How to build Harvards

The proposal to create a dozen new so-called world-class universities, in addition to 16 new Central universities, seems, at first sight, to be an important step in expanding quality higher education in India. There is also something encouraging in the fact that at least some of the right phrases are being dropped in discussions of these universities: commitment to excellence, new norms for faculty compensation, commitment to attract talent from abroad, introduction of a credit system, some departures from governance as usual and so forth. But unfortunately, there is good reason to believe that these laudable ideas will eventually be subverted; and that policy-makers have less than a clear grasp of what it takes to build excellent institutions.

The first indication of this is that they simply have not got the trade-off between quantity and quality right. There is, correctly, an emphasis on keeping the universities relatively small by Indian standards, with an average size of about 12,000 students. Most world-class institutions that manage to strike the right balance between the teaching and research requirements of the faculty have a student-faculty ratio of no more than 1:10; often it is even lower. If you build 14 new universities, you are looking for at least a thousand faculty members per university over the next five to seven years. Even if you managed to attract huge quantities of talent from abroad, this is a tall order. The rapid expansion of the IITs is a warning of what might happen; they are struggling for faculty, and in fields where we are relatively well-placed. If any private institution would have said that they will simply run classes out of another existing institution, the AICTE would have cried foul. But we have allowed this for our flagship IITs. Of such stuff are aspirations to excellence made.

Policy-makers have also not understood the advantages of agglomeration effects and the disadvantages of the dispersal of talent. Suppose, for argument’s sake, you can attract 30 to 40 world-class faculty in a particular discipline. If you disperse them over a large number of institutions, it will have two consequences. First, they will be surrounded by mediocre colleagues and hence unable to set their stamp on the institutions. Second, the crucial missing link remedying the shortage of faculty is the quality of PhD programmes. These are the programmes that both determine your ability to be a knowledge producer in the long run and ensure the supply of good faculty. We are facing an acute shortage, because our graduate programmes are in a state of complete meltdown. Good quality faculty, dispersed over a large number of institutions, will not be able to create and control the quality of PhD programmes as they could if they were concentrated in fewer institutions. Those institutions could in turn produce quality PhDs which, over the long run, would service new universities. Therefore, there is a case to be made that if the Government wants to get into this enterprise, it should start with two or three really good ones, than labour under the illusion that it can create dozens together.

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