Without scale, there cannot be scope, and without scope, there cannot be
quality education
Indian institutions of higher education
function at a sub-optimal scale compared with some of the best in the world.
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, my alma mater, is one of the
larger IITs in India. It nevertheless has only about 8,000 students, while the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has over 11,000 students and is
part of the larger Boston educational area with more than a quarter of a
million students. Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard all have around 20,000 students
each. Some of the publicly-funded universities in the US such as Michigan and
Pittsburgh have over 35,000 students. The University of California system has
250,000 students, with each of its campuses having 20,000 students. In
comparison, IIT Bombay has not grown much over the years; in 1978, when I had
joined, it had about 3,500 students.
Indian universities could have been larger;
the total students on their campuses across all disciplines would not add up to
more than a few thousand, typically much less, scattered over several campuses.
We have denied scale to our publicly-funded higher education and, as a result,
we have ended up with a high fee structure for students.
The cost of a year of student education in
most of the leading IITs and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), for
instance, is about half of that of the leading schools in the US at rates of
compensation to faculty and staff that are less than a sixth. If IIM Ahmedabad
itself were to double its strength to match that of Harvard Business School,
its unit cost would fall by 30%. Thus money is wasted due to limited scale.
Starting new IITs and IIMs would increase the real social cost of a seat by
more than three times the long-run marginal cost of expanding existing IITs and
IIMs. And expand they can since they have ample land and only need a paradigm
shift in their conceptualization of a good campus. The great campuses of
Harvard, MIT, Pennsylvania and other city universities have activity and
residence densities between five and 15 times that of IIMs and IITs.
IIMA, which in this regard is more efficient
than other IIMs, could easily accommodate another three schools with a more
compact campus through efficient architecture. But then, our regulations define
higher education as requiring a campus that has a minimum of 100 acres.
Efficient use of land further reduces the currently high interaction cost today
in many of these campuses, and can add to the social value of activities,
including that of living. The approach of locating a new institute far away
from urban places imposes upon it the avoidable administrative burdens and the
need to provide all services, however below scale, within the campus. Thus they
have to create their own shopping, residences, children’s schools, canteens—all
of which, being below scale, would have poor quality and service levels.
Perhaps more than cost, or the inefficient
use of land, or even the indifferent provision of support services, through
such an approach, the core functions of knowledge creation and education are
weakened; and however hard the institute tries to overcome these defects, it is
not able to catch up. Without scale, there cannot be scope, and without scope,
there cannot be quality education.
If there are only 500 students in a business
school, then we cannot have a law or public policy faculty, or a real estate
group, that is large enough (at least 15 strong) to be viable, given its own
scale. So, we have to make do with academics who are implicitly sacrificing their
own professional advancement by being part of sub-optimal faculties. Thus, some
of our top institutes of technology find it difficult to have a world-class
humanities faculty. There is the double debility therefore: lack of scale and
of scope.
The consequence of being sub-scale is that
many professors have to go beyond their competence to give a worthwhile
portfolio of subjects to their students. Professional interaction within a
faculty declines, and an academic with high potential would think many times
before risking his or her career to being part of a group which is too small
for impact or collective reputation building.
In contrast, the schools and university
systems of nearly all the rest of the world (China included) are able to have
scope—many schools and departments in close proximity so that students are not
denied a wholesome portfolio and faculty members can have colleagues to
professionally interact with. Even tiny Singapore, in the design of Nanyang
Technological University, Singapore Management University and National
University of Singapore, ensures scale and scope. Coping with such design
errors means that many administrative functions have to be missed, faculty
members have to get involved in administration as in many of the leading IIMs;
and stretch out over many more disciplines and topics. The latter tendency,
even if it does not hurt graduate (MBA) education, would badly hurt research
and doctoral programmes.
The All India Council for Technical Education
grants approval for 60 students the first time for management. Imagine a
private or charitable trust trying to set up a school. Few would be able to
afford a library of more than a few thousand books, when the minimum number
that one can imagine for a business school is 100,000; while many global
universities have over 3 million books. Technical schools with large lab
requirements would have to cheat the students of their practical work. Quality
becomes the sacrificial lamb.
Since the public sector institutes suffer
from scalability, the question arises if some of the private institutions in
higher education will be able to fill this void in quality. Some of the
well-meaning private universities, which have picked up scale, might be able to
get on to the path of higher quality, but this is unlikely and would take
decades, if not more.
Nowhere has the private sector done well in
actually providing high-quality higher education, not even in the US, without a
large role for the state sector. This is because education, especially higher
education, is a so-called experience good not easily amenable to objective
ex-ante measures of quality—without a state sector, price itself can become a
measure of quality, resulting in vast exclusion.
The failure in India is well evidenced by the
fact that around 90,000 students from India go abroad every year to seek higher
education. They know well that beyond the IITs, IIMs, National Institutes of
Technology, Indian Institutes of Information Technology, a few colleges of
metro universities and some older private schools which have kept their heads
above water against the odds, the quality falls precipitously.
Obviously the government would be better off
by pressuring well-performing IITs and IIMs and other schools within its direct
control to expand and diversify by giving them autonomy but demanding
performance in quality and quantity terms. Indeed, around them can then emerge
the new world-class universities covering the sciences and social sciences. For
that to happen, Indian officials and politicians would have to go against the
belief that giving grants to schools gives them the right to intervene and
micro-manage.
Source | http://www.livemint.com
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