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Restructuring higher education

THE UNIVERSITY GRANTS Commission's golden jubilee celebrations saw the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, airing his concerns over national and global trends in higher education. Since the advent of liberalisation — which in turn has had a significant impact on higher and professional education — the Government has not spelt out its policy outlining the country's manpower, infrastructure and resources requirements in the medium and long term, nor the means of financing higher education in order to attain global standards. Mr. Vajpayee may have reiterated the familiar themes of direct links between education and development, of making higher and professional education accessible to more people, and making India a preferred destination for foreign students. He perhaps laid correct stress on the need for improving public-private partnerships to bridge the growing gap between the actual requirements and the availability of resources for funding higher education ventures; or wanted rich students in government colleges and universities to be made to pay more for their courses. But, in truth, India so far has not seen a single successful instance of a public-private partnership working to make higher or professional education accessible to the poor.

Governments and decision makers have for long been citing resource constraints for their failure to open new colleges and universities. The University Grants Commission (UGC) itself funds only universities, which cover just 20 per cent of the total number of students in higher education. The others are in colleges that are out of the UGC mandate. Obviously, these trends are leading to increasing privatisation of higher education.

However, experience shows that privatisation is causing serious distortions, especially in technical and professional education. Standards are falling. Private entrepreneurs are reluctant to make their funding and fee structures transparent. The number of students from the poorer sections is woefully small in unaided colleges. The Prime Minister's call for replication of the IIT and IIM models obviously skirted the fact that these institutions used public funds to provide cost-effective, merit-based but high quality technical education. In a privatised scenario, a learner who pays higher cost for education is more likely to adopt short-cut methods for recovering the cost in the short term. Thus, despite all the resounding platitudes, the policy options for making higher education more cost-effective remain unaddressed. Perhaps, one aspect that merits serious consideration is Mr.Vajpayee's suggestion that the UGC henceforth call itself the University Education Development Commission. But it should not mean the Commission could give up its `Grants' responsibility. To convert itself into a more purposeful body with a more democratised mandate, the Commission ought to seriously consider ways of reducing costs of higher education, create an Education Development Fund to lend low-cost funds to college managements as well as students. Also, in a technology-enabled environment, quality teachers can now reach out to more students. Students can access high-quality resources and knowledge repositories. A big reform required is to enhance the ceilings on teacher-student ratios, without affecting the human functions, which live teachers alone can perform. The potential of the beneficiaries, viz., the industry, to pay back the providers of education in the form of turnover tax has remained untapped. Globally, multilateral funding can provide the answer to the 4.8 billion people living in the developing world.

Finally, even a country that is struggling to provide basic education to its young citizens cannot ignore its responsibilities towards higher or tertiary education. When primary or secondary education is universalised, it would obviously increase the pressures at the tertiary level also. The country that ignores this trend and seeks to cut public spending on higher educational ventures will do so at its own peril.

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