CONTEMPORARY institutions for waging war – the military – and for producing or disseminating knowledge – higher education – are strikingly similar in several instructive ways. In their own fashion, both are recognized as routes to the acquisition and sustenance of power. Despite obvious differences of degree, both are extremely expensive, inherently wasteful, and resist accountability – but are nevertheless seen as mandatory items on national budgets. Globally, they are simultaneously universal (every country worth the name has them) and extremely centralized (only a few countries matter, only one is supreme). Both are burdened by ideologically overloaded stereotypes far removed from current realities – like the perennially popular images of the ‘brave soldier’ or the ‘brilliant scientist’ for example. Above all, the nature and purpose of both are taken as self-evident, thus deflecting much needed introspection about their recently transformed modalities and future roles.

In fact, being taken for granted is more true of higher education than the military, and perhaps even more so in the Indian than the global context. But Indian higher education has changed so comprehensively in the last decade that even its most obvious objectives and functions need to be re-contextualized and re-evaluated. This essay provides a synoptic sketch of the terrain to be covered in such an exercise.

 

Decisive changes in the first decade of the 21st century have transformed Indian higher education and cemented its integration into global circuits. The most visible change is in size. Between 2001 and 2010 higher education more than doubled its institutions (254 to 544 universities) and raised enrolment by 62% (90 to 146 lakhs), which works out to an astonishing growth rate of more than one new university per fortnight, and a more modest but still impressive increase of about fifteen hundred students every day.¹ This growth is fuelled from the demand side by a ‘demographic bulge’ in the age structure, by expanded access to schooling, and by larger numbers being able to afford higher education.

On the supply side, higher education has grown through privatization – what used to be a virtual state monopoly by default has changed during the last two decades with the swift growth of technical-professional education as a lucrative site for private investment. Overall, the private sector now accounts for a majority of both institutions (63.2%) and total enrolment (51.5%), but it really dominates the technical-professional fields where credentials command high to astronomical premium.² At the other end of the spectrum, preliminary estimates suggest that absolute levels (and not just shares) of enrolment may be falling in some of the basic sciences.³ 

 

For well-known reasons related to our great and ancient culture, higher education used to be overwhelmingly dominated by male, urban, upper caste students and specially teachers. There has been significant but uneven change on all these fronts. Women now account for almost 42% of total enrolment, but are still only around 18% in the technical-professional fields. The so-called lower castes are also increasing their share in enrolment, but are still below their share in overall population, and there are also important differences by gender, field of study and region. But by all indications Hindu upper caste males, who were more than two-thirds of all graduates in the not too distant past, are now a minority amongst currently enrolled students, though still over-represented relative to their population share.⁴ Although precise figures are unavailable, the share of rural and first generation entrants has also been increasing.

Finally, ongoing processes of ‘globalization’ have been consolidated in three main ways: (a) the explicit recognition (visible in vigorous marketing efforts) now granted to India as one of the top ‘customers’ of global-western higher education; (b) recognition as a site for investment in the form of franchises or local branches of foreign higher education providers (though not much has happened on this front so far); and (c) through the intensification and expansion of academic networks linking Indian institutions and individuals to foreign ones.

 

Taken together, these changes suggest two methodological precautions. First, the necessary abstraction called ‘Indian higher education’ must be disaggregated if it is to remain useful. There are at least two main axes of differentiation: fields and disciplines, specially the division between the technical-professional and other streams; and institutional types, beginning with the private-public distinction (or combinations) and going on to the hierarchies of reputation and perceived worth ranging from elite ‘institutions of national importance’ to the most subaltern sub-regional institutions. Claims about Indian higher education must be contextualized with reference to such a grid.

Second, rather than rely on preconceived notions about the relevant actors and interests, it may be more useful to begin with a detailed empirical description of what is actually happening. For example, the standard notion of public education may not capture the gigantic coaching industry attached to the Joint Entrance Examination of the IITs, which may actually be crucial to that context. Similarly, a standard list of relevant actors in private education is unlikely to recognize the importance of politicians as educational entrepreneurs.

