Higher Education in India: Envisioning a complete overhaul

Professor Pranab Bardhan, Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley 

Professor Bardhan began by a categorical statement which posited the ‘abysmal’ state of Higher Education in India. He further stated that ‘Our Higher Education is generally a fundamentally broken system. It is afflicted by a deep malaise’. He quoted from the National Knowledge Commission’s Report, ‘There is a quiet crisis in Higher Education in India which runs deep’. Of the three widely held criteria through which the viability of any educational system, ‘Access’, ‘Equity’ and ‘Quality’, India had failed its young people. India had no university within the top 200 in the world, while China already had 10. He stated that there had been a growth in the quantity of Higher Education institutions in India, but not much in quality. He felt that higher education in India was ‘riddled with inequity’.

Professor Bardhan stated that had served in the ‘most high powered academic body’  at Berkeley for three years,  and this apex body oversaw all the appointments at the university, all salary increases and all the most significant academic and administrative issues pertaining to the university. He declared that this experience had enabled him to gain a wonderful opportunity to assess how a public university as opposed to a private one, functioned in the U.S.A., and maintained its edge of excellence. Harvard, a private university and unquestionably excellent, was also extremely rich on the basis of its private endowments and hence its striving for even greater excellence was made easier by being unhindered from lack of funds. Professor Bardhan had been keen to know how Berkeley, a state university, in the State University of California chain, survived in the stiff competition amongst American universities, and still came out on top.

Professor Bardhan stated that his experience at Berkley got him to think about issues and problems which riddled the Indian system and how they may be negotiated and solved. He started by pointing out what led to a high rate of secondary school drop outs especially in rural areas, where social compulsions to get girls married off early existed, where there was lack of remedial teaching, where there was often a lack of proper educational tools and methods, which led to many students not have any access to higher education at all.  He quoted certain statistics, positing that only that according to reliable statistics and figures only about 20% of engineering graduates in India were employable. Post graduate research was not at a commensurate international level with few papers have high ‘impact factor’ and ‘citation indexes’.  He stated that he had come up with a scheme for an ‘overhaul’ of the system, which might seem utopian, but was still worth thinking about. He said that he could not imagine how difficult the ‘transition’ from the current state of Higher Education to the state of affairs he was proposing, would be, but it was still worth thinking about.  

Professor Bardhan referred to Adult Vocational Schools in America, where poor people were given courses in auto mechanics, auto repairing, typing, fire fighting, nursing at night, and these schools which were practically free. Of the Higher Education scheme that he was outlining vocational training would be one of the earliest seams. He advocated starting out with two alternative models A and B, after students left High School (Plus Two):

·         Stream A: universal access with ‘o’ tuition to local vocational institutes to learn plumbing, welding, auto mechanics, fire fighting, etc. Funding for this educational system would be shared by the State and local business houses which might even provide internships, and eventually employ the graduates. After two years there would be a Pass Out Test and a diploma earned. This was modelled on the current German system.

·         Stream B: Admission to a local college in General Sciences or Humanities. This course would train students to be school teachers, Laboratory assistants, Library Assistants, clerks, basic programmers and similar professions. This was the California Community College model, which provided for free education and was highly socialistic. At the end of two years students would earn a degree and enough class credits.

Students who qualified in the top 10% of streams A and B would have to take a test and if they qualified then they could go on to Options D or E.

·         Stream D: Professional schools like Law, Business and Engineering. There would be the availability of a large number of student loans payable within first five years of the student’s getting a job.

·         Stream E: Public universities with specialized learning in the Sciences and the Humanities where the fees would be high. Specialized branches of the Sciences and Humanities would be taught.

In India, Professor Bardhan stated there were 700 universities over which the resources of the country were spread thin. Therefore he advocated having only 50 universities, with two per state. He then proposed the final tier of this new education system. Of the top 1% of streams D and E would be able to reach:

·         Stream F: 2 top level research universities in the entire country where tuition would entirely free. Here research would be collaborative and multidisciplinary as it was in the best academic traditions worldwide.

He then went on to state that within this academic system involving streams A B D E F, there should be no political or bureaucratic control. At Berkeley notwithstanding the fact that it is a State University, which means funding for the University comes from the public budget,  there will be no tolerance of any  kind of political interference in terms of faculty hiring, faculty salary determination or faculty promotion. In the case of any such eventuality, the entire faculty body will rise in protest. This is how the success of the Public University system is maintained. Professor Bardhan thus emphasized autonomy which defined the profile of all American universities. 

