better future among youth. However, universities and colleges have become profit machines. The result is mass production of degree holders without jobs. This study in Meerut shows that the state has badly failed to regulate the commercialisation of higher education and protect youth from harassment and exorbitant fees.
Introduction
Nowhere has the expansion of higher education been more dramatic than in India. The number of universities has grown more than six times in the last four decades. India has more than 33,000 colleges with one-third of the colleges having been set up in the last five years, and the higher education sector is expected to continue growing at a compound rate of 18 per cent a year until 2020. As government investment in higher education has failed to keep pace with enrollments, it is increasingly the private sector that plays an instrumental role in this growth. Private institutions now account for 64 per cent of the total number of institutions and 59 per cent of total enrollment in the country, as compared to 43 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively, a decade ago (Ernst & Young, 2012). In the case of vocational courses such as engineering, management, medicine and teacher training, the figures for private sector enrollment reach up to 75 per cent in some states (Surowiecki, 2007). Barring a few well-known universities, there is little discussion about private colleges and universities like Banarsi Das, Adhunik, Little Flower, Elite or Lovely colleges, to name a few, which have mushroomed in the cities like Meerut, Dehradun, Jaipur or Bhopal, nor have the implications of increased privatisation on education and youth ever been part of any public discourse. There are some important aspects of privatisation of higher education in India that have not yet caught the attention of the mass media and popular debates.
In the late 1990s, following neoliberal economic reforms and World Bank dictates, the Government of India declared that institutions of higher education should make efforts to raise their own resources by raising fee levels, encouraging private donations and generating revenues through consultancy and other activities. The government justified this decision as necessary to ease pressure on public spending. In April 2000, the Prime Minister’s Council on Trade and Industry appointed a committee headed by Mr Mukesh Ambani and Mr Kumarmangalam Birla to suggest reforms in the education sector. The committee considered education a very profitable market, and suggested that the government should confine itself to primary education while leaving higher education to the private sector (Ambani & Birla, 2000). These two industrialists made a case for the full commodification of higher education (Ambani & Birla, 2000). In the following years, the budgetary allocation for higher education was decreased and new recruitment of regular academic and non-academic staff was almost halted. As an overall result, between 2007 and 2012, the number of private institutions grew faster than the number of government institutions (Ernst & Young, 2012, 14). In the aftermath of these developments, I discuss how this commercialisation has led to the effective dismantling of higher public education in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh (UP), and its replacement by a system of private education. Through a study of the contemporary history of higher educational institutions in Meerut, a complex picture of interrelationships between entrepreneurs, politicians, student leaders, brokers, teachers and students emerges.
Private Sector and Expansion of Higher Education
There are very few public universities for the large numbers of young people who want to get into university education. Chaudhary Charan Singh University (CCSU) remained the only public university in the five districts of western UP until early 2000. Named after a farmer leader and former Prime Minister from the region, the university was established in 1966. The university offered MA, MPhil and PhD courses in Arts and Sciences. In addition, around 40 colleges in Arts and Sciences (graduate and postgraduate) and 15 colleges of Engineering, Management and Medical Sciences were affiliated with the university. It is important to note that the number of these government and aided colleges and seats available in them hardly changed between the 1975 and 1995 in Meerut, despite the increased demand for higher education. While the university provided poor-quality teaching, had over-crowded classrooms and generally suffered from neglect and lack of infrastructure, it still did an admirable job of providing education in multiple fields to people of diverse class–caste backgrounds. However, things changed dramatically in the early-2000s when the university, following changes in government policy including dramatic budget cuts and neoliberal reforms, started raising funds by giving out certificates and other forms of approval to run self-financed vocational courses, first within the university departments, and later in affiliated state-run colleges. In the self-financed courses, a student was supposed to pay more than usual on user-fee grounds, but infrastructure such as buildings, teaching staff and libraries were provided by the university in these campus-run, but self-financed courses. The teachers, who would get salaries from the government, started running self-financed courses and instead of teaching their own assigned classes, began putting their energy into the new courses. This new development not only benefitted teachers but also a section of students who could now access formal education. However, many students were not in a position to pay the high fees required for admission in self-financed courses. For instance, fee for self-financed one year PG Diploma Course in Journalism ranged from ₹20,000 to 30,000 per semester. In another example, a semester fee for a Master in Social Work (MSW) Course ranged from ₹20,000 to 50,000. While the tuition fee remains the same as sanctioned by the University but capitation and development (infrastructure development) fees keep changing from colleges to college and have become a great source of income for private colleges and exploitation of students. More than two dozens of courses have been started in the university campus within a decade. In short, it was in fact the government who was providing public resources to fund private education.
