Opinion Foreign universities in India: UGC’s long overdue move in the right direction

The University Grants Commission’s decision to allow foreign universities to set up campuses in India could herald long overdue transformations in the country’s higher educational milieu. A set of draft rules released by the regulator on Thursday gives institutions outside India considerable freedom in exploring the world’s second-largest higher education market. They promise autonomy in academic affairs, governance, admission policy and tuition fees. Earlier endeavours to globalise education, including the UPA-era Foreign Educational Institutions (FEI) Bill, had also promised such autonomy. But the new rules remove a major stumbling block by allowing satellite campuses to remit funds to their parent bodies. They do not require these education providers to maintain a corpus fund — the UPA’s Bill insisted on such a corpus.

In the 1950s, the Johns Hopkins University in the US opened what is widely recognised as the first international branch campus in the Italian city of Bologna. The profusion of such campuses is, however, a relatively recent occurrence — in the past 25 years, universities have set up close to 300 offshore campuses. India introduced its first piece of legislation to draw in foreign universities in 1995, but the Bill was aborted. Another draft law in 2005-2006 could only go up to the Cabinet stage while the FEI Bill failed to pass muster in Parliament. The new National Education Policy 2020 seems to have given renewed impetus to the idea of globalising education. It talks of “facilitating” the world’s top 100 universities to operate in the country. The UGC’s new rules aim at a bigger basket — universities that participate in global rankings will require a place in the top 500 to set up campuses in India while those that do not participate in such rankings will need to be “reputed” in their countries.

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The rules cater to a longstanding need. Three decades of economic reforms have given rise to aspirations and placed demands which the country’s educational system has struggled to address satisfactorily. Currently, only a little more than a quarter of India’s 18-23 year-olds are enrolled in a university or college. At the same time, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, India is the second-largest “exporter of students” with more than 4.5 lakh students studying abroad. Satellite campuses can bring in much-needed ideas in realms as diverse as technology, health, business studies, arts, and humanities. In the long run, they could become harbingers of vibrant educational hubs in the country — chances to participate in exchange programmes could enhance the educational experiences of students across universities and offer other exciting opportunities. Malaysia, for instance, imported international branch campuses in the early 2000s to meet demands for university places and is today counted amongst the top eight global education exporters. But a caveat should also be in place: Offshore campuses have often been criticised for falling short of the standards set by their parent universities. In turn, these institutions have cited the lack of an enabling climate, and illiberal regimes, as a reason for this failure. The country’s educational planners must draw the right lessons from these experiences.