The International activities of universities have expanded manifold in volume, scope, and complexity since the 1990s. They enable students to study abroad and learn other cultures. Branch campuses can absorb the demand that local institutions cannot meet. Therefore, international initiatives cover a wide range from study abroad programmes, franchised foreign degrees, independent institutions based on foreign models, foreign language programmes, internationalization of curricula, programmes to provide cross cultural understanding. All these activities constitute internationalization of higher education. Besides, cross-border education is big business, earning considerable sums for universities and other providers in a world where higher education is getting increasingly more expensive.
Globalization and internationalization have often been used interchangeably but a distinction can be made between them. Globalization in the context of education means economic, political, societal and other forces that are pushing 21stcentury education inexorably towards greater international involvement. Why is this happening? One reason is because of the rise of democracy. The two are interlinked.
The Impact of Globalization and Democracy
The demand for higher education is being driven by at least two factors: globalization and democracy. Globalization can be seen as, “The widening, deepening, and speeding up of worldwide ‘interconnectedness’. It is the “overarching international system shaping the domestic politics and foreign relations of virtually every country. It involves the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies to a degree never witnessed before -– in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is also producing a powerful backlash from those brutalized or left behind. We have gone from how big is your missile to how fast is your modem? We have gone from a variety of economic ideologies to a choice between, free market vanilla and North Korea.” While the polarities may not be so extreme, but in today’s context as Henry Feignenbaum observes, it is taken as axiomatic that education and spread of knowledge are essential to increase international competitiveness because national and global economies are interconnected and based on information and its exchange.
Globalization is intimately connected to democracy and the empowerment of individuals who seek opportunities in an increasingly shrinking world. As Friedman points out, two major events have been responsible for this. One is the end of the Cold War, which has also been a struggle between two economic systems -– capitalism and communism. Second is the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Now there is primarily one system in the world and while there may be many variations of it keeping in view the local milieu, everyone has had to orient and adapt to it one way or another. With the spread of democracy, regulated or centrally planned economies have been giving way to economies being governed in consonance with interests, demands and aspirations of the people, that is, from ground up rather than by planning from top down.
Friedman states there have been three great eras of globalization.
1) From 1492 when Columbus set sail opening trade between the Old World and the New World, lasting until around 1800. It shrank the world from large to medium. Globalization was about countries and muscle. The driving force was, “brawn how much muscle, how much horse power, wind power or later, steam power your country had and how creatively you could deploy it.”
2) The second era of globalization was roughly from 1800 to 2000 interrupted by the Great Depression and World Wars I and II. This shrank the world from medium to small. The key agent of change in this era, the dynamic force driving global integration, was multinational companies. The multinationals went global for markets and labour, spearheaded first by the expansion of Dutch and English joint-stock companies and then the Industrial Revolution. In the first half of this era, the impetus was given by falling transportation costs, thanks to the steam engine and the railroad; and in the second half, by falling telecommunication costs because of the development of technology. The global economy matured because there was enough movement of goods and information from continent to continent to create a global market. It also created a global labour market.
3) The third phase of globalization began around 2000. With it, the world shrank further from small to tiny and simultaneously flattened the playing field. The new found power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally gives this phase of globalization its unique character. The new information technology has made us all next-door neighbours. It is now for individuals to ask themselves where they fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day as they can, on their own, collaborate with each other globally. Individual empowerment is the most important new feature of globalization but companies, small and big, have also got newly empowered in this era and seek opportunities of growth and expansion for themselves.
Individuals push for higher education as they see in it an attractive personal investment, which can bring them rich rewards in terms of long-term income and employability in comparison to individuals with lower formal qualifications. Both these have contributed to the promotion of market elements in higher education particularly through increased privatization, which has helped to meet the demand for massification, diversification, and the increased access it requires. It has created heterogeneous and complex systems that are required to meet the new and diverse demand which has made it nearly impossible to maintain a pattern of detailed uniform regulation of higher education. Hence, new forms of governance, financing, curricula and flexible delivery and evaluation systems are needed.
