Why the world-class model doesn’t work for India

Policy-makers in India and other developing countries want to create what they call ‘world-class’ universities. Most of the country’s universities suffer from a lack of adequate financial resources and effective academics and also from an undesirable bureaucracy.

It would be better if these constraints could be tackled. However, rather than tackling these, the current fashion is to talk about creating world-class universities. This warrants a reality check.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Say, the king or the ruler of one of the countries in the Middle East or Central Asia plans to create a Harvard-like university in his territory. He has lots of money, accumulated through selling petroleum and expansive stretches of land near the capital city. He may decide to pay academics salaries that are 50% or 100% more than what they can get at Harvard. He can create the best quality infrastructure for the university.

Would he be able to attract academics who might work or are working at Harvard University? Academics at Harvard enjoy life in the United States and participate in the academic, social and other activities there. How many of them would be willing to move to this new university? Though monetary gains are important for academics, they alone are not adequate to attract them.

Will the new university be in a position to attract the kind of students who plan to go to the Harvard? Proficient students from all over the world may want to go to Harvard not only for the education that they get there, but also for the employment opportunities and for the life they might lead in the US after they finish university. Will they be attracted by the conditions in the country that is trying to build a Harvard-like university?

If the students and academics at the new university cannot match those at Harvard, there will not be any similarity between these two universities even if a country spends enormous amounts of money. Building a very good university requires an appropriate socio-ecosystem and that cannot be recreated easily.

There is an underlying problem regarding the notion of ‘quality’ here. A useful notion of quality is that one gets the best possible outcome with the available resources and for a particular social purpose. Indian universities may be failing in this regard. However, there is no merit in measuring quality against an absolute and single standard. By doing so, we will not enable institutions to deliver the best that is possible and required in any given context.

Moreover, these will not be able to be anywhere near the level of the so-called ‘world-class’ universities. There could be a ‘double failure’ then.

Pursuing a particular model of higher education

In the domain of higher education, the major trend is for every university to aspire to be like Harvard (or something equivalent) but to end up ranking or continuing to rank hundreds or thousands of places below it. Everybody wants to copy a particular model, but in the process it merely becomes an inferior copy.

The differentiating feature between two universities is in their degree of inferiority compared to the best. There is a need to think about the reasons and implications of this imitative tendency in higher education.

One argument for copying could be that the technology or knowledge that is in use in a modern economy and society is, by and large, similar in all countries. Hence any university in the world is expected to impart a ‘universal’ knowledge. However, this by itself does not justify participation in the competition to be a ‘world-class’ university. There are other reasons.

Unfortunately, a major part of the ‘benefit’ of higher education comes from its role as a signalling and screening device. Since employers cannot judge the ‘real ability’ or the earnestness of a potential employee by conducting interviews, the former uses the name or rank of a person’s university as a way to screen candidates. Candidates use it to signal their ‘quality’ or ‘ability’.

However, this leads to a substantial waste of social effort. All those efforts made by students to pass entrance examinations to get into a higher ranked institution do not add much value to society. This is an example of a rent-seeking or directly unproductive profit-seeking activity that wastes the resources of a society.

One can see perverse outcomes for these social efforts. The majority of students who get into Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs, have no interest in taking up manufacturing or construction jobs (or engineering careers). Even when they take up software jobs, what they use is their basic training in mathematics and logical thinking.

Most of the engineering subjects that they study at IITs have no relevance for their careers. The purpose of their higher education at the IIT is to demonstrate to potential employers their ability to do hard work and crack difficult entrance examinations.

There are other such cases. One can see unemployed and underpaid doctors with a degree in medicine in Indian cities while there is a severe scarcity of medical professionals in rural areas. The intense competition to get a degree in medicine leads to a situation where medical colleges end up admitting only those students who do not want to live in rural areas. People who are likely to improve the health status in these areas cannot get admission to these colleges.

When the main benefit of higher education is its role as a signalling or screening device, society demands a kind of ‘value’ chain for each university or institute. Going up in the ranking based on this particular model – even if it is not a realistic goal – becomes the main preoccupation of a society and the main policy issue in higher education. When everybody attempts to go up the scale, there may be no significant improvement for any individual institution.

The pursuit of this model is attractive to academics too. Their interest lies in self-reproduction. It is easier for them to transfer the knowledge that they have acquired rather than equipping students to apply it to their employment and social context. Academics who are the products of this particular model have a strong interest in its self-perpetuation.

This model of higher education aggravates the exclusion and inequality that prevails in society. The intense competition among students to get into particular institutions can enhance their ranking. That is why the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management retain a certain reputation despite the not so laudable research carried out by the faculty there.

The academic ranking of a university depends on its ability to exclude students. Academics and university administrators boast of the divide between the number of applicants and the number of places and reckon it constitutes a measure of the ‘quality’ of their programme.

This continues to be the case even if a small share of places is given to those students who belong to underprivileged groups. Such actions are either too inadequate to address the issue of social exclusion or the students coming from such groups may fail to cope with the (unwanted) competition to emulate a universal model.

Need to pursue alternative models

The pursuit of this model has led to the neglect of many useful activities that higher education needs to address, especially in countries like India. For example, India badly needs high-quality teacher training courses. This is necessary to improve its awfully poor achievements at the school level. Objectives like these can end up being sidelined in the struggle to create world-class universities.

There is an urgent need to pursue alternative models in higher education, especially if we want to create a more inclusive and less unequal society.

There is a lack of appreciation of the challenges involved in pursuing such alternative models. If we create a teacher training college where 50 students are admitted from a pool of 5,000 applicants, we are less likely to meet the social needs of a country like India, even if the quality of those students approaches that of a universal standard.

When they graduate, these students may seek and get jobs in elite private schools – where the working conditions are attractive – or may pursue higher levels of education. They will not be interested in becoming school teachers in the interior parts of the country where their services are needed.

Hence, if competition at the time of admission is a marker of ‘quality’ in the previously described model of higher education, identifying and providing education to those who are likely to serve a specific social purpose should be the hallmark of this alternative model of higher education.

V Santhakumar is a professor at Azim Premji University, India. A version of this article was first published on his blog.