I recently attended the 5th Global University Summit, in which senior leaders from universities from many countries participated and shared views. It was indeed a unique opportunity to meet and listen to leaders of some of the best universities of the world. While it was great to hear the views of these top leaders, and there are always things that one learns and approaches that can be translated to Indian context, it became clear to me that the pressing issues for these universities are simply very different from those faced in India.
At a fundamental level, these universities assume that high quality faculty talent is available, and high quality infrastructure exists. Some of the current focus areas for them are how to support higher education in times of reducing government support (almost in all developed countries the support from government for higher education is reducing with governments pushing them to become mostly self sustaining), improving diversity as they believe that in a globalized world diversity will help in their pursuit of excellence, attracting the best students, evolving strategies for making an impact, etc.
One could not help but see the stark difference from the scenario in India. Even in the top Institutes, getting decent faculty is perhaps the predominant issue being faced. And decent infrastructure remains a major concern – there is just too little money being put in for building educational infrastructure, as we still seem to believe that higher education needs just modest funding – an investment of Rs 200-500 crores for setting a university is viewed as extremely “generous”, when this amount is typically used to construct a high quality building for one department (the CS building of UIUC, Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford – which have come up in the last 10 years, have cost in the vicinity of $100 million). So what is assumed by Universities in the developed world, are the pressing issues in India.
It also became clear that building a world class University, at least by the measures that are used to define such universities, will be a challenge, if not an impossibility, for the next few decades in India. The reason is simple. Research performance drives the global standing of a University, and the two main factors that impact research productivity and quality are faculty and PhD students/postdocs. The well established universities pursue talent at a global level, and are able to get them, given their facilities and good compensation. So they attract the best talent to join as faculty, and they get the best available students in their PhD programs.
The situation in India on these fronts is extremely challenging. Forget about global talent, Indian Institutions are not in a position to attract even the best Indian talent – both the best faculty and the best PhD students from India prefer working overseas. Even the best Indian institution has available to it only those faculty who chose to return to India (or stay in India), and those PhD students who were unable to get fellowships abroad (or did not wish to go abroad). It should, however be noted, that at the undergraduate level, we are able to attract the best Indian talent, as generally the best students prefer to study in top Institutions in India and only those who cannot make it to them go abroad (if they can afford it.) Unfortunately, top class UGs, while they help build the brand of an Institution in teaching, do not help much in building the research capability of a University.
So, it seems evident to me that in pursuit of excellence, our focus in the foreseeable future should be on doing whatever it takes to attract the best Indian faculty to work in India, attract top Indian students to do PhD in India (which can be facilitated by good faculty), and leverage the high quality UGs to the extent possible. And if we are able to achieve this, then in due course excellence will come and ratings will follow. (For attracting best Indian faculty and PhD students to work in India it is necessary to properly understand from them, what is it that they need to work in India, and build policies based on this. I have done one informal survey of Indian PhD students in US on what they need to return to India – results of this survey are available here, and one of UG students in three IITs regarding why they dont do PhD in India and what they need to do a PhD in India – results of this survey are available here. Inputs from both of these were used to build policies for faculty recruitment and PhD student recruitment at IIIT Delhi. )
jalote
May 09, 2012 @ 12:40:21
Indian Education is heavily subsidised..Atleast in IITs and NITs where students get decent jobs should payback through loan system as in US.
May 13, 2012 @ 01:22:29
Though infrastructure is an issue in India,the main challenge seems to be priorities of th e institutes. If we look into the success story of Anna university, they do not get the best talented students. But there system has power to deliverw high quality researchers ( as compare to other institutes). I always wonder ,why institutes of national importance who get comparatively better talent, can not do excellence. There is some difference in the system. i would like to know the reasons.
May 13, 2012 @ 04:34:34
No one can teach a person if he is not willing to learn. Faculty, infrastructure, resources, etc. are secondary.
UG students generally are inspired by the stories of those who earned a degree from top institutes & moved on to earn larger amounts of money.
I think Indian students need inspiration to take up areas of research & exploration.
They need stories of those who made a new scientific discovery or breakthrough rather than money earning professionals. They will perhaps also want/need some Indians with whom they can relate & get inspired.
I also think that the Indian school system needs to be re-designed from scratch as it’s inefficient in many ways to be effectively fixed/changed.
May 13, 2012 @ 05:00:11
My simple views on this:
1. The research funding in a country hugely depends on the economy of the country. In a developing country like India, though the talent pool is abundant, that fraction to be spent in basic amenities and basic facilities is higher.
2. One major factor could be the IT industry attitude in India. The majority talent pool is attracted towards the services sector. India stands as one of the major markets for providing service, support and off-shoring projects. The concept of Industry research is minimal compared to other countries.
3. A simple wiki data show us:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_science
In countries like US – 63.7% of the science research funding comes from industry (private sector) and 70.1% of the research funding are used by industry. So self sustenance (industry+ private) plays a very important role.
4. In countries like India, academia has to take over this role and provide industry style research attitude. That would fill the gaps in India and elevate our researching standards.
5. However, placed like DARPA which are completely government funded still provide some of the best research and infrastructure for research.
Thus, my opinion would be in India, more than the problem of funding and infrastructure, it is the question of proving a point that research in India is possible. If one Indian institute (industry or academia) would come forward and set an example, that would begin the changing of trends.
Anush
May 13, 2012 @ 10:34:47
The assumption here is that a quality research environment requires high spending of monetary resources.
However, if one looks at the balance sheet of time resource spent — in direct/indirect teaching+admin activities vs research activities — what is the percentage of time spent in the latter in IIITD? Even if scheduled teaching load is just three hours, actual load of admin and teaching can be up to 30-35 hours a week depending on the institution. This leaves less than the threshold amount of time for sustainable research, given that faculty must do research in essentially post-doc mode (without students).
So before sinking more money, appropriate use of (existing) time resources must be justified. A survey time spent on teaching+admin+gossiping seems appropriate.
May 16, 2012 @ 13:49:31
Stipend of Ph.D. students should be competitive. In computer science, anything less than Rs. 50K per month will not be sufficient to attract the best talents.
Jun 03, 2012 @ 05:14:20
I have 2 points to make here:-
After having the subsidised education in India in IITs and NITs, the student willing to go abroad for jobs may be allowed on the execution of a bond of atleast Rs. 10 lakh or to serve in the country for a period of 10 years.
The student willing to go abroad for higher education may also be sent on the same condition and the returning student with higher education must be given the good facilities and reasonable salaries. The faculty should be given the due respect and the due facilities including suitable residential accomodation in the campus of institutions.
The funds so collected thru bonds may be spent on the expansion of the instituions.