Apart from an increasingly integrated world economy, new information and communications technology, and the emergence of an international knowledge network, English language has gained in prominence as an international language of communication and work. Without English, it is not possible to prepare students for the globalized world, the byproduct of which is internationalization of higher education. It includes enabling students to study abroad, setting up branch campuses overseas, and internationalizing the curriculum or engaging in international partnerships.
The use of English as a lingua franca of university education and especially scientific communicationhas led to growing integration of research and growing international labour markets for scholars and scientists. It is aided by Information Technology thatfacilitates communication, permits efficient storage of information, selection and dissemination of knowledge. It has made it possible to offer academic programmes of all kinds through e-learning. Multinational publishing, and technology and communication firms have all grown. Global capital has become interested in higher education and knowledge industries and is investing heavily into it; not only in research but also in training programmes. The emergence of the “knowledge society”, the rise of the service sector and the dependence of many societies on knowledge products and highly educated personnel for economic growth are a new phenomenon.
International Debate
Internationally there has been much debate and discussion on higher education. October 1998, for instance, was a very significant year for the world of higher education as representatives of 128 nations who were responsible for education in their respective countries, including higher education, met for the first time in Paris under the auspices of UNESCO to discuss issues of common concern and to agree on the general direction that higher education must take in the twenty-first century. The Conference was unanimously of the view that a renewal of higher education was essential for the whole society to face the emerging challenges. These included intellectual independence of individual in creation and appropriate advancement of knowledge; and education and training to shape responsible enlightened citizens and qualified specialists, without whom no nation could progress economically, socially, culturally or politically. The Declaration of the World Conference emphasized that since society was increasingly knowledge-based, higher education and research had become essential components of the cultural, socio-economic and environmentally sustainable development of individuals, communities, and nations. The development of higher education, therefore, ranked as amongst the highest national priorities of nations throughout the world. Without it, the required human resource could not be created.
The Conference was preceded by widespread mobilization of partners, national policy makers, institutional leaders, professors, researchers, students, professional sectors and others. Regional Conferences were held in Havana in November 1996, Dakar in April 1997, Tokyo in July 1997, Palermo in September 1997, and Beirut in March 1998. Findings, declarations and plans of action of these conferences provided inputs for the Paris Conference of October, 1998. These were complemented by studies and analyses undertaken by some fifty governmental and non-governmental organizations charged with preparing a series of thematic debates on important issues of higher education. Twelve debates were structured around three main domains:
- Higher education and development as requirements for the world of work. Under this were to be considered higher education and sustainable human development contributing to national and regional development; this was to be a continuous process.
- New trends and innovations in higher education that encompass students’ vision of higher education for a new society. These would include the use of new information technologies, challenges and opportunities in research, and the contribution of higher education to the education system as a whole.
- Higher education and its relationship with culture and society. It would have under its umbrella, women and higher education; promoting a culture of peace, mobilizing the power of culture; autonomy and social responsibility.
At the Conference itself the delegates dealt with issues pertaining to the changing missions of higher education in the twenty-first century. These included access to higher education, interaction of higher education with society; the impact of the change process on higher education together with its diversification; and increased flexibility of systems and promotion of lifelong learning; and access to higher education. All these factors provided elements that went into the Declaration and Framework for Action that the Conference adopted at the end as “World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century: Vision and Action” and “Framework for Priority Action for Change and Development of Higher Education.” The Conference resolved that, “Beyond its traditional functions of teaching, training, research and study, all of which remain fundamental”, higher education must “promote development of the whole persons and train responsible, informed citizens, committed to working for a better society in the future.”It has led to intense activity around the world as country after country has tried to assess the role of higher education in development and what needs to be further done.
In the year 2000, the Task Force on Higher Education and Society was convened by the World Bank and UNESCO to bring together some of the world’s foremost education and development experts. Based on research, intensive discussion and hearings conducted over a two-year period, the Task Force concluded that without more and better education, developing countries would find it increasingly difficult to benefit from the global knowledge-based economy.
