Higher Education for the Future

Global university rankings and world-class universities have become buzzwords almost in every country. Both exercise positive and not-so-positive impact on higher education systems. Universities everywhere are trying hard to improve their status and global rankings. The article reviews some of the important issues related to these two strongly emerging phenomena, and their influence on development of higher education in developing countries. A positive development is the increasing concern of the educational policymakers to improve the standards and quality in higher education institutions, and accordingly their launching of quite a few important ‘excellence initiatives’. But the exclusive pursuit of status and ranks can have disastrous implications for the development of universities. Besides reviewing these two phenomena, the article critically reviews the approach of the Government of India in this regard.

Privatization of higher education in India is the outcome of increased demand, especially from the growing middle-income families, and the inability of state governments to step up public funding for higher education. This has resulted in rising enrolment in private unaided institutions, which increased from 25 percent in 2000–2001 to 58 percent in 2012–2013. Consequently, the burden of financing higher education has shifted from the state to the households. In the light of these developments, this study examines the alternative sources of financing higher education in India. The trends in public expenditure on higher education and the coping strategies adopted by the public institutions are discussed. The burden of higher education expenditure on households is examined using unit-level data from the National Sample Survey (NSS) on participation in education. The results reveal that the economic burden of expenditure is higher on households with lower incomes, which is a cause for concern. The study also explores whether student loans can serve as an alternative financing mechanism to ease the burden on the public as well as on the households. The rationale for cost sharing between the state and the households is also discussed.

Student internship plays a major role in transforming the engineering interns to ready-to-use professionals. Learning at the workplace has become a challenge for the interns due to several issues. A knowledge gap analysis has been depicted considering all stakeholders of the internship, including the intern, faculty, institution and the industrial organization. This article identifies and discusses these issues and provides a framework for effective learning and above-mentioned transformation considering the engineering industry. The role of the faculty is very important to successfully pursue an internship programme. The article also discusses, in detail, the role of the faculty in the success of the programme.

Globalization has made the market in India very competitive. The lower segment of the workforce is under tremendous pressure to improve their productivity to sustain in the market. Being one of the important stakeholders, universities can play a very significant role in transferring knowledge created by them under their social responsibility. The article discusses that even though most of the universities are not explicit about their social responsibility, they are interacting with community through their students and faculty as part of course work or voluntary co-curricular activity. However, funding is always an issue and only those initiatives have proved to be sustainable which have collaborated with some other organization. Recently, by revising the company’s law, the Government of India has made it mandatory for high-earning companies to spend at least 2 per cent of their average net profit for the immediate preceding three financial years on corporate social responsibility (CSR), and the study reveals that education is one of the preferred channels for CSR in India. If corporate sector shares its CSR contribution with the university social responsibility for knowledge creation and its dissemination, it will have a lasting impact.

Developing a pedagogy of teacher education is an enduring concern for teacher educators. Drawing on data from a small study on teacher educators teaching in a secondary teacher education programme in India, this article examines their pedagogic practices. This is a qualitative study that sought to capture the narrations of 30 teacher educators teaching in diverse teacher education classrooms. The article frames the pedagogy of teacher education as four ‘problems’: as a curriculum problem; as a relational problem; as a professional knowledge base problem; and as a learning problem. Such a formulation highlights the challenges faced by the teacher educators, including the need for teacher educators to scrutinize their own practices. Implications for developing a framework on ‘what should teacher educators know and do in the context of India’ are considered in order to guide teacher educator preparation and their continuous development.

The problems, policies and debates on the quality and access of research cannot be decoupled from higher education in an educational system like that of India where the impact of primary, secondary and higher education is sequential. The article traces the idea of education from the early Greek and Indian philosophers, the university tradition of India during the British rule which laid the foundations of modern Indian education, to the present-day globalized world that offers transnational education with a large number of private players in the fray. The changing contours of the concept of education, that is, what is to be taught and how it is to be taught, direct us in valuing education for the future by properly placing it in the socio-economic context. This is accomplished by critically examining various strands of literature that deals with the value of education from its economic valuation as a quasi-public good to Amartya Sen’s concept of education as a tool to widen social choices. The article then analyzes the problems plaguing higher education in the Indian context that include: a lack of pluralism in student and faculty profile; openness to travel across disciplines; maintaining the highest quality and integrity in research and learning, including publishing and handling of archives; the woes of mushrooming private institutes; and inadequate financial resources that severely demoralize ambition. Consequently, the article concludes with suggestions for reform to improve equity, access and excellence by applying the highest values of academic standards through rigour, dispassionate research, meticulous training and alternate sources of funding for acceptable standards of infrastructure and access to resources.

Internationalization of higher education has undergone significant change in the current scenario. The approach to traditional internationalization which was based on international co-operation and rarely a profit making activity were at the center of traditional internationalization has changed significantly from the last two decades. Emergence of the new phase of internationalization of higher education is characterized by self-economic interest of maximizing profit and capturing student market by expanding institutional reach in other countries. The intention of students to go abroad and the functioning of universities has changed substantially in the current scenario. The governance by comparison and competition for international students has made radical change in the governance of institutions. The remaining work is done by the globalization of higher education, essentially motivated by profits rather than by either government policy or goodwill. The observed competition in recent decades in the international higher education market has led to the marginalization of teaching–learning, which is assumed to be the central role of educational institutions. The central focus of the present article is to trace the change in internationalization of higher education in general, with special reference to student mobility and how it is changing the role of educational institutions in the new phase. In connection with this, the present article aims to contribute to the body of knowledge under the broad head of internationalization of higher education.