Shubhashis Gangopadhyay: Education revolution
India needs to set up integrated universities with undergraduate and postgraduate teaching along with an active research base
Shubhashis Gangopadhyay / Oct 23, 2010, 00:33 IST
There is s quiet revolution happening in the Indian higher education system. It started in the South many years ago, with the mushrooming of private engineering, medical and business schools. The profits made by these institutions encouraged others in the rest of the country to do the same. However, the real revolution is happening now with established business houses planning “world-class” universities in various parts of the country. While the success of ISB encouraged the growth of business schools in the country, the spectacular success of Manipal University has shown how private universities can be good business as well as serve an important social cause.
Indeed, if we have any hopes of becoming a knowledge-based economy, it is imperative that we invest in higher education, and we do it now. There are two factors working to our advantage. First, an increasing number of students are leaving India after finishing high school to go and study in colleges abroad. While some of them may be getting financial assistance, most have to spend their own money and, the cost is certainly not cheap. This means that if reputed private institutions offer degree courses in India, people will be willing to attend them even if they are costly. The problem, however, is one of reputation.
This brings me to the second advantage that India faces. Up until now, much of Europe has been providing free education to all those who made it to their system. Starting a year from now, free education will be available to European students alone, which means Indian students will have to pay hefty fees, much like what they have been doing to study in US colleges. In addition, universities are now being encouraged to add to their resources in whatever way they can — attracting paying students, selling patents and consulting for private companies. If these universities open up overseas training centres in India, they will reduce the costs of studying in Europe without, necessarily, diluting the quality of the training.
In other words, there is enough of a demand for good higher education in India and there are enough reputed foreign universities that will gladly set up shop in India.
A famous scientist on his retirement from an undergraduate college recounted the following story. After he finished his doctoral studies, he applied for a job at the local university. In the interview, he was asked why he would want to give up a promising research career and join a teaching institution. He promptly decided against joining the university and, instead, took up a position at a highly reputed undergraduate college. He remained there throughout his professional career and became one of the city’s most respected teachers and a highly regarded researcher. The moral of the story is that one cannot be a good researcher without having a bunch of good students to teach. A good researcher seldom makes a bad teacher, while it is unusual for a non-researcher to be an excellent teacher at higher levels.
Unfortunately, we have followed the principle of separating teaching from research and set up institutes all over the place, away from universities and without undergraduate and postgraduate students. Some of these institutes do give higher level degrees but their student intakes are minimal and they seldom take in undergraduates. To counter this, private institutes of higher education have set themselves up as pure teaching shops with little or no research activity. It is time to change this and the best way is to set up integrated universities, with undergraduate and postgraduate teaching along with an active research base.
Also, a university must nurture all disciplines. MIT and Harvard are not known because they specialise in certain disciplines but because they are at the frontiers of all disciplines. In India, we have not only segregated teaching and research activity; we have also separated out the disciplines — basic sciences from the engineering courses and the sciences from the humanities. We thus have the IITs and the IIMs as well as institutes of mathematics and physics and, of course, we have the social science research institutes. Teaching and research activities are carried out in disciplinary silos, their geographical separation ensuring that there is no scope for lateral inflow of ideas into one set of disciplines from another. A university set-up where students can and do learn more than one discipline, and can constantly interact with young minds from various departments, is necessary for our education system to flourish.
What makes this approach difficult is that while there is high market demand for some disciplines, like engineering, medicine, business, economics and finance, there is little immediate demand for humanities and other social sciences. This means that there has to be some cross-subsidisation across disciplines. Both student fees and teacher salaries have to reflect the market opportunities of each discipline. In a government-funded institution, this is difficult; in privately run universities, this is more feasible. Private universities being set up must ensure that they go beyond the so-called professional courses.
This is where tying up with reputed foreign universities can be of immense help provided the collaboration goes beyond teaching. A university is successful not only because it has good teaching, but also because it produces internationally acclaimed research. However, research and teaching has to be based in the Indian context. While much of the theoretical and methodological training is independent of the country where it is being imparted — there is no American physics, British chemistry or, economics for a country like India — the problems or applications being discussed have to be set in the Indian context. Only then we will develop research that gives us solutions to problems faced by India and, hence, move us towards a knowledge-based economy.
The author is research director, India Development Foundation
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