The Hindu Business Line : The business side of education

Creation of a high quality human capital pool requires a common curriculum that standardises abilities across as a great a pool of students as possible.

Sumit K. Majumdar

Education is an extremely lucrative business in India. As a source of demand for existing courses and as a location in which to establish organisations that provide training and certification, India has evoked substantial interest in domestic and global suppliers’ imagination.

This is hardly unexpected. With a population of 550 million under the age of 24 , the number of students clamouring for certification runs into the hundreds of millions. These numbers are greater than the populations of Bangladesh and Pakistan combined, or thrice the combined populations of France and Germany.

Thus, one observes a mushrooming of educational establishments in India. Once considered illegitimate, private colleges levying capitation fees are respectable today.

Beyond the pale less than five years ago, private universities — even those with hardly a credential to their name — are now considered as high internal rate of return projects and entrepreneurs are flocking to establish them.

Money spinner

Educational initiatives are, in effect, fabulous real-estate opportunities, as land is given for these at throwaway prices. And, then, capitation fees paid in cash and annual fees over several years ensure that every annual intake of 100 students generates, on an average, cash revenues of Rs 15 crore.

The costs in such private institutions are, of course, minuscule as there is hardly any infrastructure or faculty. Hence, the returns are absurdly high even after giving the touts their large commissions.

At last count, around 70 and 90 MBA programmes were being offered in Kolkata and Pune respectively. In the South, there are hundreds of engineering colleges. Medical education is flourishing too, though one would be wary of consulting medical professionals who pass out of such institutions.

In Mumbai, the activities of educational entrepreneurs have seen them amass wealth and even catapulted some of them to political prominence.

Yet, with every educational enterprise that is set up, which promises exciting opportunities for the youth, a definite dilution of quality is being witnessed.

As the numbers of such organisations rise, they are chasing fewer and fewer trained faculty members, as the opportunities in the financial and services sectors beckon anybody even with a modicum of talent.

Unemployable candidates

In fact, it is these unemployables from these dubious educational establishments who return as faculty to their alma-maters because there are no other job options. Thus, a vicious cycle of declining instructor competence and educational quality has been set in motion in India.

As more educational organisations chase fewer faculty of increasingly lower quality, the steep decline in pedagogic quality is exacerbated. The steady dilution of human capital — of analytical abilities, common sense, general knowledge and reasoning — will be detrimental to the future of the country.

Global Players in the Fray

And into this gold mine has entered the UK. As a country with over a hundred universities and a limited university-going population, it needs to fill these seats. What better way than to fill them with Indian students. After all, these students pay three times as much as a local student, and so the establishment makes a handsome profit for every student coming through. Thus, degree offerings in ridiculous subject combinations are available in the UK for £12,000-15,000 a year for which a local student pays only £3,000.

Indians are good business. Hence, educational charlatans in the UK are making a a beeline to India to sell degrees in absurd subjects, assuming possibly, and quite rightly, that there will be a de minimis number of, say, 100 individuals who will choose to study ‘lifestyle and recreational sciences’.

That would be a nice little earner for the foreign universities. For the Indian student, a phoren degree in ‘how to enjoy life’ at best translates into a job as a waiter at, say, the Harbor Heights Hotel. It pays to say “Good Morning, Madam or Sir!” with a fake British accent!

The siren song of an British education is best unheeded by Indian students. The quality of programmes are very ordinary, and the year that might be spent on a Master’s degree is essentially a year spent in tourism in the UK that benefits the British economy and not the student.

The year consists of two terms of ten weeks each, and at the end a 10,000 word paper, that takes three weeks in research and a week in writing, is due. This leaves 28 weeks in a year free of the supposedly high quality educational inputs that a student is expected to acquire for the £12,000-15,000 that is paid for the privilege. Thus, most programmes in the UK are best not touched with a barge pole. An Indian qualification, from whatever source, has very much more content than these British offerings.

The Way Forward

Can India do something about this? Yes. And here are four steps that need to be taken:

The creation of a high quality human capital pool requires the presence of a common curriculum that standardises abilities across as a great a pool of students as possible and generates a minimum common performance metric. This is prevalent at the school level but not at the college and higher educational levels.

There are no worthwhile national standard-setting activities for higher education. To achieve this every discipline needs to have a professional association — like the General Medical Council of the UK, for instance — that sets standards and maintains them. In all areas of professional education, such associations, with relevant teeth, are an absolute must.

Peer-review of programmes and inspections, which are routine in colleges and universities in the US, are simply absent in India.

Along with the promulgation of standards is also the need for an inspection agency to ensure that standards are met. There are Inspectors of Schools in India, but who has heard of inspection of colleges or post-graduate institutions. Voluntary inspections are a must, as only peer pressure and monitoring will motivate educational institutions towards higher performance.

Faculty development and appraisal processes, which are intensive in the US and some European countries, are absent in India. This is a high priority activity.

Also, regulation of educational activities is an absolute must in India. This does not mean micro-management or interference, but appropriate delineation of quality norms, and maintenance of the norms and quality.

If a manufacturing plant can have quality control as a primary activity, equally the educational sector needs high quality regulators. The process of putting in important regulatory safeguards in the education sector, to ensure and protect the long-term quality of India’s human capital, is absolutely vital and to be neglected any longer.

(The author, Professor of Technology Strategy, University of Texas at Dallas, can be reached at majumdar@utdallas.edu)