Rise of Asian Countries
Just as globalization has tended to concentrate wealth, knowledge and power in the hands of those already possessing these, international academic mobility favours the well-developed education systems and institutions. Significant elements of inequality exist in the expanding world of international higher education. Initiatives come from the North and are focussed on the South. Ownership of knowledge, and knowledge products, and the information technology infrastructure, are emphatically in the hands of Northern institutions, corporations and interests. Whilestudents flows tend to move from South to North, other initiatives and programmes flow from North to South. But the good news is that now increasingly South-South activity is taking place. However, as of now, internationalization is mainly controlled by the North.
Discussions on cross border education turn around the growing number of mobile students and who study in countries other than their own and also the growing number of branch campuses emerging worldwide leading to the question, whether in the extreme case education all over the world eventually become mostly foreign.
Asia figures prominently in these discussions because this region supplies the largestnumber of mobile students. China and India send the highest number of students to study abroad. Last year’s figures show 100,000 students left India to study in US alone. Now they also go to Australia, UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Germany and France. The outflow of foreign exchange is said to 20 billion dollars annually i.e. India imports education worth 20 billion dollars annually. However, gradually Asia too seems to be adapting to and innovating in cross-border higher education to fit both local and regional needs. Rather than merely supplying students to the west, they are beginning to recruit students among themselves and integrating cross border provisions in their higher education systems. Twinning programmes, joint doctoral programmes, branch campuses, satellite research centres are now found in countries as varied as Singapore, Vietnam and China. In India they are largely outlawed.
In this process of internationalization education hubs are being created that stand out as large scale initiatives to transform a country, city or zone into an eminent higher education destination. Several hubs have emerged in Asia in the last two decades. An educational hub treats trans-border education as an instrument of its growth rather than as a supplementary activity. These educational hubs encourage multiple forms of mobility of students, faculty, researchers, programmes and providers. They actively recruit foreign students, researchers, training providers, and even multinational companies. The most common discourse in these education hubs is of globalization and internationalization but the underlying rationales are many and varied. Many observers assume that student fee and the earnings they bring must be the maintain motif and this is mainly there, but other rationale well beyond economic interests also cannot be denied. These are talent development, educational capacity and soft power. The economic motive may be germane to some of them but these other rationales too are equally strong. Further, the rationales are not stagnant. Policy rationales fluctuate according to on-going developments in local, regional and global political economy. Educational hubs see cross border education as a critical plank of development and involve substantial participation from multiple individuals and institutions, both local and foreign. In Asia, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong have emerged as important education hubs.
The idea of an education hub emerged in the late 1990s in Qatar, Singapore and Malaysia. These countries were also early pioneers in cross border education in terms of twinning programme, franchised programmes and branch campuses. However, it took about ten years for the hubs appeared in the first decade of 2000s.
Rationales
The main rationales for developing education hubs are economic benefits, talent development, educational capacity and soft power. Developing higher education and research hubs benefits economies by upgrading technology and providing better research facilities. Industry grows and more patents are filed. The education capacity of the country improves while the standards of the existing universities too rise. Local students get a global environment which makes them capable of job mobility throughout the world. Gradually, the universities can get more choosy about the students they enrols and sets their own standards. Often universities augment their revenue by charging differential fee from foreign students. Alternatively, they may, as in Singapore, provide a fee waiver if after graduation a student is prepared to work for a specified number of years. Finally, the city itself where the university is located benefits as large number of foreign students live there and are visited by friends and family. Not only does its economy improve but it becomes more cosmopolitan. Of course, what goes without saying are the soft power benefits that internationalization brings. Students from different parts of the world, when they live and study together develop bonds that last a life time. They also spend the best years of their life in that country and have a special place for it in their hearts making it a lifelong point of reference.