 

The following list of the most common objectives of higher education is unlikely to be controversial: (i) expanding the frontiers of knowledge through pioneering research; (ii) disseminating current knowledge and sustaining a reliable system of credentializing; (iii) offering a means of social mobility; and (iv) the final site for the socialization of the young. Why and how do these objectives or functions need to be re-evaluated today?

The production of new knowledge or ‘cutting edge’ research suffers the most from unhelpful cliches and meaningless slogans. In fact, the global academy has witnessed a remarkable process of centralization and concentration in recent times such that ‘pioneering’ research is now the preserve of a handful of institutions even within the developed world. This is due not so much to high costs or scarcity of talent (though these are contributing factors) but to the difficulty of nurturing an institutional culture that can sustain the required scale and intensity of innovation. ‘Globalization’ now ensures that the gravitational pull of existing centres of excellence is felt across the world, making it harder than ever for new ones to emerge. A related feature relevant for more context sensitive fields like the social sciences is that globalization eases access to distant societies and cultures and further magnifies the advantages of already dominant institutions.

However, the more important point – specially in contexts like India – is that rather than extolling the virtues of an admired model (an ‘MIT’ or a ‘Cambridge’), it is more productive to begin with a detailed critique of our existing institutions and how they may be redeemed. One of the more surprising features of Indian higher education is the comparative lack of serious research on its institutional cultures and organizational practices. It is these elusive yet crucial aspects of ‘excellence’ that we need to understand. Unfortunately, what is available by way of critique consists mostly of the generic complaints and exhortations to ‘just do it’ that are found in numerous commission reports.

One must note in passing the ‘crowding out’ effect that rank-oriented notions of excellence have on other equally or more useful descriptions of possible institutional futures. To aspire for good, productive or competent institutions is as worthy an objective as to aspire to be ‘number one’. There are a variety of institutional roles and models that could be useful and synergistic in the Indian context without being ‘cutting edge’ in the usual unspecified sense. It is these more prosaic but also more concrete alternatives that we need to describe and explore.

 

Quality is another frequently expressed anxiety in Indian higher education, the term being used for two very different problems. One is the general issue of enabling our institutions to rise above the levels of mediocrity that they usually settle at. But the more puzzling phenomenon is the continued proliferation of institutions that do not even aspire to this level. If one of the functions of higher education is to provide a reliable market-signalling mechanism through its degrees and certificates, then how is it that dud credentials are not driven out of the market but continue to flourish? Why do otherwise astute parents pay astronomical sums for admitting their wards into institutions known to provide little or no training? The answer is to be found in the distinctiveness of the Indian credential market.

There are two key aspects to this distinctiveness. First, the higher education credential in India is more a claim to status than a claim to competence, since the former normally trumps the latter. Second, the market for credentials is segmented rather than singular – just as ‘genuine spares’ are available at different prices in the auto parts market of any city, university degrees and professional certificates are available in many distinct market segments. The segment that behaves conventionally is the hardest to enter, and it consists of the elite national institutions and their regional counterparts, mostly in the state sector. But it is soon dwarfed by the new market segments that emerge in response to the huge excess demand for credentials.

 

Apart from the demographic and other factors already mentioned, excess demand is partly due to credential inflation, which follows from a tight job market where acquiring additional degrees appears to offer a competitive advantage. It is also fuelled by what might be termed as intergenerational transfer of status, best explained concretely. Consider a doctor, lawyer, architect or other self-employed professional wishing to pass on the family business to her/his progeny. Or consider an established politician, successful businessman, wealthy landlord or corrupt bureaucrat wanting to buy a permanent source of high status for a son or (less often) a daughter. Both types of customers are alike in that they are very keen on degrees but indifferent to quality. This is because they already have the material and non-material resources that enable their wards to (a) get a job or create one; (b) wait to acquire competence on the job over time; (c) insulate themselves from the consequences of their incompetence; and (d) not be dependent on the advantages that competence might confer. The degree is required only as a legal formality or for its status connotations – the competence that it claims to certify is an inessential luxury, welcome if present but not missed if absent.

