India’s Higher Education Opportunity

Investing in Higher Education has long been viewed as essential to the development process, though attempts to quantify its contribution to the actual growth experience across countries has been unsuccessful. It is over 40 years since the publication of the first edition of Gary Becker’s Human Capital brought analysis of higher education into the mainstream of economic analysis. India invested early and strongly in Higher Education, with the explicit objective of economic development. Technical education was accorded pride of place: as is often repeated, India today has the third largest pool of S&T people, and its higher technical education (HTE) system is correctly credited with its successful software industry and growing strength in IT-enabled services. However, growth in India has been greatly concentrated – by field, by geography, by degree, by who provides and who pays, and by teaching. This concentration provides both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is to use the demonstrated responsiveness of the Indian higher education system in other areas. The challenge is to address the key issues that this concentrated growth has raised. I first provide background on the levels of concentrated growth of the Indian higher education system, ending with a brief comparison of China to highlight how concentrated growth in India has been. I then suggest some reforms that could address the concerns arising from this concentrated growth.