In India he said, we need an every 3 year/ 5 year evaluation by a body of  Peers from other universities, which would evaluate the overall profile of each department. This external body would have a financial constituency which would then determine on the basis of the Report, how much funding should be given to a particular university, and how many faculty positions to sanction. Professor Bardhan emphasized that promotion should be on the basis of productivity and not seniority in age. He called this the Merit Review System.  For some reason he seemed to think that senior teachers in India were not productive and were promoted simply on the basis of age. Nor did he mention that seniority also ensued from the number of years in service.  Once again, emphasizing the case of Berkeley he said that Berkeley went through this evaluation every  5 years, and  the Report was handed in to the top most academic and administrative body of the university, and the future of faculty promotions and salaries depended on this Report and Berkeley’s own academic and administrative body evaluating this report. He also said that an Incentive Merit System needed to be introduced where faculty were given incentives to produce and do quality research.

Addressing the question of autonomy about which he was very emphatic in that it needed to be introduced in all Indian universities he said that the downside of autonomy is that it could lead to a ‘culture of mediocrity’ where ‘mediocre people get other mediocre people around them and thrive in a cocoon that is comfortable’. He referred to the term, ‘collusive mediocrity’ that an Italian academic had felt about the system of university autonomy in Italy. In America this was circumvented by the stiff competition between universities that vied with each other in recruiting the best faculty. Universities took care to see that their best faculty did not move out of their university to go to another one, because with the moving of this faculty person, the faculty person’s grants, affiliated students and advanced laboratories would also move. This kind of keen competition secures U.S. universities from the ‘culture of mediocrity’ that autonomy may generate.

Another evil that autonomy could spawn was the granting of fake degrees or degrees of inferior quality. He felt that politicians in India, pointing to a recent case in M.P., were invested in such degree giving. He had already pointed out in the early part of his lecture where he spoke of the fast growing rate of higher education institutions in India, that Maharashtra and South India had seen the birth of many private universities, which charged exorbitant fees that students from lower income groups could not afford and loans from banks were doctored by politicians. This is how politicians had become increasingly involved with higher education. He further stated that Market Testing Credentials would put students on the track of which degrees were valuable when they would find out what quality of degree were valued by hiring agencies.

Professor Bardhan said that funding from external research agencies was a big source of university income. For instance, he had once got a National Science Foundation Grant while at Berkeley and the university had taken away 50% of the money as per university protocol. He said that in India, I.C.S.R, U.G.C. D.S.T. I.C.H.R. were too regulated by bureaucratic control and needed to come out of it for university and other faculty to draw the maximum benefit from them.

He said that in matters of education he was definitely ‘elitist’. He posited that Reservation while constitutionally mandated was not that effective unless it produced students or graduates who were truly competent, because sometimes the phenomenon of being first generation learners impeded their expected performance level. He also stated however, that when students from reservation categories came to the university, they were to be provided an atmosphere in which they could thrive and prosper. He reminded the audience of Rohit Vemula’s letter and posited that universities should ensure that ‘equity’ and ‘quality’ did  not work at cross purposes. He hoped that India would progress to a state of Higher Education where the young people in the country could benefit from.

In the question answer session Ritoban Chatterjee of Physics asked whether  the fact that ‘lack of honesty’ within the Indian system of Higher Education had anything to do with the fact that India was a democracy that was only 70 years old, whereas Europe and America had much longer tested democracies. Professor Bardhan replied that he was an ‘economist’ and therefore believed that something could be done right now instead of waiting for a future when everyone would become ‘honest’. He said that ‘systemic’ changes could be introduced now and they would help.

Professor Anruadha Lohia spoke next and told Professor Bardhan quite categorically that ‘2’ universities would never work for a population of 125 million. She said that she strongly objected to his frequent premise that ‘politics’ and ‘politicians’ had completely riddled the Indian system of Higher Education. She said that many administrators fought against too much controlling from the top. She also said that for students whose parents had them groomed from childhood, would never accept their child only learning a ‘skill’ like automobile engineering or nursing, even if their child was not that brilliant or capable. She posited that ‘aspirations’ could not be monitored in this manner. She also added that we all needed to work together to take India to a better and better state of Higher Education.