The newly created institutional structure of the university provided an initiative to give out certificates to private parties, to run professional courses and led many local industrial houses and entrepreneurs to open colleges. Soon, this initiative also captured the attention of unemployed educated youth, some of whom were running coaching centres. It also attracted local political leaders who had access to the university bureaucracy, the political class and the networks among political leaders across parties. Overnight, many one-room coaching institutes were converted into vocational colleges. Hundreds of acres of public land, which had been snatched from farmers at throwaway prices, were allotted to industrial houses, local entrepreneurs and politicians by local authorities. 1 These local industrial houses and politicians set up colleges under charitable trusts. 2 This helped them to invent ways to convert ‘black money into white’ and evade taxes in the name of social service. 3 In this wave of expansion, a number of educated unemployed youth leaders in the CCS University campus and Meerut Colleges were able to set up their own colleges. Initially, these youth leaders protested against the commercialisation of higher education highlighting issues of exorbitant fees and lack of infrastructure in the upcoming private colleges but simultaneously they used their connections and influence with the university bureaucracy, Vice-Chancellor (VC), political leaders and state officials to setup new colleges. Interestingly, as one of the youth student leaders told me, ‘I started my BE.d. college (Bachelors in Education) in a rented house without even a teacher in the beginning (2000) since the university bureaucracy was not very particular about the rules regarding setting up a college’. Now this student leader owns and runs 15 colleges of teachers’ training (BEd and Basic Training Certificate [BTC]), Engineering and Management in western UP. One can guess from the available data that within a decade, more than 350 private colleges were set up in rural and urban Meerut and nearby towns. The CCSU gave certificates to these colleges to run various courses in Engineering, Management, Hospitality and Pharmacy, and to offer BEd degrees. Hardly any private institutions are interested in offering courses in Arts, Social Sciences or Philosophy. These colleges are not interested running any courses which do not prepare the degree holders for the market. So the critical thinking and research skills of a liberal education are no longer the ideal. For instance, courses in BA and MA in Sociology, Economics or History are termed ‘traditional courses’ among the youth. Courses such as MBA or B. Pharmacy are addressed as ‘professional courses’ and seen as job fetchers. However, the reality is altogether different. The result is that CCSU has been reduced from a large and comprehensive public university into a machine that distributes certificates for profit-making private colleges.
Degrees without Skills
Certainly, private investment in higher education enhanced chances of some students to access the higher education while creating new inequalities of access for poor. Those who had money could access the new courses and new institutions. However, the situation is more complicated. While there were and are some good private colleges, a majority of the colleges and institutions are merely degree shops offering by in way of genuine knowledge, skills delivery or other training. The degrees themselves are hardly worth the paper upon which they are printed. As is clearly seen from the field experience here, the state has woefully failed to regulate the commercialisation of higher education in India over the past two decades. The state’s dismantling of the public higher education and the emergence of a burgeoning private sector has had many perverse consequences on the quality of education and social justice. In the beginning, many institutions were set up and run without fulfilling the guidelines laid down by the government for opening a private college as mentioned before. This has resulted in hundreds of the colleges and institutions being run without proper infrastructure or a qualified teaching staff in Meerut and its vicinity.
Local Hindi newspapers are rife with the stories of universities and colleges being registered in a hotel room or being run on websites—without any physical trace. There are institutions which have no proper classrooms, labs, permanent faculty and even libraries. Mostly, faculties are part-time and low-paid, except few. There are teachers with MA and MPhil degrees who teach BEd students are paid ₹7,000 per month as one of the teachers told me. This was confirmed by a few college owners who run BEd colleges in western UP. Moreover, because there is a serious shortage of faculty in institutions of higher learning, some qualified teachers end up renting out their curriculum vitae (CV) to more than one college. Since physical verification of the faculty is hardly done, the CV of a qualified faculty enhances the credibility of a college and helps it to get approval from Gautam Buddh Technical University (GBTU) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). Displays of qualified teachers at college websites also attract students. There are institutions in which students are registered on paper, but in which no classes are held. Every college boasts of 100 per cent placement but reality is totally opposite as many students have reported. After completion of Bachelor of Computer Application (BCA) or Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), young people are doomed to work at as low a salary as ₹7,000 per month. They find work in corporate offices and business firms in Noida, Delhi and Gurgaon. Some of them end up teaching in private colleges at low salaries after paying bribes, sometimes amounting to ₹4 lakh or more as the tuition fee for a three-year course. In addition to the tuition fee, students are forced to pay several unaccounted arbitrary charges such as fee for travel and tour, annual development, personality development, practical fee, etc. Delay in payment of these additional charges leads to harassment of students in classrooms—for example, a teacher would not mark their attendance even if they are present in the classroom. Also, they were barred from writing annual exams as reported by some students. Even after paying all this money, many of these students failed to get any kind of job or enroll for another course or appear in a test for a government job. There exists thousands of their ilk who keep running from pillar to post among institutions for English-speaking courses, coaching centres and private colleges in order to enhance their chances in the job market through improvisation. In 2013, in Meerut city, there were 170 English speaking institutions which provide personality development and English speaking courses. Majority of the students in these institutions come from lower middle class background–rural and urban both. However, rural youth are high in numbers in these English speaking institutions.
