Reforming education

Even as India can be justifiably proud over the reforms that it has unleashed in the social and economic spheres, mostly for the good, there is one critical area that has been completely bypassed. That is education, especially higher education which is still in the clutches of old school philosophy. Some of the world’s eminent corporations may be headed by persons of Indian origin who had their university education in India and the country may count in the top five economies in the world but yet not one of our universities, including the best known ones, has proved good enough to rank among the top 100 in the world. Two universities from China and one from Singapore feature in the top 30 of the latest Times Higher Education World University Rankings while the Indian Institute of Science, the topmost from India, is ranked above 250. Consequently, higher education is one of our biggest imports with over half a million students migrating abroad for higher studies every year, as former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan pointed out in a recent event hosted by this newspaper in Chennai.

As with everything else, the comparison here is with China. According to Rajan, of the 12 students admitted to the doctoral programme in finance of the University of Chicago this year after a rigorous shortlisting process, six are from China and none from India. He also pointed out that Chinese patents are amongst the highly cited ones while India is nowhere in the picture. Our education system, stuck as it is in old methods of pedagogy, has also failed to encourage free-thinking, open minds and free exchange of ideas. Rajan’s point about India being an “absorber” of ideas from the rest of the world when it should have been contributing to the world of ideas is very relevant.

The time has come to overhaul and refresh the system and liberate universities from the stifling controls of regulators. We need to promote greater internationalisation of universities by permitting them the freedom to absorb foreign students and staff which will enable cross-fertilisation of ideas. We need to improve our certification framework and find a way to marry technology with human expertise in pedagogy. A major flaw in our system is the strict segregation between the sciences and humanities/arts unlike the US where students are encouraged to take credits across streams. The new age private universities now offer courses that marry the sciences and the arts but this should be spread across the older, established universities and colleges too. Finally, we need to crack the funding puzzle. While taxpayer funds can be funnelled into public universities, how do you ensure that private universities that are self-funded remain affordable to the best of talent that might not be able to afford them? These are not easy questions to answer but we need to start moving now.

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