No Indian university in Times top 200 universities of 2011

I am not surprised at the latest 'Times Higher Education' ranking where no Indian University features among worlds top 200. I am also not surprised by China's rise with 6 universities featuring in top. Despite all the talk about state of education in the US, 7 out of top 10 are American universities and I doubt if that's going to change anytime in near future. Fact remains that the best and the brightest of the world come to the US for higher studies and this again is not changing anytime soon.

In this post, I want to express my thoughts on why Indian education system is gradually deteriorating at a time when we as a country seem to defying the age old process of economic development - skipping the industrial revolution and becoming a services driven knowledge economy. Needless to say education plays the most vital role in this knowledge economy.

Government's decision to increase the number of IIT's has eroded the IIT brand value. Established IITs (6 of them) seem to be satisfied to have become a factory of producing IT engineers and analysts - very little research seem to be coming out of the IITs. Poor pay and infrastructure drives the best academic professionals away. I suggest we privatize the IITs, let them enter into faculty and student exchange programs with top engineering universities and allow them to pay top dollars to deserving faculty. This would lead to a much higher tuition but given that future of IIT grads is typically bright, there should be no problems in students availing loans for a quality education - government can start subsidizing student loans and offering need based scholarship grants rather than directly subsidizing tuition. I just don't understand the rationale of a Modern School or Delhi Public School student spending less than 10% of what he / she spent in school for a world class engineering degree.

Same holds true for the IIMs as well. I doubt if government needs to even subsidize student loans in IIMs given that most of the graduates end up with great job offers.  

For undergrad universities like Delhi University - first step is to increase tuition. Paying less than a thousand dollars a year for an undergraduate degree is not going to get us the best education and infrastructure. Government needs to again walk away from directly subsidizing cost but rather move to a need based scholarship grants and interest free loans. Management of universities need to be put into professional's hands rather than bureaucrats. Why cant the Dean of Delhi University be chosen through a CEO search firm? Curriculum of most of the undergrad colleges is outdated and students get little or no practical exposure during 3 years. I believe its time to make undergrad degrees 4 years in tenor with internships and projects forming a substantial part of evaluation. More money needs to be put in to improve infrastructure and creating conditions for best minds to join academics.

It is time we allow foreign universities to come and set up campuses in India - to safeguard the interests of student from fraudulent universities, we can start with those featuring in the top 200 to come and invest or define a criteria.

We need to be open minded when we talk about institutions like IIPMs. We laugh at them and consider them to be fraudulent but lets not forget they do play a role in the overall system - they basically play on the skill gap formed in our undergrad colleges and try fill that. Their purpose is to make money and lets not bastardize them for that - lets try and put in place regulations that ensure student get their moneys worth rather than say IIPMs should not exist. Harvard and Stanford are not public universities - they are private universities and we need to embrace this aspect rather than revel in our socialistic past.
In the end, I still believe that quality of students coming out of our top colleges is comparable to the best in world. It is therefore not hard to imagine how much further better it can be with better infrastructure and faculty.

Primary education would be the subject of my next post.