Profit Machines
Many of these colleges charge huge capitation fees or donation. They bypass existing rules regarding the capitation fees. Many poor and lower-class students cannot pay these fees. In order to help poor and lower class–caste students, the government offered fellowships and subsidies to institutions that admitted Scheduled Caste (SC) students to vocational courses. But rather than promoting social justice, this has benefited private colleges that have tailored the programme and for their own profit. A big chain of brokers (dalal), private colleges, coaching centres and student leaders has emerged over two decades. All these fly-by- night operators survive on students’ money.
In the wake of announcement of subsidies by the Social Welfare Department, the Government of UP, many colleges and institutions hired so-called ‘consultants’ (brokers) to prepare lists of SC students by going door-to-door in villages and urban neighborhoods around Meerut. These students were asked to enroll in the vocational courses that qualified for government subsidies. In many cases, the students were not interested in these courses, but were enrolled on paper anyway. Further, many students were admitted to more than one college without their knowledge. In the former case, students benefited from the fellowships by obtaining degrees without attending classes, while the college owners received huge subsidies from the state. In the latter case, the college owners and consultants were beneficiaries with no benefits to the students. In this way, huge public funds were laundered into the private sector under the guise of social justice. As one of the respondents told, ‘I was admitted into a BCA course without my interests and only discovered it when a teacher of the Vinayaka Vidhyapheet asked me to collect my scholarship and sign on the papers’. Further, he said, ‘there were 5 SC students from his village who were admitted both without their consents and in some cases without their knowledge in different colleges at the same time’. The number can go in hundreds in one Block or Tehsil and can multiply at the district level. These are some of the deceptive ways in which the private colleges are accumulating money and sustaining themselves financially. Private colleges and universities have become profit machines. These colleges have created a para-economic system in which brokers, low-paid contract teachers, non-teaching staff, student leaders and college owners are earning their livelihoods.
The private colleges have also became political machines for accumulating votes. Many politicians set up vocational colleges in rural and semi-urban areas. For many of them, one of the motives was to buy cheap farmland in the countryside. These politicians projected themselves as social workers who were not only helping their fellow caste members but also people across castes and classes in rural areas where educational facilities are still few and far between. The private colleges have become an instrument to extend patronage to poor parents who cannot afford huge capitation fees and to educated youth who struggle to find jobs. During elections, these parents and young people campaign and vote for their patrons. Thus, the private colleges are used to build political profiles of leaders and to accumulate votes. Normally, a college is named after the caste hero or leader to gain legitimacy within the caste group. For instance, despite the high tuition fees, poor infrastructure and having no teachers in the colleges, Jats and Gujjars like others always praise and appreciate the colleges owned and run by their community leaders. They felt that it is their community institution and raised their ‘pahchan’ or identity in the region. Ordinary caste members are not bothered that their brethren are accumulating so much wealth in the name of caste–community and social service. They expressed pride that such and such college belongs to their community. This sounds similar to the ways in which Kammas and Marathas accumulated wealth in Andhra and Maharashtra respectively (Johnson & Karlberg, 2005; Upadhya, 1988). In Meerut, this is very much evident from the cases of relatively poor Jat and Gujjar student youth leaders who were able to set up their own colleges without much capital.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of the educated unemployed Jat and Gujjar youth, who were waiting to get a government job, were also engaging with a politics of protest against the private colleges which were plagued by poor infrastructure and lack of faculty. However, the protest politics turned out more complicated than what it appeared from outside. The protest politics became a resource or a ‘gold mine’ through which many youth leaders have become college and university owners in Meerut. The student leaders through protest politics managed to develop good relationships with the university bureaucracy and local state offices which they had labeled as most corrupt and were their main targets. Gradually, some of these student leaders started diverting their energy and networks to set up their own colleges. The protest movements, while used as a mechanism to put pressure on the university bureaucracy to regulate private colleges and improve their infrastructure, also became a tool and provided opportunities to the student leaders to set up new colleges. Thus, the new economic and political conditions produced new entrepreneurs who took advantage of the neoliberal educational policy and their links with the local state and their communities. In Meerut, several Jat and Gujjar youth student leaders and teachers in coaching centres have become college owners and millionaires. These entrepreneurs have also started contesting local and legislative elections. Now, this is a dream every student leader nurtures in the CCS University and Meerut College campuses.
Conclusion
In reality, public resources have been used to fund the expansion of the private sector in India. Not only has this privatisation created a rich class of college owners belonging to the upper and middle castes, it has also aggravated inequality of access to higher education. Private colleges have created a para-economic system in which a big chain of brokers, student leaders and coaching centre owners and politicians is supported. A large proportion of graduates of private colleges either end up enrolling in additional courses to enhance their qualifications or taking jobs at very low salaries. SC and poor students are finding themselves stranded in the maze of private colleges. Thus, the result is reproduction of class and caste, and pure instrumentalisation of knowledge and qualifications. I have studied this phenomenon only in Meerut and western UP, but the privatisation of public education elsewhere in India is bound to have similar consequences when state regulations can be circumvented with bribes or other forms of corruption. This resembles the worldwide trend of public goods being transferred to private players while the state may be seen conniving with the market.