beyondbrics

India is one of the greatest economic success stories of the past twenty years and its citizens swell the ranks of Forbes’s list of billionaires. But its higher education system lags far behind those of the developed nations it is leapfrogging economically.

Only one Indian university made the recent Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2011-12: the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (Mumbai), which came in between 301 and 350 out of 400. (The survey does not individually rank schools beyond number 200 because the differences are too small to be significant.)

Narayana Murty, IIT-Kanpur alumnus and billionaire founder of Infosys, the IT and outsourcing giant, recently lamented the declining quality of students emerging from India’s premiere technology and engineering institutions. He said the poor English and social skills of recent graduates and their inability to think critically had hindered their performance in jobs and in graduate and doctorate programs in the West.

At first glance, it seems, Indian universities aren’t quite making the grade.

To a large extent, that is true. But it isn’t exactly a fair comparison, experts told beyondbrics. Rankings like THE’s tend to focus on a universities’ prestige as a research institution – indeed, in this list, research accounts for 60 per cent of a school’s score – an area in which Indian universities, because of various constraints beyond their control, cannot compete.

Western countries – which dominate the higher rankings – simply have more money, fewer governmental regulations and greater ability to accommodate student demand than India does.

The lack of funding also keeps Indian universities from performing well on the list’s other major criteria: teaching environment and international outlook.

“If you compare [Indian universities] to some of the top-ranked universities – Harvard, MIT, Oxford – the total funding runs into billions of dollars… research grants for MIT is 60 per cent of funding the university gets,” said Abhinav Mital, senior principal at The Parthenon Group, a Boston-based consulting firm whose Mumbai office focuses on education. “Now if you get that kind of capital, its obvious that you can support more research work.”

According to a World Bank study, the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University, which ranked first and second, respectively, each have annual expenditures of over $3bn dollars. IIT-Bombay’s total research funding, on the other hand, clocked in at just $36.6m for 2010-2011.

“So the rankings in that sense are a little biased toward the international schools, compared to the Indian universities which, even if you think of the [prestigious] IITs or [Indian Institutes of Management], the government is helping subsidize the operational costs,” Mital added.

While establishing a strong research presence is important as a long-term goal, Indian schools currently need to prioritize increasing their capacity to enroll more students. Even with only 14 per cent of India’s roughly 97m people of higher education age enrolled in university, the country’s schools are overwhelmed.

Indeed, Indian universities’ need to focus on enrolling more local students keeps their “international outlook” score low, while the low wages they are able to pay professors keeps it lower still.

“Look at what an average Indian faculty [member] is paid versus what an average faculty [member] from these top [international] schools is paid,” said Ajit Rangnekar, dean of the Indian School of Business, which ranked number 13 on The Financial Times’ Global MBA Rankings 2011. If they could pay more, they would be able to attract more top foreign talent.

Without access to the best professors and without funding for state-of-the-art infrastructure, the schools’ teaching environment suffers. That has made it harder for Indian universities to break away from rote memorization and promote critical thinking.

Even with those constraints, Rangnekar said, “the good thing is that Indian institutions still produce a very high quality pool of talent.

“One has to also be a little pragmatic about where India is at this stage of its evolution and say let’s make the [students] employable” with the money available, he added.

Asked how it felt to be listed among the world’s best universities, IIT-Bombay spokesperson Jaya Joshi said it felt good.

“We wouldn’t mind a higher ranking,” she told beyondbrics. “But it’s good to be the only Indian university” on the list.

She said the institute had put plans in motion a decade ago to grow as a research institution, but that it remained a long-term goal as IIT-Bombay continued to address and focus on serving the needs of Indian students.

In the end, Indian universities must decide how to make use of very limited funding – spend it on research that will increase their ranking or spend it on getting more Indians enrolled in higher education.

“The problem that we are dealing with is not the same problem that the universities in the developed nations are,” Mital told beyondbrics. “We are looking to expand capacities and increase enrolments rather than improve the education quality of the existing students – because at least these guys have a seat; at least they have something, rather than nothing.”

Related reading:
India’s fast growth fails to lift primary education, FT
Indian schools: failing, beyondbrics
China and India’s demographics: getting in the way of growth, beyondbrics