By Bhagirathi Panda
These days in academics, government and the larger society, the National Education Policy 2020(NEP 2020) is being regularly discussed and analysed. One of the important objectives of the NEP 2020, particularly with respect to higher education, is to make it global. The question that arises is what does it mean to be global? In other words what are the evolving critical characteristics or elements that make a higher education system global? The next important question is, why do we need to make our higher education system global? This question essentially relates to the rationale and desirability of making our higher education arrangement global. If we could answer both these questions with confidence and relevance (which we have tried to do here in subsequent analyses), then naturally the third question pertains to the challenges that we would face in undertaking this exercise. Having identified the multiple challenges and analysed them in their contexts, we could then suggest some ways forward. However, all these four exercises, require a prelude in the form of understanding the current status of higher education in our country and identified regions with respect to some fundamental indicators.
We start with the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education. As per the report of All India Survey on Higher Education, 2020(AISHE 2020), the GER in higher education (regular mode of education only) stands at 27.1% for the whole country as against USA’s 88%, Germany’s 70% and China’s 54.4%. Within the country, when it comes to the North Eastern Region(NER) , out of the eight states, five states viz. Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura are having GER lower than the national average. Another important indicator is Pupil-Teacher Ratio, which simply shows how many students are there per one teacher. Here, the Indian average is 29 as against USA’s 12, Sweden’s 12.1, Russia’s 10.1 and China’s 19.1. When it comes to the NER, again five states viz. Assam, Arunachal, Meghalaya, Tripura and Sikkim have pupil-teacher ratios that are worse than the national average. Accreditation is an important characteristic of global higher education. In the country less than 30% of our higher educational institutions are accredited, whereas at the global level in USA more than 90% of the tertiary educational institutions are accredited. Total number of foreign students enrolled in Indian higher educational institutions in 2020 was only 49,348. Majority of these enrolled students and scholars, come through bilateral exchange arrangements. Hardly 2-3% of them come spending their own money. Research is an important component of global higher education. In our country for the last two decades the allocation in R&D has been hovering around 0.6-0.7 % of GDP, against USA’s 2.8%, China’s 2.1%, Israel’s 4.3% and South Korea’s 4.2%. India has 216.2 researchers per 1 million inhabitants against 1,200 in China and 4,300 in the US. Total citations in the year 2018 for Indian research papers was 4.27 million against 66.45 million for USA and 19.35 million for China. During 2018, the number of research papers published by Indian scholars was 0.52 million, against 3.8 million for USA and 2.06 million for China.
With this prelude in mind, let us examine the critical elements of global higher educational system including the changing prototypes. Global education system in terms of its practice is marked by competition among students, presence of global students and faculty, autonomy and accreditation, ranking, multi-disciplinary learning and research, collaboration with global institutions, public-private partnership, credit transfers and employability. In terms of its content and pedagogy, it provides for multidisciplinary learning and research, better connect between theory and empirics, peer to peer connect, curriculum linked to societal problem solving, experiential learning and continuous and comprehensive real-time assessment. The changing prototypes include(i) the student and teacher being reinvented as learner and mentor, (ii) fixed time teaching being replaced by teaching on demand, (iii) provision of reading materials by the teacher being replaced by mapping learning outcomes, (iv) one time training being replaced by life long training through skill formation and (v) one time learning being replaced by lifelong opportunity. When we compare our present state of higher education with these bench-marked characteristics, we do find some of them are non-existent and some of them are sub-optimal.
Let us now answer the question relating to the imperative and rationale of globalising our higher education. We could see broadly two rationales here- the rationale of remaining relevant in the context of emergence of crucial macro global driving forces such as the arrival of the knowledge economy, competition, revolution in technology and declining public investment in higher education. The second is the powerful economic rationale of education as a service emerging as a key strategic reform and development agenda of many developed and emerging economies. When one looks at the global growth practice and strategy, one comes across a distinct pattern in the strategy of the developed countries and the same is also being adopted by emerging economies such as China. Industrial revolution brought in huge economic gains to western Europe and the manufacturing sector contributed the lion’s share of the GDPs of many of the European countries in the eighteenth and early and mid-twentieth century. Subsequently rise in labour cost of production in these economies led to shift in world manufacturing base from western Europe to countries and regions such as USA, Japan, South East Asia including South Korea and China in that order. Europe and USA thus started compensating their loss in manufacturing by exporting services such as finance and insurance, tourism and recently education. During the year 2019-20, USA ‘s economy received $38.96 billion in exporting education services leading to creation of over 415,990 U.S. jobs. Of late, China has started aggressively exporting education services, once it realised that its competitiveness in manufacturing may not continue long. And in this direction it has undertaken complete revamp of its higher education landscape trying to make it world class by benchmarking global practices and attributes. Recently ( before Covid-19) there has been an increase in the number of Indian students going to China for higher education. Currently, there are more than 15,000 Indian students who are pursuing tertiary education in China.
It is against the background of both the relevance and economic rationales that we need to prepare ourselves to become a global power in export of educational services. This will not be possible unless we ensure the standard global practices and values in higher education. NEP 2020 therefore very rightly mentions internationalisation of our higher education system as one of its prime objectives. However, to realise this objective, we have a number of challenges to overcome. None of the universities and institutions from India are in the list of top two hundred universities in the world. This results in graduates with low employability, a common feature of higher education in India. We have to create world class physical infrastructure. Faculty shortage is a big setback. Faculty shortages and the inability of the state educational system to attract and retain well-qualified teachers have been posing challenges to quality education for many decades.
The profile of our faculties and students needs to be global. We continue with outdated and rigid curriculum mainly focused on imparting theoretical knowledge bereft of creativity. There exist huge gaps between industry requirements and what the higher educational institutions teach in terms of their curriculum. This needs to be taken care of. Pedagogy and assessment are focused on input and rote learning. We need to provide opportunities to students to develop a wider range of transversal skills, including critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem-solving and collaborative working. The important tasks cut-out for us would be to promote global collaboration, ensure diversity and flexibility, establish peer to peer connect in teaching and research, encourage endowment culture, build in motivational and experiential learning, ensure increased public-private partnership and value proposition in our higher education.
The NEP 2020 stipulations on transforming the regulatory system of higher education by establishing four verticals having distinct functions of regulation, accreditation, funding, and academic standard setting; establishing of a National Research Foundation (NRF) and creating more multidisciplinary universities and colleges are steps in the right direction. Globalisation of Indian higher education is fundamentally about benchmarking global quality, infrastructure, institutions and practices along with the unique Indianness in our higher education arrangement. This requires serious partnership with government, academia, market, community and civil society. Are we ready for it?
(The author teaches at the department of economics, NEHU. He can be reached out at [email protected])