Regional Groups
Not only individual countries, but also groups of states are creating educational hubs. For example, when organizations like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) were established in the 1960s, their prime objectives were to achieve political confidence and facilitate collaboration among themselves. The rapid expansion of trade and economic activities in the region, increasing globalization, accompanied by the influence of the Bologna process, made nation states in these organizations to collaborate in a wide range of activities including education. Collaboration in education has also grown between Southeast Asian countries and East Asian countries. In 1989 the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) was created with 12 Asia-Pacific economies. Three more – China, Hong Kong, and Chinese Taipei – joined in 1991. Since 1997, ASEAN has undertaken various collaborative activities with three East Asian countries – China, Japan, and South Korea – to foster educational collaboration. This has led to the emergence of a new regional organization, ASEAN Plus Three (APT or ASEAN+3).
It is significant that since the early 1990s, East Asian countries too have placed great emphasis on developing close linkages and collaborations with their partners in the region. This is especially true of China, Japan, and South Korea. In 2010, the three countries jointly launched the Campus Asia Project, a regional responses to globalization and worldwide competition in higher education. The aim was to make universities in Japan, China, and South Korea places where students and professors from diverse cultural and regional backgrounds could come together and realize the merits of each other’s universities. Particularly, the Campus Asia Project also aims to stimulate the regional mobility of students, faculty, and researchers to enable further collaboration in higher education. Within the framework of this program, the three countries have formulated national policies and strategies to further integrate their education systems. These initiatives include the provision of financial support to build intraregional university networks, design joint curricula and joint degree programs that combine the cultural and academic strengths of the three countries, and provide more English-taught degree programs. Currently, major universities in China, Japan, and South Korea are expanding their English language lectures and degree programs for undergraduate and graduate studies to attract more students from the other Northeast Asian countries i.e. not only from China, Japan and South Korea but also from North Korea, Mongolia and the eastern regions of Russia.
As a consequence, the region has seen a growth in personal movement. With respect to student mobility, according to UNESCO statistics for 2013, approximately half the students from Asia and the Pacific studying abroad actually do so within the region, compared to 36 per cent in 1999. In some countries and territories, such as Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Macao, students from Asia and Pacific accounted for more than 90 per cent of their foreign students. In China, Japan, and South Korea, the lists of the top five countries of origin of foreign students comprise, in addition to the United States, countries of the region, including Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Mongolia, and Taipei, China. Parallel to the rapidly increasing numbers in student mobility, there has been corresponding growth in regional mobility of academics. A gradual increase in the number of full-time foreign faculty members from neighbouring countries who are recorded as being employed in higher education institutions in China, Japan, and South Korea. For example, the number of full-time faculty members from Asia, especially from China and South Korea, at Japanese universities had grown considerably by 2013. Also, by 2009, of the 345 full-time foreign faculty members in the University of Tokyo, 212 were from Asian countries. This means that the largest percentage of fulltime foreign faculty members are from Asia. Similarly, the number of full-time faculty members from China and Japan at Korean higher education institutions haw tripled between 2003 and 2012.
Singapore
As Jack T. Lee has pointed out Singapore realised in the 1980s that its manufacturing sector had severe limitations because of its small size and cheaper production emerging elsewhere in Asia. At that time economic growth depended on manufacturing and services and Singapore continued as a manufacturing country till the recession of 1985-86. This forced it to identify 11 promising service industries through which it could diversify its portfolio. Education was one of them but the government could not commercialize it because of socio-political sensitivities. Then came the Asian Financial crisis in 1997, making policy makers revisit the idea of commercializing education. The aim was to make Singapore, the “Boston of the East”. Looking at the state of education in Singapore at that time, the idea was met with great scepticism both at home and abroad. Undeterred, Singapore launched its World Class University programme in 1998 to attract at least 10 internationally reputed universities to set up campuses there. It also divided its education sector into six segments: 1) elite world-class universities, 2) local universities, 3) applied research, 4) corporate training, 5) primary education and 6) testing services. While capability development and talent attraction were presented as rationales, the chief motive was revenue generation. Over the following ten years, Singapore consolidated the initiatives taken and added some more. The key actors in developing Singapore as an educational hub were its Economic Development Board and then the agency for Science, Technology and Research. The Ministry of Education was only peripherally involved.
