The Contribution of Private Participants to the Indian Higher Education System and the Impeding Role of the Regulatory Structure

Abstract

A long standing debate in India relates to the extent to which the Indian Government be duly allowed to intervene in the supervision of the higher education institutions. Increasingly, it is being suggested that the "invisible hand of the market" be allowed to modulate the higher education system through the free play of the rising and dipping arms of the scale of demand and supply. The judgement of quality of education rests with the student, as much as it does with other entities. It is being stressed that student perceptions and judgement is an important, albeit neglected, marker of institutional quality. Similarly, it is also being put forth the world over that the boundaries between public and private universities are superfluous and must be relegated to the background. It is about time that the "licence Raj" be made to give way to regulatory methods that allow for authentic quality assurance.

Corporate recruitment practices and the hierarchy of graduate employability in India

“…India, like many other developing countries, aims to expand higher education opportunities. Observers note that the country's higher education sector is in the massification 1 stage (Altbach 2014;Varghese 2015;Yeravdekar and Tiwari 2014b). Gross enrolment ratio (GER) in higher education was 25.8 per cent in 2017/18, with a policy target to hit 30 per cent GER by 2021 (Ministry of Human Resource Development 2018).The underlying assumption is that the expansion of higher education opportunities will increase the stock of knowledge and skills in the country, thereby meeting the demand for talent by corporations and put the Indian economy on a strong footing towards advanced economy status (Agrawal 2014;Khare 2014;Malik and Venkatraman 2017).…”

“…A range of priority areas have been identified in various scholarly articles and government reports. The themes include (1) sustaining the increase in the participation rate of Indians in higher education (Agarwal 2009;Jacob 2018); (2) improving graduate employability through curriculum reforms and strengthening academia-industry linkages, with estimates that hardly a quarter of engineering graduates and only 10 percent of other graduates were currently employable (Blom and Saeki 2011;Gokuladas 2010;Khare 2014;Kulkarni and Chacadi 2014;Malik and Venkatraman 2017); (3) creating a robust quality assurance and accreditation system in the university sector to raise standards (Agarwal 2009;Gambhir, Wadhwa and Grover 2016); (4) improving the resourcing and administration of higher educational institutions including increasing infrastructure spending and removing political lobbying of faculty appointment (Altbach 2014;Yeravdekar and Tiwari 2014a); (5) the pros and cons of private sector provisions in higher education (Agarwal 2009;Varghese 2015;Yeravdekar and Tiwari 2014b); and (6) enhancing equality of access to higher education by under-represented groups (Jacob 2018;Varma and Kapur 2010).…”