Balancing Quality and Quantity in Private Higher Education

In my earlier posting, I discussed about the high quality innovative model of ISB, which is a private institution and has not pursued local approvals from AICTE, but still managed to attain global rank of 15 in the Financial Times ranking. In contrast, the quality of a large number of the private higher education institutions in India, even after being approved by the regulator, ranges from pathetic to poor.

In the last decade, share of private institutions in professional education like engineering and management have increased to nearly 90%. But this expansion came at the expense of the quality (see International Engineering Education by Wadhwa et al.). Who is responsible for poor quality of higher education in India--regulators or institutions?

History suggests that when private players were allowed an opportunity to enter higher education, they misused it for profiteering from students. For example, the Chhattisgarh Private University Act, 2002, which gave state government power to grant registration for a private university without prior permission from authorities, resulted in mushrooming of "universities" that ran from a single room setup. The situation became so grave that the Supreme Court of India ordered closure of 117 universities in 2005.

On the other hand, there are genuine institutions like SP Jain, which have struggled to gain well-deserved recognition from the regulator. Even the panel formed by the ministry of human resource development found that universities consistently experience corruption and inefficiency of the regulator (AICTE). Recent raids on the AICTE chairman and several other senior officials found evidence to unreported income.

It is fair to say that both regulators and institutions have shown their areas of malfunction. This suggests that quality assurance process in Indian higher education has failed and it has not kept pace with the local changes and global best practices resulting in a persistent challenge of balancing quality and accessibility. According to Wadhwa et al. "improving the quality of education and increasing the quantity of those educated are often divergent strategies." The challenges for the policymakers is to optimize quality with quantity, a not so easy task.

What is the solution? A recent report by UNESCO entitled A New Dynamic: Private Higher Education argues that "quality mechanisms must find a balance that ensures high levels of provision while at the same time not constraining appropriate innovation that responds to the evolving public and private education sectors." New Minister of HRD, Kapil Sibal, is considering to merge multiple regulator and create an independent National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) with the objective of balancing innovation and consistency. Thus, at the policy level there is a need for a overhaul of regulation and quality assurance process. At another level, higher education institutions need to work towards improving incentive systems and develop professional culture, so that they can attract top talent for building quality institutions.