Malaysia
Malaysia too used the idea of educational hub to solve its chronic problem of trade deficit in the service sector. Malaysia’s aspired to be a high income country at least since the 1990s when Prime Minister Mahathir launched his seminal blue print Vision 2020. It was realised that one important factor that was contributing to the service deficit of Malaysiawas the large number of studentsleaving Malaysia to study overseas. The country’s Malay majority was economically disadvantaged compared to Chinese and Indians and so affirmative action in terms of ethnic quotas were put in place led to an exodus of students who now could not find place in the local universities. Although quotas were abolished in 2002, enrolment data continued to slow skewed ethnic enrolment
Private universities emerged rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s to absorb the unmet demand from the public universities. These began to partner with foreign universities to deliver twinning and franchise programmes. The 1997 Asian crisis hit this sector badly and as a result few Malaysian students could go abroad to study as part of their training programme requirements. Hence the private universities entered into agreements with their foreign partners to allow them to deliver the entire programme in Malaysia converting the twinning into a franchise programme. This fuelled the idea that Malaysia could become an education hub-by opening its private education sector to international students and marketing the country’s low cost of living. The plans of the educational hub idea can be prominently seen inthe New Economic Model 2010 and the Economic Transformation Plan 2010 and the National Higher Education Strategic Plan 2020, – The main driving force in Malaysia, unlike in Singapore is the Ministry of Higher Education.
Hong Kong
Hong Kong began implementing the idea of emerging as an educational hub later than Singapore and Malaysia. In the late 1990s, some references are found in policy documents that show a desire to enrol students from Mainland China. Gradually the idea of making Hong Kong an education hub had begun to appear in policy documents,. In 2004, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong named Education as one of the potential industries that could contribute to the city’s economic growth to make it “Asia’s World City”. However, visible strategies to attract more non-local students appeared only in 2007. The worldwide recession in 2008 motivated the government to undertake an economic review and it was proposed that Hong Kong expand its expertise beyond financial services. Six industries were recommended for this: medical services, education services, environmental industries, innovation and technology, testing and certification, and cultural and creative industries. A large number of Mainland Chinese students began to enrol motivated by the city’s high quality universities as well as civic freedoms that Hong Kong gave them.
National Initiatives
In parallel with the regionalization of higher education in Asia, many countries have developed strategies of internationalization in higher education to respond to the challenges of globalization while there are individual differences, in general, the main objectives of these policies and strategies are concerned with a further expansion of personal mobility across borders and incorporation of international perspectives and content into teaching and research. They also include the provision of joint-or double-degree programs, establishment of branch campuses in partnership with foreign institutions, delivery of English-taught programs, building of a regional hub, and supporting several selected universities or disciplines with enlarged budgets to become world renowned institutions or departments. In East Asia before the mid-1990s, internationalization of Chinese higher education mainly meant sending students abroad and attracting international students to Chinese campus, as well as implementation English-taught degree programs. Since the mid-1990s however, the Chinese government has implemented new national policies. The first document as a result was issued in 1995 “Contemporary Regulation on Operation of Higher Education Institutions in Cooperation with Foreign Partners,” and the launch of Project 211 and Project 985, were launched. The two projects have been carried out tobuild several world-class universities in China in the near future.
