The many lows of India’s higher education system

TODAY, a college/university degree is a primary requirement for most well-paying professions. Some might even say that a degree is also good for one’s izzat (honour), much like a permanent sarkari naukri. Little wonder that anyone with a modicum of desire and opportunity makes an effort to get a degree.

Yet, in India, despite so many young ones eager to acquire a degree and willing to pay for it, we have neither been able to create infrastructure to educate them nor succeeded in ensuring that the existing infrastructure has quality.

All that we have been able to do successfully is to increase the stress on young Indians by subjecting them to unnecessary and seemingly unfair screening tests of the sort that the National Testing Agency is currently administering. The only object of those tests is to reject aspirants who have already been tested by a school board or a university.

Often, students going abroad is linked to the lack of job opportunities in India. That would be a misunderstanding of the problem. The malady is deep-rooted.

Few realise that Indians spend six to nine times the size of the Union Budget on higher education to study abroad. At the last count, the Ministry of External Affairs reported that there were over 1.5 million Indians studying abroad. With each of them spending at least

Rs 20 lakh annually on tuition fee and living expenses, the total money taken out of India merely to study abroad each year amounts to at least Rs 3 lakh crore. It could be as high as Rs 4.5 lakh crore if we make a more realistic estimate of what these students actually spend. In contrast, the allocation for higher education in the Interim Budget of 2024-25 was

Rs 47,619.77 crore.

This is a drain of wealth which we have allowed by creating a misshapen system of higher education. Even this system yields considerable results for those who stick to it. Even this bit of higher education that is imparted in India leads to a considerable jump in the earning capacity for those who partake of it. So much so that despite not earning anything while studying, those with educational qualifications earn far more over a lifetime than those without.

Using the Periodic Labour Force Survey data for 2022-23, it is estimated that the cumulative earnings of a person who invests four years in college education after completing higher secondary education would be more than that of someone who was merely HSC (higher secondary certificate)-qualified, by the ninth year. This would translate into something as follows: overall, a graduate earns over Rs 26 lakh more in a lifetime as compared to someone whose highest qualification was higher secondary; for the postgraduate, it turns out that earnings over a lifetime would be more than Rs 54 lakh as compared to someone with HSC as the highest qualification; for a PhD holder, this difference is even greater at Rs 69 lakh over a lifetime.

However, and this is an interesting bit of detail that has often been ignored, even this educational qualification is not sufficient for Indians to get a job abroad. It may get them a visa for further studies in Canada, the US, UK or Australia — the four preferred destinations for Indian youth — but not a job. For that, they have to invest anything from Rs 20 lakh to Rs 40 lakh per annum for at least two years.

Essentially, a degree from India is useless outside the country. Most Indian institutions, too, do not consider these degrees of any value beyond a basic minimum. Indians with degrees have to undertake fresh entrance examinations for entry to a higher level of education or for a job. Recruiters across the job market complain that a degree in India is not a guarantor of relevant knowledge any more.

Worse still, even in the realm of creating new knowledge, the Indian higher education sector is lacking considerably.

Please do not confuse knowledge generation with the number of PhDs or the number of books and scientific papers being published. Look at the reception of research in Indian higher education institutions in the world of knowledge.

The Times Higher Education Rankings is one of the hundred-odd ranking systems that have emerged in the past two decades. One of the metrics that it reports is ‘research quality’. This includes a combination of citation impact, research strength, research excellence and research influence examined over the past five years. On this metric, the top 50 universities of the world have a score of 90-plus.

Among the institutions of higher education in India, only the IISc (Indian Institute of Science) features in this decile with a score of 96. This is a small institution with less than 10,000 students.

The next set of institutions, including Jamia Millia Islamia, IIT-Patna, IIIT Hyderabad, Jamia Hamdard, NIT-Silchar, Delhi Technological University and Anna University – have scores in the 70s. After these come Panjab University (67.9), Mahatma Gandhi University (62.3), Alagappa University (64.8), Aligarh Muslim University (61.6) and Banaras Hindu University (66.4).

Jawaharlal Nehru University, which is presumed to be among the top universities of the country, scored a dismal 51.4, while Manipal University, one of the few private universities to feature in the rankings, has a score of 46. Other universities of India have far worse scores.

The absence of knowledge creation seems to be having a cascading effect across the entire realm of education in India.