The Hindu Business Line : Funding higher education

THERE IS A new suggestion that industry must be made to subsidise higher education by paying a levy for every person it employs with higher educational qualifications. The suggestion that has come from Prof U. R. Rao, who recently chaired the committee on revitalising technical education, has a certain beguiling quality about it but bristles with conceptual and practical difficulties. From a purely public finance perspective, user-fees are meant for services not widely consumed and, hence, it makes sense to get such consumers pay for the service rather than have tax revenues sustaining it. But today there is a growing tendency to finance all manner of public goods with user levies as bankrupt governments find themselves unable to cope with rising public expectations. If every service is to be paid for, then what are taxes meant for? From a practical standpoint, there is also the question of how to price equitably the educational output of institutions with their varying quality, and factor in also the aspect of candidates bearing a differential burden of the cost. These are not easy to resolve.

Few would quarrel with Prof Rao's assertion that the country is dishing out poor quality higher education at costs that are not commensurate. There is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence as well as expert opinion to suggest that not all is well with higher education. Not surprisingly, the Tenth Plan too has identified improving the quality of higher education as a thrust area of development. Compounding the problem of questionable quality are costs. Private establishments with their fancy fees have reinforced what government-funded institutions with their indifference to quality have engendered in the public mind — a belief that the system delivers education of questionable value at disproportionately high costs. The problem has to do with the amorphous nature of the product itself. It is well nigh impossible to measure its quantum. It is even more difficult to evaluate the differences in attributes of the products offered by competing suppliers. In the absence of these two fundamental constructs, the market for education gets reduced to an interplay between the vast army of uninformed students/parents and institutions of doubtful quality. No amount of policing by the All India Council for Technical Education, the regulator, has ensured that the playing field is level for the benefit of the students.

But the answer does not lie in the Government setting a ceiling on fees or even using public educational institutions as role models to get private institutions to fall in line. For, if the AICTE has not been able to enforce minimum standards of infrastructure and trained manpower on private institutions, what are the prospects of getting them to adhere to a state-mandated ceiling on fees? The solution lies in the AICTE enforcing rigorously its norms on infrastructure and academic staff and monitoring them continuously. Only when uniformly-enabled institutions are made to compete amongst themselves are students most likely to get quality education.