The Japanese government made conscious efforts to enable the acceptance of international students from the 1980s to 1990s. It developed the national policy, which was implemented in 1983, to host 100,000 overseas students by the year 2000. More recently, internationalization in higher education in Japan has entered a new phase with new characteristics. They include the following two aspects. First, the Japanese government has begun to revise the legislation concerning the approval of foreign institutions in Japan and to adopt new strategies for recognizing cross-border or transnational branches and programs. This approval makes it possible for foreign educational activities or services to be recognized by Japanese universities and allows Japanese students to apply to foreign educational programs or institutions in Japan. Meanwhile, more and more Japanese institutions have attempted to export their educational activities by providing transnational programs in other countries. Second, in June 2001, the Japanese government set the goal of fostering its “Top 30” universities toward the attainment of top global standards. Later, the program was changed into a scheme of cultivating Centers of Excellence in the 21st Century (COE21). It focused on nine key disciplines, exemplified as life sciences, medical sciences, chemistry, material sciences, mathematics, physics, earth sciences, information technology and electrical and electronic engineering, and the central government expanded the budget for them. The government hopes that the quality of research activity in Japanese higher education can be enhanced and increased international dimension can be integrated into campus research activities.
In 2009 the Japanese government launched a new Global 30 program. Its primary aim is to attract 300,000 foreign students by 2020, tripling the current number. In order to achieve that goal, 13 universities, including 7 national and 6 private universities, were selected to play a central role in implementing the program. They were required to accept many more international students and to provide at least two English-taught degree programs. In 2012, the Japanese government issued another strategy to develop global human resources. In Japan in response to the demand of big enterprises in the context of increased global economic competition. Although there is still some debate about the meaning of the phrase “global human resources,” and the interpretation of the term varies among individual universities, industry, and stakeholders in Japan, according to the government report the aim is to develop soft skills of their people. They are to acquire the ability to think independently, be more easily understood by their colleagues, customers and acquaintances make their minds more supple so that they are able to understand multiple points of view and use that to build synergies. The effort is to understand different perspectives from different cultures and create new values.
Shortly after China and Japan announced their plans, the Korean government announced its first national plan on internationalization of higher education in 1996.It was the Initial Plan for Opening the Higher Education Market to Foreign Countries, and was a response to the upcoming WTO negotiations. This plan was based on the idea that importing higher education services, in close collaboration with overseas partners, would be an efficient and practical way to meet the challenges of internationalization. In 1999 the Korean government started the Brain Korea 21 project for the purpose of building world-class graduate schools and nurturing the development of research personnel. The second stage, began in 2006. Although the Korean higher education has already moved to a stage of a near universal access to higher education it has very few research intensive universities. Many Korean academics believe that only two or three universities are really research-intensive, and the huge majority of their universities are teaching-oriented. Therefore, the objective of the Brain Korea 21 is to establish the research focused university system and attract expert personnel, including academics who are internationally recognized in their disciplines and researchers with an international reputation. In 2008 another national strategy called the World Class University Project was implemented. Several strategies have been developed to build world class Korean campuses and research institutes to attract some of the best scholars in their fields in the world. It is expected that these inbound top scholars will be able to undertake joint research and co-author with local professors and researchers and therefore raise the ranking of Korean universities in major global university ranking systems, to help Korean universities improve the quality of their teaching and learning, as well as research activities, and to provide both Korean faculty members and students with more international learning and research environment. Similar policies can also be found in other Southeast Asian countries.
In South Asia, perhaps the South Asian University comes nearest to bringing students of all the SAARC countries together in one University. Established by all the SAARC countries in 2010, it stands out as an effort of regional cooperation. Tertiary education including vocational, professional and academic is a key factor in building the economies of developing nations like ours. Priority has to be given to the reduction of poverty through sustainable economic growth for which higher education is critical. However, in most of our countries, higher education is far from what it should be. The challenge is to make the system more inclusive for the disadvantaged and improve the quality. This requires large financial outlays.
In most of our countries in South Asia, the GER is very low ranging from 5-6 per cent to about 17-20 per cent. That Higher Education holds the key to prosperity both of the individual and society, has also been emphasized by all UN Bodies since 2000. However, developing countries like ours are caught in the dilemma of competing globally simultaneously addressing the local concerns with inadequate resources, usually huge populations, poor school infrastructure, inequitable distribution of opportunities and resources, social stratification and stultifying cultural norms. These are interrelated issues.
