Competing in Education
August 24th, 2008My alma mater, the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been placed 34th worldwide (and 26th nationwide) in a new ranking of world universities conducted by the Center for World-Class Universities at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Indian universities, on the other hand, trail far behind along in the world ranking, with the IISc and IIT-Kharagpur sharing 303rd place with ninety-eight other universities around the globe.
With the Beijing Olympics basking in the spotlight, a typical sports discussion lamenting the absence of a billion-strong nation from the world’s largest competitive event quickly turns to a consolation about how Indian graduates are making their mark elsewhere. Unfortunately, world rankings of universities such as this latest one highlight a different story.
The Indian government’s education expenditure as a percentage of GDP has remained constantly under roughly 4.3%, despite a recommended target of 6% set first by the Kothari Commission in 1968. In recent years, the country’s GDP has risen quite exponentially thanks to a multitude of economic factors - however, investment in educational resources has grown rather linearly at a lackluster pace.
Our grim performance in the world rankings report does have a silver lining, in that higher education in India has seen rapid growth by evolving into divergent streams with the private sector playing a stronger role (partly due to the Government’s concentrated efforts towards achieving literacy goals and maximizing retention in elementary education). Restructuring this growth to place emphasis on quality over quantity, however, is what is sorely desired to rejuvenate the landscape of post-graduate education.
Setting aside political agendas when it comes to utilizing taxpayer money is a primary requirement before great strides can be made in bootstrapping India’s tiered education structure to meritorious thresholds. We as a nation should channelize efforts diverted in overcoming barriers posed by linguistic and ethno-social differences, towards building competencies in the form of strong educational institutions and support organizations (such as improved public libraries). Bringing forth scalable solutions to defeat this social inertia would be a welcome step forward in this race for dominance in education.
