Creating world class universities in India

Dinesh Mohan, Professor at IIT Delhi, has an excellent piece in Business Standard on where India stands in the business of creating world class universities. The Shanghai Jiao Tong University's latest academic ranking of world universities confirms what we already know: we have been left far behind in the race.

In the top 500 universities in the world, India has only two: IIT Kharagpur and IISc, both ranked in the lowly range of 303-401. China itself has 18 universities in the list. Predictably, the US tops the list with 159, all of Europe has 210. The US has 9 of the top 10 (the tenth is Oxford) and 17 of the top 20. In academics, as in defence, it is a superpower.

The methodology, Prof Mohan points out, is sufficiently sound to command respect. The motivation behind the exercise was to figure out where China stands and what it needs to catch up. Prof Mohan highlights a number of interesting findings:

• A vast majority .... are large public universities enjoying liberal funding. Even in the USA, where many private universities exist, over 70 per cent of the universities making the list for engineering sciences are state funded. Even in the private universities, a significant proportion of research funding comes from the public sector. In the middle and low income countries, only state-funded universities are able to do any scientific research of any consequence.
  
• The age of specialised institutions like IITs, IIMs and IIITs seems to be over. A great deal of modern research involves interdisciplinary work and that is why such institutions are the exceptions.
• The kind of people who take up research and teaching jobs in any country come from middle and lower middle class family backgrounds. They are the ones who look for security in a job and work hard. Those who have spent money on education or taken loans are unlikely to take teaching jobs. We will have to reverse the trend of rising costs of education and give liberal scholarships even for living expenses.
• Our public sector institutions like the railways, NTPC, ONGC, DRDO, municipalities, BIS, building and road departments, etc. must put in place policies to hire such people (people with Master's and Ph D degrees) and give them meaningful jobs to do.
  

The bottomline? Forget the notion, currently popular, that in order to create world-class universities, we need government to get out of education. Forget also the notion that private institutions, motivated by profit and charging appropriate (that is, sky-high) fees will do the trick. Think again about the notion that you need fabulous pay packages in universities in order to attract talent- no, the types who are attracted look for job security, decent pay and a supportive environment.

We need to strengthen the IIT-IIM model and give it wider application. At least where the IITs are concerned, fees remain reasonably low and affordable and they must remain so. Improved governance at generously funded state institutions and inclusive, affordable education are the key to creating world class universities. In short, the drift towards privatisation, higher fee and higher pay packets for faculty as the answer must be checked before it is too late.