Quality, equality

Now that the cabinet has cleared the quota bills, the politics will presumably will be worked out and the fiscal commitment will hopefully be fully understood. What are the chances though that the Indian establishment will take a reality check any time soon on this country’s ranking in the global league table of higher education. The argument for inclusivity and social mobility is unexceptionable. But it has to be subordinate to the defining principle of higher education: a certain kind of inequality is always the result of engendering high merit. At every stage, higher education consists of selecting the best students, recruiting the best professors, and lavishing teaching and research opportunities on the best. An IIT degree is prized because not everyone can get into IIT: the best few are chosen, and then tremendous training time is invested on them.

It is absolutely right to say that government resources should be lavished on elementary education. But it is important to recognise that the tremendous success of Indian firms which are at the heart of the Indian growth miracle depends on a few thousand individuals with a top quality education by world standards who are manning Indian companies. To benefit from globalisation’s opportunities, a company requires managers, leaders and thinkers. Most of India’s young need at least decent seventh standard education if they are to be employable in a manufacturing revolution, the chances of which are slightly less dim now than before. But roughly about 100 million people must have quality college education.

India has earned enormous export revenues owing to the sale of higher education intensive products like software or high-end engineering. Building higher education holds the key both to alleviating labour shortages in the corporate sector and to India’s moving up the value chain towards bigger revenues. The present framework of higher education involves an awkward dance by the Indian state which starves universities of resources, prevents new players such as Stanford or Yale from starting universities in India, forces low salaries which ensure low quality recruitment, and meddles in the quality of students. This is in big contrast to China, which has delicensed the higher education sector: anyone is welcome to go to Communist China and start a university.