Abstract
Higher or tertiary education has emerged as the last bastion of struggle against whittling down of all that was achieved during the heydays of statist development and, arguably, represents the best of the welfare state. The wide agreement across the academic divide with respect to the public good character of education (and higher education in particular) notwithstanding, the contemporary political discourse has other things in mind, including privatisation of higher education under the garb of efficiency or cost-effectiveness. Having said that, it is also crucial to recognise that all has not been well with the higher education sector in India which suffers from a series of maladies—from regulatory overreach to academic opaqueness, from outdated curricula to absenteeism, and a lot more. All this provides an additional line of argument to argue for drastic reform, much of which is direly needed but the scale of crisis in higher education pays put to any effort to interrogate the direction of reform.
The present volume is therefore a timely intervention to help us navigate the labyrinthine mess that higher education has become in the past decades or more. Setting out the main issues under the rubric of quality, access and financing––what they call the ‘trilemma’ of Indian higher education––the editors underline the over-regulation of higher education by a multitude of agencies, often working at cross-purposes. Finance-wise, the abysmal level of funding is highlighted while the question of access is embedded in the larger debates on social justice, wherein empirical evidence is at best mixed. With respect of internationalisation of higher education, the editors argue for a capacity-building approach wherein foreign experts will train local counterparts!
Apoorvanand Jha’s wonderful chapter reflects on the multiple dysfunctions in the higher education system in Bihar through the stories of two colleges in Siwan and Patna. Jha underlines the supportive environment––comprising too many variables such as dialogic engagement with colleagues and peers across disciplines, supportive social context, competent teachers and administrators, organisational capacity, principled decision-making, and so on; which is sadly lost on the more recent planners of new colleges and universities in India. The decline of higher education is, therefore, a mix of all these factors having been undermined under the parochial politics of ‘social justice’ in recent years.
Sachi Hatakenaka reflects on multidisciplinary research universities in India in the light of international experience to argue that the distinction that has emerged between research institutions and teaching universities has undermined fundamental research––a situation compounded by the stress on economically relevant orientation of all higher education. Given the massive need for expansion, shortage of qualified teachers and organisational disarray, while important lessons may lie in international experience, the Indian system needs to attend to its own problems.
The chapter by Manish Sabharwal and Srinivasan Kannan, and one by Megha Agarwal examine the vocational education, informal sector training, on-job training and skill development in the formal and informal economy. Premised on design issues of creating suitable and adequate institutions of vocational and skill education, these two papers offer a series of recommendations but fail to distinguish between education, training and skill development.
Jeemol Unni and Sudipa Sarkar explore the relationship between employment and education using the standard human capital theory to enable harnessing of benefits from the burgeoning knowledge economy. While the standard economic analysis of the requirements of the economy, along with education and training deficits in the labour pool, have been presented, the implicit argument is that all education needs to be harnessed to economic goods: knowledge economy is another avatar of the industrial economy requiring more skilled manpower, which the education system must supply.
K.P. Krishnan examines the models of financing higher education while briefly looking at experiences across select countries. For some unexplained reason, the US model of financing higher education through student loans has been prioritised and its efficacy and possibilities in India assessed. A closer look at publicly funded successful models across Europe and other parts of the world is needed before being discarded.
Devesh Kapur and Madhav Khosla examine the litigation around educational matters in the Supreme Court of India. The chapter cites a variety of data about how cases related to higher education have been handled in the Supreme Court to point out that the largest number of cases have related to faculty, administration and curricula issues, followed by admission-related matters. It is not clear why the authors have chosen to club curricula-related issues with administrative matters. The chapter while acknowledging that the burgeoning number of cases in the Supreme Court are a function of growing private education providers, it critiques the well-articulated juridical principle that private education providers cannot be allowed to profiteer. The chapter also examines two cases decided by the Supreme Court with respect to competence of the state legislatures to regulate private educational institutions to critique the regulation of private sector education providers.
Pankaj Chandra examines the contested work space of universities and its govern ance structures. Largely descriptive and recommendatory, the chapter acknowledges the peculiar peer-driven character of university governance but refrains from articulating robust principles for structuring administrative structures of universities.
There can be no doubt that the higher education sector in India is in dire need for change and reconstruction. However, all change is not necessarily progressive to address the requirements of the growing young population of the country. Many chapters in the volume presume that moving to one of the models––namely, the North American one, is progressive change without providing the rationale for such an argument, especially in case of India. Arguably, there is a degree of cherry-picking even in the selection of examples from across the world. Further, many chapters view the model of IITs and IIMs as pinnacles of success. Much debate can focus on this presumption; and, such models can certainly not fulfil the requirements of Indian higher education in other areas, particularly social sciences. The fact that a large proportion of IIT graduates shift to banking, administrative and other fields clearly poses a large question to the presumed success of the IIT model!
Besides, the chapters in the volume also presume that privatisation may be able to the fill the capacity gap that has been created by unwillingness (not inability) to devote public resources to higher education. It may be noted that increasing priva tisation of higher education may result in the creation of a larger number of exclusive institutions; and, not an expansion and democratisation of higher education. The social role that public universities have played the world over has not been a focus of analysis in most papers as the authors have given up on that possibility, arguably without sufficient evidence or merit. The functional view of higher education that emerges may actually be a remedy that is worse than the malady.