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.
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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.
Obama Leads U.S. Universities to India as Yale, Duke Build Ties
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.