Routine exhortations to ‘improve quality’ are unable or unwilling to engage with the intractable problem of the quality-indifferent customer armed with substantial purchasing power. Scenarios of this sort point to the mismatch between the load bearing capacity of fragile rules and norms and the immense weight of various forms of capital. Tightening rules or stiffening punishment never works because implementation depends on incentive structures that are pushing in the opposite direction. Though this might seem passive and pessimistic, there is much to be said for the view that this is an unavoidable phase of market and social evolution that will only be transcended when competition trickles down into every social group, or when the hunger for status finds healthier outlets.⁵ 

 

Among the virtues attributed to higher education in the western context is its ability to arrange a marriage between democracy and meritocracy. By offering upward mobility to subaltern groups lacking most kinds of inherited capital, and by basing this mobility on demonstrated ability in fields of endeavour open to all, higher education fuses two of the most potent legitimizing principles of modernity. But, as usual, this parable of modernity changes shape when retold in the Indian context. Here, higher education offered economic mobility and moral redemption, not to subaltern groups but to a long-dominant social elite comprised of the so-called literate castes. It allowed the elite sections of these castes not only to reinvent themselves as a modern, meritocratic class, but to be blind to the caste-colouring of the credentials they had acquired. Because education (and specially higher education) was open to all only in a formal sense in the initial decades after independence, it effectively excluded the vast majority of the citizens of the new republic.

 

This Nehruvian phase was followed in the 1970s by a much more embattled era when higher education was no longer effectively ‘reserved’ for the upper castes, though it was still dominated by them. The intermediate castes were beginning to enter the world of higher education, but with the state unable to expand subsidized higher education or to create jobs, the problem of ‘the educated unemployed’ emerged for the first time. In a deeply hierarchical society pathologically obsessed with relative status, the over supply of qualified white collar workers had the paradoxical effect of fuelling the ‘credential inflation’ already mentioned. The opportunities offered by excess demand for higher education brought private entrepreneurs and politicians into the field.

The mobility story has become more polyvocal than ever in the current phase characterized by the acceleration of globalization and democratization of access. Some segments of higher education still cater to an entrenched elite trying to force its way into the global middle class. Below this still largely upper caste elite is a much more diverse social group waiting to make the transition from regional to national levels of affluence and status. Lower still are the poorer, left-behind sections of the upper castes, the not-yet-affluent sections of the middle castes, and sections of the lowest castes that have recently escaped poverty. Channelled through various segments of the higher education system, these disparate aspirations impart to it the volatility so visible today.

 

Coming now to the last of the listed functions, how has the ability (or inability) of the higher educational system to inspire the young changed in recent times? This question forces us to acknowledge yet another area of ignorance and uncertainty. Matters are helped somewhat if we shift perspective to think of higher education as a site where things happen rather than as a causative agent in itself. One could hazard the guess that, at least from the perspective of metropolitan middle class youth, higher education has experienced a degree of relativization in a media saturated world because it must compete for attention in a rather crowded environment. On the other hand, it could be argued that the very same changes in communicative technologies act as force multi-pliers expanding the range of what is possible for young people to do in and with higher education.

Changing perspective yet again, there are good reasons to argue that in terms of its impact on the world-views of younger generations, the most eventful segments of higher education today are regional and sub-regional rather metropolitan. For example, even the little that is known about the social conditions that precipitate ‘honour killings’ in Haryana is enough to show that higher education is highly significant. Access to higher education and the consequent possibility of getting jobs and gaining financial independence – particularly for young women from conservative rural backgrounds – is one of the crucial early links in the chain that leads, via escalating tensions with insecure patriarchies, to the horror of the sanctioned public murders of young men and women.