Today South Asia is embroiled in all kinds of conflicts and hostilities. However, we can only prosper through cooperation. We need to remember our shared geography and rich cultural heritage, philosophy, the synergies in arts and crafts, music, poetry and theatre, mythology and folklore, the living knowledge systems coming to us from the past and ways of life. We need to take a long view time stretching back to the centuries gone before us rather than the see the short and the immediate in which are present conflicts of our own making and those caused by the divisive colonial heritage of some of us, not including Nepal and Bhutan. For this, while we need academic excellence, we also need to inculcate in our students, democratic ideals, tolerant world views, multicultural perspectives and critical, thoughtful and compassionate minds and hearts.
We live in a globalized world in which survival and progress depend on creating a knowledge in which universities have to play a vital role. We have an abundance of talent in South Asia but paucity of resources and opportunities. We lose a lot of out talent and skilled human resource to the more developed economies of the west. Thus we not only lose in terms of human resource but also end up subsidizing the more prosperous economies. We need to create opportunities at home so that people return or stay to make a more equitable society in which there is economic growth and progress for all. Together with opportunities at home, a passion for nation building has to fire the imagination of our young people as only then will there be a determined resolve to make the country and thereby the region progress. Men and women have to be educated in a way that they acquire human values, a commitment to social justice and are imbued with a critical and scientific outlook.
The mission is to develop a regional consciousness among its studentsand , to go beyond the horizons of knowledge and learning by inculcating values of togetherness among students. In a globalised world which, is unable to break away from the shackles of the nation state, SAU strives to dissolve borders in a region that has a shared common history and create leaders of tomorrow who will strive to work to fulfil the aspirations and needs of the region.
Indian Education
What is the situation in the Indian Universities? The Indian education system is vast but fragmented in which different sectors have little or no conversation with each other. For example, there is no `awareness bridge’ between the school system, institutions of higher education, vocational training and skill development and professional education. This lack of dialogue is also very evident in the various sectors in which educational institutions function—private, public and public private partnerships. In fact, there often seems to be hostility between them. Each works in isolation and often at cross purposes and so is neither able to capitalize on its individual strengths nor can it collaborate with others. The sufferers are the students and the quality of education they receive. The results are for all to see in every sphere.
In India, access to higher education is said to be anywhere between 13-29 per cent, which is very low. Statistics vary and that is a real challenge in policy making. In any case, the target is to double the GER by 2020 so as to reach a figure of 30%. There will be increasing demand for higher education as primary and secondary education becomes more widespread and the drop-out rates fall. This can be seen from the trends. The student enrolment increased from 8.4 million in 2001-01 to 14.6 million in 2009-10. The estimated increase up to 2022 is at a compounded rate of 11-12% per annum. This means that about 26 million seats will be required in the next decade. Vast expansion of institutions would have to take place but for them to be meaningful they would have to be of global standards to produce competent and employable graduates.
However, enrolment is only a fraction of the story. According to the Narayana Murthy Committee Report, although India has one of the largest higher education institutional network in the world, the majority of them are understaffed and ill equipped. There is an acute faculty shortage. Forty five percent of positions for professors, 51% for readers and 53% for lecturers were vacant in Indian universities in 2007-2008. According to the statistics of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, this is when the student-teacher ratio is 26:1 when it should be 15:1. This compares adversely to national and international benchmarks. The ratio is 11:1 for the Indian institutes of management and, according to The Princeton Review, is 7:1 for Harvard University and 5:1 for Stanford University.
There is deficit infrastructure as a study by UGC reveals with 73% of colleges and 68% of universities falling under medium or low quality. The curricula are outdated and libraries are ill equipped. There are only 9 books per student in an average higher education institution in India, compared with 53 at IIT Bombay and 810 at Harvard University. The number of accredited institutions is few, there being only 161 universities and 4,371 colleges having gone through the process up to March 2011.
