Taking the XIIth standard country-leaving exam

A radical rethink is required. We first have to candidly acknowledge that higher education can be a business. The Supreme Court’s view, propounded in judgment after judgment, that education should not be for profit, rests on a morass of moral and policy confusion. Naturally, an education system should not be premised entirely on the ability to pay. Anyone who is talented must be given access to education. This requires that the bulk of education financing comes from the state sector. However it is also an undeniable fact that education should be seen as a legitimate business. There is nothing unseemly about profits in this sector.

We labour under the illusion that education will magically appear without investment. But who will invest if we do not allow returns? There is rank hypocrisy in not allowing for education to be a business. Food can be sold for profit, so why not education? In any case the courts’ views on the matter are behind the times in so far as under WTO provisions it will be treated as a business. The proposition that merely the ability to pay should not determine admission can be misleadingly interpreted. Nobody makes the argument that money alone should determine admission. And everyone ought to agree that all meritorious candidates should get access. But it does not follow that ability to pay should not be a factor in determining admissions. In fact, mobilising funds from those who can pay can increase the access of those who cannot, by generating resources for the system as a whole. So if, let us say a medical college wants to charge NRIs much higher fees to cover its costs, so that it can cross-subsidise other students, what’s the harm?

In fact, we ought to allow the full spectrum of institutions to flourish: from profit-making to charitable, from state run to autonomous. But then freedom and autonomy are two words our education regulators dread.

The low quality of educational institutions is paradoxically the outcome of misplaced state regulation, rather than inherent to private education. Most of the private investment in this area is not by educational professionals or entrepreneurs with an educational mission. The licence raj may have been dismantled in industry, but in higher education it is flourishing and encourages those investors who can manipulate the system rather than deliver on quality. The non-profit status that allows for tax exemption makes it easier to launder money. Setting up an educational institution is a means of getting access to subsidised land. Land allocation, a crucial lever of state power, is almost never done to encourage quality professionals. It is not an accident that an embarrassingly large number of private institutions have politicians as members of their boards.

The state immediately subverted the idea of autonomy by insisting that all so-called autonomous colleges can grant degrees only through existing universities. This resulted in the worst of both worlds. It allowed private capital to come in, but did not allow them to engage in any educational experiments: they all had to conform to the standardised UGC norms that apply to most universities. So these colleges, for the most part, reproduced the infirmities of the state system.

PART II