Search

India has the second largest higher education system in terms of institutions worldwide, despite having only 26.3% Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER), including vocational education. It aspires to achieve a target of 50% GER by 2035. It means it would require a larger number of higher education institutions (HEIs), public and private, in addition to huge fiscal resources. At present about 75% of the HEIs are privately managed with about 66% of student enrolment. Though there is no provision of for-profit higher education institutions in India, many non-profit private HEIs are actually working as for-profit. They are growing fast and are visible too. Therefore, it is high time now to think seriously about the pros and cons, causes and consequences of for-profit and nonprofit private HEIs in India. India provides a big market for non-profit and for-profit higher education to domestic and foreign stakeholders. Already 160 foreign universities are working in collaboration with public or private limited companies in India. This essay provides an analysis of issues related to for-profit and nonprofit HEIs, including desirability, size, funding, transparency, accountability, quality, feasibility and sustainability, government policies, regulation, foreign collaborations, private investments, and incentives. The methodology adopted is analytical, comparative, and empirical.

This paper examines the digital revolution taking place in the Indian higher education sector, by (i) highlighting the drivers for change in the higher education landscape; (ii) reviewing the major initiatives undertaken by Indian authorities to facilitate lifelong learning for teachers, students, and those in employment that are in pursuit of knowledge free of cost, including the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, the National Repository for Open Educational Resources, and SWAYAM, an indigenous information technology (IT) platform hosting MOOCs; and (iii) analysing the first generation of Indian MOOCs.

India demonstrates many features characteristic of private higher education in much of the world. Among these features are proportional size, with roughly 30 percent of total enrollment, and fast growth. Also rather typical is finance, which comes almost exclusively from non-government sources, principally tuition, while public higher education is mostly though decreasingly funded by government. Related to rapid growth and finance is the private sector's preponderance of commercial over academically strong institutions, bringing criticisms about quality and even fraud, including as many legally nonprofit institutions appear to be for-profit in reality. There are also religious and semi-elite private institutions but the clear majority of private enrollments lie in the non-elite and demand-absorbing sub-sector. Unsurprisingly, then, the extent and form of regulation is vigorously debated. All this is common internationally. On the other hand, though less powerfully, Indian private higher education also stands out for a number of relatively unusual configurations. Some are functions of the country's huge size. Its private sector nearly rivals that of the United States as the world's largest in absolute enrollment. Yet India's overall higher education system remains notably small in cohort enrollment--which suggests large latitude for further growth in the system overall and for the private share in particular. Another set of relatively unusual configurations relates to the political system. The world's greatest private growth is occurring in developing countries, most of which are non-democratic or problematically democratic. India is remarkably democratic. Indeed it is remarkably decentralized in its democracy, with a large role for individual states, Congress, and even the courts, and with vigorous debate among political parties. Debate over private higher education is particularly intense as deeply held socialist and state-oriented beliefs clash with the overall political-economic trend of privatization. (Contains 27 notes.) [This working paper is revised from "Commonality and Distinctiveness: Indian Private Higher Education in International Perspective," in eds. Asha Gupta, Daniel C. Levy, K.B. Powar, Private Higher Education: Global Trends and Indian Perspectives.]

One of the salient concerns in contemporary higher education internationally is access, which is rapidly expanding. Another salient trend is the rapid expansion of private higher education. These two salient tendencies have not been treated in scholarship as heavily intertwined. Much of the reason is that many people associate "private" with "elite," in part because of the U.S. reality of leading private universities clearly associated with elite functioning. In much of the rest of the world, suspicion of privates runs deep and there is little disposition to couple the negative connotations of private with the positive connotations of access. Yet as enrolment has been rising rapidly and keeps increasing, there are strong limitations on what can be accommodated through public higher education. Practically, either access is spurned, widely considered politically, socially, and even economically untenable or there must be explosive growth of private higher education. This is largely a matter of demand for higher education greatly outdistancing at least the public supply of higher education. Thus, much of the link between access and private higher education concerns "demand-absorbing" institutions, which is not to overlook more specialized avenues of access to other types of private institutions. At any rate private higher education has grown powerfully in recent decades and seems destined to grow further. India is a marked case of still very low cohort enrolment in higher education but with great demand and rapid private growth. (Contains 10 endnotes.) [This working paper is slightly revised from a presentation at the PROPHE Panel on Access and Private Higher Education at the 52nd CIES Annual Conference, March 20, 2008.]

The object of this paper is to analyze the concepts of "entrepreneurship" and "entrepreneurial university" in the broader context of globalization, technological innovations and the emergence of knowledge-based and technology-driven economies. Instead of epistemological and organizational forms of knowledge production and dissemination, the universities today are required to play a protagonist role by training productive intellectual resource and generation of new knowledge that could be converted into wealth or social gains. They are no longer confined to teaching "about" entrepreneurship but are actively engaged in teaching "for" entrepreneurship. Instead of preparing their students for seamless path to work, the universities are required to prepare them for uncertainties, complexities and vulnerabilities in future. Besides highlighting some of the issues at stake, an attempt is made to understand the economics, philosophy and legality behind the whole idea of entrepreneurial universities in general and in India, in particular. The idea of social entrepreneurship is also introduced in the context of India. The methodology adopted is analytical, descriptive and empirical. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)