The strains on the public sector system are more than evident as there are only a few research universities at the top and the bottom does not adequately fulfill the requirements of demand and so has little time to devote to relevance and quality. The skill formation is inadequate and too dysfunctional to meet the requirements of a growing and diversifying economy. While IITs and IIMs may be internationally competitive, they are only niche institutions which cater to a very small percentage of student population. One of the fundamental causes of malaise is, perhaps, as Prof. Altbach says that the mass of institutions of higher education have no clarity of vision about their purpose and aim. The universities are neither provided resources nor do have the mandate to build a distinctive and innovative profile which is essential for successful academic systems. So they continue as an undifferentiated mass repetitively producing more of the same. If there was clarity on what different institutions are attempting to deliver, then their funding sources and patterns could also be diversified.
The accountability in the system is so diffuse and distributed that no one can be held responsible for delivery and outcomes. This leads to mediocrity. It is only natural because most academic arrangements in India have been derived from British colonialism and were not meant to be effective or encourage quality. The most affected is undergraduate education as the affiliating system puts the undergraduate colleges under the universities with their highly bureaucratized and controlled environment. It impedes innovation as they have to follow the common centralized policies without any autonomy. The universities, in turn, receive their funding from the government. So while they have formal autonomy they too are basically under the control of central or state governments. Also, they have been politicized which makes them ideologically blinkered and contentious. All this has made issues of quality assurance very ambiguous.
The responses playing out in the world to meet the twin challenges of globalization and democracy are also being reflected in India. Obviously the public higher education system will have to cope with it but it is not likely to be able to meet the huge demand for higher education. Also education and employment having got firmly linked to higher education, questions are becoming insistent about its relevance and quality. The need to simultaneously expand to increase access, create equity and tackle the issues of relevance and quality by upgrading existing institutions and establishing new ones, has put a strain on the resources available for the public funding of higher education and given rise to private education. Even the government has allowed elements of private education to enter the public sector universities and colleges through mechanisms like `self financing courses’ that run concurrently with public funded programmes. Self financing institutions have also been affiliated to public universities and they now far outnumber the public funded colleges. Most of them are in the southern states of India. Many private deemed universities have emerged which indicates that the government seeks private help and, lacking a transparent policy or legislation, has taken this route to enable private institutions to flourish. There are another group of private institutions in the non-university sector that are run by private and corporate initiatives like NIIT and APTEC. By law they can’t award degrees but they attract students because of the quality and relevance of their programmes and training that they offer.
However, the acceptance of private higher education will essentially depend on the role of the government. The government has to be clear, and build a national consensus on the issue. Right now there is divergence and the public perception is negative with a fair justification. At the same time, paradoxically the private sector continues to grow while policy lags behind. Therefore, benign negligence of the private sector or allowing its covert entry will not do. The government has to decide whether it needs the private sector for resource mobilization and its other strengths. If yes, it has to facilitate it and see it as complementary to its task of discharging its responsibility of expanding the higher education base. The first and most important step is appropriate legislation because it will embody the will of the state and bring about clarity on the rules of the game. It will prevent perpetual litigation and help in insisting on quality private participation. Regulation implemented with integrity can lead to open and transparent policies that can attract big corporations with enough funds to establish quality institutions and staying power to not expect immediate returns. Lacking a national legislation many states have already enacted for the establishment of private universities, sometimes with disastrous consequences as in Chhattisgarh. Hence state legislation is not enough, and the national policy must be spelt out clearly with its three basic components: promotion, facilitation and regulatory control.
Right now Indian higher education seems to be stuck in a quagmire. It is clear that India is affected by global trends but is unable to deal with them. If it has to meet the challenges it has to systematically create an internationally competitive academic system. For this it will have to rise above ideological biases and politics to reform its outmoded structures of academic governance structures and delivery systems and build a national consensus by a continuous center-state dialogue on higher education both in the public and the private sectors. A tall order perhaps but without it the Indian higher education system cannot deliver either nationally nor can it compete globally. It is imperative for not only India and competing with the best to think and act both locally and globally. They must create an eco-system of education which is inclusive, diverse, flexible, striving for excellence, but for all Asian countries this is the Asian imperative.