Why They Won’t Come to Teach You From Harvard
Dragon Gets into the Act
China is facing a strange problem: A problem of plenty. Kathryn Mohrman, professor of practice, School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, and an observer of China’s higher education system, says, “Because the expansion of the higher education system has been so rapid, there are just not enough suitable jobs for those who graduate.” While that is a problem, considering the fact that China began from a base that was way lower than India’s, what China has achieved in a short span is impressive. Ten years ago, about 50 percent of students who completed 12 years of education, got into universities. Today, China sends 80 percent of 12-pass students to college — three times what India sends.
While Mohrman thinks that China’s attempts at setting things right in the higher education space have only met with mixed success, there sure are things that China has done right. And there might be some lessons there for India.
Take foreign universities themselves. During Deng Xiaoping’s reign some 30 years ago, China decided to allow foreign universities in. China discovered that some of the more aggressive foreign universities were the for-profits. In fact, they were more interested in making money and paid less attention to students. “In the last few years, they restricted new foreign universities because quality was low, students were paying a lot of money but not getting suitable job skills,” says Mohrman. China has stipulated that foreign universities need to have a Chinese partner.
Illustration: Malay Karmakar
The Chinese model can be understood in the context of its leading private university Yellow River University of Science and Technology. It started diploma courses in 1994 and degree in 1999. By 2007, it had 13,000 students in 37 degree programmes. And then it collaborated with two top government universities, Tongji in Shanghai and Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, to run a number of master’s degree programmes. The advantages of this approach are many. “The private university gets the knowledge and expertise to run higher level masters programme from government institutions. The government institute gets 25 percent of the profits that private university makes and which it uses to fund its research,” says Khemka of Parthenon.
China has also brought in a degree of accountability into the system. So if a university wants to increase the number of seats in, say information technology, it needs government permission. After that, the government tightly monitors the progress of students from that programme. Only if they get good jobs, is the university allowed to maintain or increase seats in IT.
Answers Lie Within
So can India mix and match Singapore’s approach to quality, China’s path to scale and Malaysia’s ambition of becoming a regional education hub? That’s some way off, but it is possible to see some early experiments within the existing constraints.
About 155 kilometres from Delhi in the Aravalli range is the fort town of Neemrana. Last year, this little town saw a 100-acre university campus come up. Built at a cost of Rs. 100 crore (to go up to Rs. 1,000 crore over 10 years), NIIT University is the brainchild of Rajendra S. Pawar, one of India’s foremost education entrepreneurs. By the time it is complete, it will have a capacity of 5,000 students. What Pawar is doing with NIIT University, in many ways, challenges our conventional notion of higher education: Be it about curriculum design, pedagogy, the emphasis on cross-disciplinary learning, industry linkages and even student selection. While it is too early to label NIIT University a success, it is an example of what can be achieved by allowing private enterprise into this area.
Being established as a not-for-profit trust has its own complications. One, you have little freedom in fixing the fees. (you can indeed fix the fees if you are a deemed university or a private state university, but it is very tough to get that status from the government). In India, student fee is the key source of income for an educational institution. What makes matters worse is that there is a cap on class sizes as well so these institutions can’t raise their intake, and hence improve fee income.
At the same time, things like faculty compensation are going up and hence operating costs are rising. “For an institution to grow, capital expenditure has to be regularly incurred. For a not-for-profit, the only recourse is debt, which has to be serviced. The debt servicing cost and the principal pay-back requirements, further add to the outflow side,” says Manipal’s Sudarshan. “Except for institutions which have been around for decades, it’s quite difficult for any institution to have annual surpluses consistently.”
Single Page View
An act on similar lines in the higher education space might help create capacity in a systematic and predictable manner.
1.The Military Industrial Complex and War.
2.Wall Street's Financial sector.
3.Bio-Tech and GMO
4.Pharma
This is the reason the US Globalists are interested in FDI in Education.The aims are:-
1.Privatization and running the same using FOUNDATIONS,as is proposed in Detroit.
2.Land Grab
3.Espionage. (Most US Universities,Cos etc,are fronts of the CIA) But the main aim is for brainwashing the youth,for ushering in ONE WORLD TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENT.
There are also many complex and seemingly unconnected reasons, like Gold scams, Depopulation etc.
Interestingly, some of the solutions emerging in the aforementioned transformation of higher education are related to getting rid of dependency on 'stellar' faculty to deliver high quality courses -- and that may be the solution to the quality faculty problem for higher education in India.
