Why They Won’t Come to Teach You From Harvard

Image: Nicole Cappello / Georgia Institute of technology

Think Parthenon’s numbers are out of whack? Listen to Anand Sudarshan, CEO, Manipal Universal Learning. According to him, the minister has spoken about how he wants to send 30 percent of India’s college-going-age kids to college. Sudarshan’s  estimate is that we need 30 million people going into college and higher education. The National Knowledge Commission set up by the government talks about the need for 1,500 universities — India has 350 now — to meet the human resources challenge.
People have always thought India’s biggest challenge was building ports, roads and power plants. The need to have more college educated kids will be a bigger challenge. In 2008, India had approximately 340 million people in the age group 25-50 year olds who did not have a college degree.  According to data from Parthenon, if we don’t speed up adding seats to our college system, this gap will increase to 380 million by 2014. India’s demographic dividend would turn into a deficit instead.

Since foreign universities can’t fill up these numbers, can the government do it? The knowledge commission thinks that at least 50 world class universities can be set over the “medium term”. Here is a reality check. Less than 10 universities have gained global acceptance as world class universities in the last 20-30 years. And it costs at least Rs. 3 lakh per student just to set up a world class university.  If each of these 50 universities enrolls 10,000 students, the government would need to put down Rs. 15,000 crore as capital expenditure and the country will only have extra half a million kids in college; way short of the eight million needed.

Coming Out of the Profit Closet
Here is a thought. Drop the pretense and let people make money off the sector. Allow for-profit institutions to work. Let government institutions (and hallowed abbreviations) like IITs, AIIMS or IIM continue to do the fine job that they are doing. Don’t dilute their brand and stretch them with scaling up targets. They should remain islands of excellence. But allow for-profits to exist alongside. Indians trust for-profits for their health by admitting themselves into an Apollo or Wockhardt hospital. They ride with their families in cars made by for-profits like Tata Motors or Maruti. They fly in airlines run by Indigo and Kingfisher. They drive on roads and bridges built by profit-seeking companies. Why is education, higher or otherwise, in the hands of profit-makers such a dangerous idea?

Countries like US and China have used the for-profits to put large numbers of people through college. The for-profits came up in the 1950s-1960s when students went straight to work after high school and thus, needed continuing education. Universities like University of Phoenix, ITT Technical Institute, DeVry University, Capella Education and Laureate Universities International all have a completely market-driven model based on demand. Research suggests that in the US, for-profits educate 7 percent of the total enrollments in degree-granting institutions each year. University of Phoenix has about 455,000 students today. Both Phoenix and Devry were profitable right through the economic meltdown!

But in India, if you turn into a for-profit,  then you can’t award degree or diplomas. Consider the case of Mumbai Business School. The folks there wanted an independent programme because they wanted to deliver high quality programmes that were contemporary and relevant. The University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) are too sluggish to update and modernise their guidelines, says Sunil Rai, CEO, Mumbai Business School. “For instance, take UGC guidelines for the MCA programme. It still mandates that students be taught Pascal and Fortran that are now outdated. They don’t include things like ERP [enterprise resource planning] that are current,” he says.

Mumbai Business School is structured as a company and not a trust that manages an educational institute. What it gains in profit it loses in recognition. “Only a university under UGC  or a college under AICTE can award degrees and diplomas. And we don’t offer that but there is always the danger that AICTE can put us in the list of non-recognised institutes on their Web site,” says Rai.

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