India's business leaders applaud progress on higher education: Chronicle-11/11/10
By Shailaja Neelakantan
New Delhi
This year has been a landmark one for Indian higher education, with the government finally offering legislative proposals that go right to the core of the system's problems, said speakers and attendees at a conference Thursday.
At the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry higher-education summit here, participants acknowledged that more work needs to be done to revitalize the country's beleaguered and somewhat antiquated higher-education system. Parliament has yet to approve the proposed reforms, for example. But many offered optimistic assessments.
"What a giant step from last year to this year," said Sushma Berlia, president of the Apeejay Stya Group, which runs private schools and colleges. "There is a sea change in the debates across the country." She said that while India's higher-education problems have been talked about for years, in 2010 the discussions became more focused on a specific framework based on the government's proposals.
As a sign of the heightened interest in India, the meeting attracted high-profile international speakers, including John J. DeGioia, president of Georgetown University, and David Willetts, Britain's minister of state for universities and science.
Referring to the recent visit by President Obama to India, Mr. DeGioia said, "U.S.-India, like the president said, will be the most important partnership" of the future.
Other American university administrators echoed his sentiment.
In India "there is an apparent new flexibility and a sense that there is a reaching out to foreign universities," said Kathleen Hewett-Smith, assistant dean of international studies at Bard College. Ms. Hewett-Smith was one of 130 foreign academic delegates attending the conference.
Kapil Sibal, the minister in charge of higher education, has introduced a slew of bills to overhaul the higher-education system, including changes to the accreditation process, the way fraudulent providers would be punished, and rules under which foreign universities would be allowed to operate in India. (Vibha Puri Das, secretary of higher education for the Indian Ministry of Human-Resource Development, said the bill approving the entry of outside universities could be voted on in Parliament's next budget session in February.)
Help From the Private Sector
At the conference, Mr. Sibal spoke less about the change he wants to bring about and more about the challenges that lie ahead for India. The government's goal of raising India's gross-enrollment rate from 12.4 percent to 25 to 30 percent in 10 years is easier said than done, he said.
"We need 800 more universities in 10 years, and no government in the world will have the resources or the know-how to build these," he said. To achieve the lofty goal, Mr. Sibal said, the government needs to encourage the private sector to step up investment in higher education and foster partnerships between both Indian and international players.
The conference not only examined Mr. Sibal's proposals, but also looked at how India's bureaucratic system compared with its counterparts overseas.
Speakers from abroad explained how their universities worked and ways partnerships could be used to improve the quality of faculty and to build new institutions or new departments. Speakers from India explained the intricate workings of the Indian system.
For instance, in a session on faculty development, Venkataraman Lakshmi, a professor at the University of South Carolina, talked about how professors are promoted at most American universities to a packed room of about 70 Indian academics,
Mr. Lakshmi said promotion often hinges on the publication of research papers and on student evaluations. However, in India, students don't evaluate faculty members, and many professors resist the idea, although a few university vice chancellors have talked about the need for it.
"Do you weigh all student evaluations equally?" asked Bijendra Jain, vice chancellor of the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, in the western Indian state of Rajasthan. Mr. Jain said that in India, evaluations would probably differ vastly, for example, from a student who attended half the classes to a student who attended almost all the classes.
Mr. Lakshmi was momentarily nonplused but answered that essentially that one student's evaluation is not weighed differently than another's when it comes to promotions.
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Obama Leads U.S. Universities to India as Yale, Duke Build Ties
By - Nov 5, 2010 12:03 AM ET
Yale University President Richard Levin, seen here, visited India last week to set up a joint program that will educate Indian college leaders. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg's Shannon Pettypiece talks about President Barack Obama's planned visit to India. In addition to a group of U.S. CEOs, a number of university officials will accompany the president as India looks to build ties with U.S. colleges. She speaks with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop." (Source: Bloomberg)
Yale University and Duke University are among dozens of U.S. colleges that India is recruiting to help educate its population with more than 550 million people under age 25.
Duke, Brown University and the University of Chicago are planning offices, research centers and campuses in India. The presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University and Cornell University have traveled to India to raise money and establish collaborations. Yale President Richard Levin visited India last week to set up a joint program that will educate Indian college leaders.
