‘Indian varsities have never been sought-after’

With over 16 years of management consulting and industry experience, Narayanan Ramaswamy has a wide experience in areas of business strategy, operational improvement, academic and regional partner search as well as in defining and implementing IT strategy. He has spoken at various events and written for multiple publications in India and abroad. He heads KPMG India’s Education Advisory Services practices in Chennai.

Ramaswamy spoke to Rajesh Rao on various concerns of higher education in India while visiting Pune recently to attend the national Indo-US education conclave.

How will foreign universities, after setting up base in India, play a role in the higher education growth?
Indian higher education has been alienated from the global arena for a long period. While Indian students formed a significant part of the ‘international’ admissions to almost all leading universities globally, our universities have never been a sought-after destination. This is reflected in the complete absence of any Indian university in any of the global rankings.

I hope foreign varsities will bring in modern practices, teaching aids, technology led pedagogy and application backed education that will provide a major boost to the Indian higher education. In my view, existing universities will go through a major transformation once we have these foreign universities on Indian soil competing for the best of the students.  

There are many formats such as community colleges in the US, TAFE model in Australia, Further Education (FE) colleges of the UK and others. Also, technology, online and flexible education formats will bring in the much needed number of students. We need to bring in newer and innovative models relevant to us and foreign universities can at best provide a platform to achieve this.

We talk about making higher education accessible to masses, but how can that happen when a majority of those cannot afford it, especially in rural areas?
Affordability or lack of finance has never been the reason for lack of education. The actual education expenses essentially are tuition fees and related expenses like travel, living and lodging that are directly related to learning. In many rural areas, another key factor has been the loss of earnings for the youngsters when they pursue higher education.

We need to address these issues not at the ‘cost’ of education. Instead, low cost delivery models and innovative means of engaging these youngsters in rural areas need to be developed.

Locally relevant vocational education or online/distance education models using Internet and communication technology would be ideal solutions. Today, partly due to the regulatory structure and social perception, the vocational education diploma does not encourage further education. Unfortunately, more often than not, a vocational diploma terminates the education journey. We need to ensure that the youth from rural and underdeveloped areas need not have long spells of education without employment.

In terms of student financing, models like tripartite arrangements with the student/parent, educational institution/employers and the lending institution can be adopted to bring in stability and predictability.

How can faculty standards be brought on par?
In India, faculty is burdened with so many roles that they have little time to dedicate to research, industry-interaction, planning and interaction with students. We need to define the different roles of faculty and their progression. Simplistic measures like making PhD compulsory for teaching in universities will not help as will lead to poor quality PhDs. We also need to realise that we cannot import or recruit new faculty for all our requirements. Need of the hour is transformation of existing faculty to modern requirement and standards.

There is an ongoing discussion about low employability of graduates due to lack of soft skills. Why are institutes not giving the required training?
It is simply because the institutes are not equipped to deliver this. Most of the faculty are removed from the industry dynamics and are not able to provide the necessary soft-skills to equip students. Also, the industry is rapidly changing that at times it is unclear as to what the employers need. We are currently losing the precious productive initial years of youngsters.

We need to embark on augmenting and supplementing our institutes in the short-run before this is ‘institutionalised’. This is a very important issue and I believe that the industry, academia and government should come together for a solution.

Investment is crucial for the growth of higher education in India, but are foreign investors the only option that can propel the growth?
Well, foreign investors are perhaps a distant option. With our regulatory structure and options, this may or may not be a preferred option. We believe that innovative models and structuring could attract investors to bring in the much needed capital for this sector. This could be from Indian or foreign investors, but this is just one of the options.

A better option is by involving corporate India. They are direct beneficiaries of a better higher education system in India. They also would have the opportunity to contribute and participate in the process thereby making it relevant from an employment perspective.

In any case, it is important that the regulatory structure should allow for some reasonable returns from these investments. There are models in between that allow for the best intentions in the ‘not-for-profit’ model and the efficiency and attractiveness of corporate ‘for-profit’ models.

A careful examination of these models and implementation is critical to attract the well meaning investors.