 

In these social contexts, higher education may be most relevant, not for the training that it is supposed to impart but for the sheer space that it provides. Being a legitimate if embattled space, it is able to trigger the destabilizing chain of events that, despite the inevitable tragedies along the way, will ultimately bring irreversible change.

This seems as good a place as any to bring up an as yet unmentioned ‘function’ of higher education, or more accurately, of the globally-recognized elite university of the West. Today, this university is more diverse, more inclusive (though continuing to be intellectually elite), and (on the whole) more politically legitimate than ever before. It is the closest existing alternative to an imagined utopia. Every good cause, every intellectual movement and every radical tendency eventually finds its home there – and this home, of course, is always ‘there’, never ‘here’. Is this admirable and universally-admired institution enacting a contemporary version of the ‘mission civilisatrice’? Is it justifying, effectively if not intentionally, the increasing centralization of global knowledge production, and ultimately, the geopolitical distribution of power in today’s world? I don’t have answers to these questions, or to the many possible rejoinders and counter-questions that they provoke. But I do not think that these questions are, nor should they be allowed to become, merely rhetorical, for they implicate all of us, no matter where we are located.

 

Since this essay began with some unprovoked comparisons between the institutional logic governing the military and higher education, it is only fair to end with a contrast. As someone who earns his living from higher education, the most pleasing of the many differences that might be invoked is that more is generally better in the case of higher education. While the Zen masters may disagree, for the rest of us who are unable to distil it directly from experience, the road to wisdom must pass through education.

 

Footnotes:

1. Figures for 2010 are from MHRD 2011:86, and for 2001 from MHRD 2008: Statement 1, p.C-1. Remarkable though they are, these growth rates are still insufficient, at least in aggregate terms. At 12.4%, India’s gross enrolment ratio (GER) for higher education in 2006 was well below the average for the world (23.2% ) or for Asia (22%), and far behind the average for the developed countries (54.6%). Sources: figures in brackets: PC 2008:22; figure for India: MHRD 2010:27.

2. Figures in brackets are for 2006, source: PC 2008:23. Powar & Bhalla (2004) estimate the share of private institutions in engineering, medicine, management and teacher training as 78, 76, 64 and 67% respectively.

3. This is suggested by the time series data in the Selected Educational Statistics of the MHRD, but some definitional issues need clarification before firm claims can be made.

4. See Deshpande 2011 for details, specially tables 3, 4 and 5.

5. Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (2007:15-16) have made the interesting suggestion that dysfunctional educational institutions be abolished in favour of well-designed public examinations that leave teaching and training to the market, along the lines of the entrance examination for the IITs. But as they note, this lets institutions off the hook and threatens a Darwinian educational system. It should also be noted that, as recurrent media reports attest, no examination – whether for pilots, doctors or others – has remained immune from the perverse but highly effective incentive structures that prevail.

 

References

Satish Deshpande, ‘Social Justice and Higher Education in India Today: Markets, States, Ideologies and Inequalities in a Fluid Context’, in Martha Nussbaum and Zoya Hasan (eds), Equalising Access: Affirmative Action in Higher Education in India, United States and South Africa. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, forthcoming 2011.

Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Mortgaging the Future: Indian Higher Education. Brookings-NCAER India Policy Forum, December 2007.

MHRD, Selected Educational Statistics – Time Series Data 2005-06. Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, New Delhi, 2008.

MHRD, Report to the People on Education. Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, New Delhi, July 2010.

MHRD, Annual Report 2010-11. Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, New Delhi, 2011.

Planning Commission, Eleventh Five Year Plan 2007-12; Vol. 2, Social Sector. Planning Commission, Government of India, New Delhi, 2008.

K.B. Powar and V. Bhalla, ‘Private Professional Higher Education in India’, New Frontiers in Education 34(2), 2004, 126-127.