President Barack Obama will make a three-day state visit to India, starting tomorrow, accompanied by U.S. university officials eager to strengthen their ties to the country. Institutions want to "get in on the ground floor" as India's economy and education system mature and the nation becomes a global power, said Dipesh Chakrabarty, a University of Chicago history professor who is leading the university's efforts to plan a research center in New Delhi, India's capital.
"We see India as a tremendous opportunity for higher education," said Robert Brown, president of Boston University and a member of the delegation traveling to India, where he aims to open a campus, in a telephone interview. "There's tremendous demand, a growing population in the middle class, an English- speaking, well-organized educational system -- all the things that you need to interface with a private American university."
Business Summit
Representatives of Boston University, Arizona State University in Tempe, and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, are part of the delegation of academic and business leaders. The group was organized by the U.S.-India Business Council, a Washington-based lobbying group. Obama is scheduled to attend their business summit tomorrow, in Mumbai. During their visit, university officials will lobby for a bill pending before the Indian legislature that would allow foreign schools to open branches in the country for the first time.
U.S. institutions of higher learning have already expanded overseas, with campuses in the Middle East and China. India is the logical next step, said Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs for Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Duke wants to open a facility for Indian and U.S. students, although it doesn't know where, Schoenfeld said.
"In an increasingly global world, it would be hard to have a truly complete education without having some experience with India and China," Schoenfeld said.
Levin, president of Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, said on Oct. 28 during a trip to India that the institution would train Indian university leaders through a partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur and the Indian Institute of Management in Kozhikode.
Tata Group
U.S. college fundraisers are also eager to tap into the growing wealth of Indians. On Oct. 14, Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, received a $50 million donation for its business school from the Tata Group, a diversified Indian company whose interests include steel and chemicals. Harvard also got $10 million on Oct. 4 from Anand Mahindra, managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd., a Mumbai-based industrial company whose interests include automobiles, for humanities education.
Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, has formed an advisory council on India and is planning an office in New Delhi, said Matthew Gutmann, vice president for international affairs at Brown. The council is co-chaired by Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Mumbai-basedReliance Industries Ltd., whose interests include energy and materials. Ambani is also the parent of a Brown student.
Growing Demand
India needs 600 more universities and 35,000 more colleges over the next 12 years to enroll 30 percent of its potential students, according to Human Resource Development MinisterKapil Sibal. The most-elite U.S. institutions won't be the first to open campuses with degree-granting programs, he said.
"Harvard and Yale are world-renowned institutions," Sibal said. "They have the best people come there, so they have no hunger. It will be institutions that have hunger. They are the ones that will come -- those that want to establish themselves as global universities."
Arizona State is seeking to attract Indian companies to an office and retail complex called Skysong that the university is developing in Scottsdale, Arizona, said Sethuraman Panchanathan, the institution's chief research officer, who is part of the delegation. Also traveling to India is Jaishankar Ganesh, dean of Rutgers School of Business-Camden, who said he's exploring partnerships with Indian institutions.
Discount Land
Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, has looked at land for a facility in Hyderabad. The property was offered, at a discount price, by the government of Andhra Pradesh state, said Vijay Madisetti, the Georgia Tech professor leading the school's initiative, in an e-mail. The university is waiting for passage of the Foreign University Bill before taking action, he said.
India's gross domestic product expanded 8.8 percent in the three months ended June 30, the most since 2007 and the joint second-fastest pace among the world's 20 largest economies, after China. Brazil recorded the same growth as India.
Only about 12 percent of children in India enter college, about half the world average of 23 percent and well below the 56 percent in developed countries, according to figures compiled by the Washington-based World Bank.
Legislative Session
India's Congress Party-led government introduced the Foreign University Bill, which would allow foreign institutions to set up their own branches. Colleges would need to invest at least 500 million rupees ($11 million) to start up, and reinvest surpluses into their India-based programs. The legislature begins its next session on Nov. 9.
How the U.S. colleges in India will operate depends on the final provisions of the law and the availability of financing, said Boston University's Brown. Unlike projects in the Middle East and China, where state or local governments have paid for U.S. campuses, the Indian programs of American schools need to find their own funding, Brown said.
Boston University is talking to a philanthropist about financing its campus, said Brown, who wouldn't disclose the name of the potential donor or the locations he is considering. Boston University would initially offer master's degrees in disciplines such as business, journalism and art, Brown said. The university may offer undergraduate degrees later, he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Oliver Staley in New York at ostaley@bloomberg.net
Andrew MacAskill in New Delhi at amacaskill@bloomberg.net.