U.S.-India education: which way to go- WSJ 11/11/10

By Paul Beckett

There's been a lot of chat and cogitation over what will happen in India if Kapil Sibal, minister of human resource development, gets his way and Parliament passes legislation to allow in foreign universities. The assumption, given all the statistics we all know about India's growth prospects, is that Yale, Harvard and every other Ivy League University would suddenly come clamoring to build a campus.

If you speak to delegates from American universities, many of whom are in town this week as part of the giant U.S. delegation around the Obama visit, this is pie in the sky. In fact, it's more like pie in space, it's so unlikely to happen.

Getty Images

Harvard University, like many others in the Ivy League, provides students with a much better education than many universities in India. The U.S. attracts Indian students in excess of 100,000, more than any other country.

First, even if the law is changed, there are the often-recited restrictions that would likely be imposed on any foreigners regarding caps on faculty salaries and fees, to say nothing of the heavy bureaucracy that foreign universities would be unwilling to tolerate.

Second, and less spoken about, is that India doesn't need Ivy League universities: It needs solid, middle-ranking universities that specialize in producing a quality education for huge numbers of students, like state universities do in the U.S. In fact, more than anything, it needs community colleges with two-year degree courses to give millions of Indians practical training that would negate the need for big companies to take students from Indian universities and then spend months training them just to be employable.

But this is not where the Indian government is focused, as obsessed as it seems to be in talking up the "Big Names" that it wants to set up shop here. It needs to adjust where it's aiming if it ever wants a chance to serve its stated goal of greatly increasing the embarrassingly small number of students who attend higher education in this country.

That doesn't mean that education isn't a big deal in the new U.S.-India partnership for the 21st century that we heard so much about earlier this week when the U.S. President was in town. It's already a huge area for partnership, just not in areas we hear very much about. Indeed, most of the action is happening the other way: the U.S. attracts more Indian students – in excess of 100,000 now – than any other country and that number is expected to soar in the next several years.

Why so?

Sad to say, but U.S. colleges do provide a much better education than the vast majority of their Indian counterparts. And as Indians grow richer, more will be able to send their kids to schools where they get the best education, regardless of where they are. It'll be a more attractive option for many than sending their kids to an offshoot of a foreign university in India.

"Even better than universities locating themselves here is students going there," says Sethuraman Panchanathan, deputy vice president and chief research officer at Arizona State University, in Delhi with the delegation. "Universities locating here is second best to that."

There are advantages for American universities, too. They can claim more diverse student bodies more in tune with a globalized world than the traditional image of an insular American campus. And they can gain financially because foreign students are more likely to pay full fees rather than receive financial assistance. At a time when state budgets are shrinking dramatically, crimping state-funded universities, and even prominent private universities aren't as wealthy as they once were, that's a good reason to drum up business from abroad.

In the past, an exodus of Indian students might have been controversial. On the one hand, it was a brain drain that undoubtedly deprived India of some of its best and brightest putting their talents to use here. On the other, it peopled the world with the likes of Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize-winning economist, and others who could only realize their full potential at the world's finest academic institutions, notes Harjiv Singh, founder of BrainGain Magazine, a new online publication dedicated to advising Indians who want to study abroad. And émigrés send in billions in foreign direct investment from remittances, he adds.

Even that debate is outmoded, though, because of the realities of the world today.

Students who migrate to other countries to study won't find it as easy to settle abroad as they once did, nor may they want to. India, with its spectacular growth rate, has been a land of much greater opportunity in the past few years than almost any other – and if Indian professionals are returning from America to work here, there is no reason students who get an education in the U.S. wouldn't too. That will be India's gain.