In a management education conclave conducted during the early 2000s, when the director of a leading management institute expressed the institute’s plans to establish a campus outside India, a member of the audience stood up and asked, “Sir, when there is a huge demand for management education that is still unmet in India, why should you open another campus abroad?” Pat came the reply from the director in a lighter vein, “When there is huge demand for clothing in India, why should we export textile?” Between then and now, we have come a long way to see certain changes in the realm of Internationalisation of Higher Education in the New Education Policy (NEP-2020). This policy potential in the two paragraph referred in the NEP has to be understood from varied perspectives for a global
game plan.
The growing irrelevance of WTO in multilateral trades and services framework due to various geopolitical undercurrents and uncertainties seems to be an opportune moment for countries and institutions to embark on their own indigenous and creative policy making in so far as internationalisation is concerned. That is what many leading destinations for global higher education have been doing to accelerate global student and faculty mobility.
New York-based Institute of International Education (IIE) releases its annual reports titled ‘Project Atlas’ and ‘Open Doors’. It’s a global research effort that analyses and prepares global student mobility data for comparing various internationalisation measures undertaken by countries and universities across the globe. The latest reports of both ‘Project Atlas’ and ‘Open Doors’ will be a good start for policy-makers to understand the various dimensions that shape the contours of internationalisation of indigenous institutions.
As per the latest reports, the USA and the UK are most preferred destinations for foreign education which attract students from all parts of the world with China and India constituting over 50 percent of the international student population. Ignoring the top 2 countries—the USA and the UK— ‘Project Atlas’ provides an interesting dataset for policy consumption. The share of international students in countries other than the USA and the UK has undergone a transformational change in the last decade. While Canada, China and Russia stealthily made it to the top 10, Australia doubled its share of international students.
Another interesting fact is that the growing number of students from our neighbourhood and SAARC nations such as Nepal, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh to other countries is also on the rise. The challenge before Indian policy makers is two-pronged: to attract foreign students to India and also establish presence of Indian institutions worldwide. It requires a short-medium-long term action plan to position India uniquely at various levels—regional and global for both inward and outward individual and institutional mobility. To begin with, here are my first five policy inputs:
* A collaborative Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) financing mechanism is required to raise and repay soft loan from international financial institutions to create world-class infrastructure. Top 100 HEIs (public and private) in the country based on NIRF or similar objective parameters should be provided access to long-term foreign-denominated soft loans.
This provides access to competitive financial instruments from development banks, multilateral funding agencies, etc, and the Ministry of Education (MoE) may extend a joint guarantee with the HEI borrower with repayment and cost of finance entirely borne by the borrower with strict selection and compliance norms.
* Accelerated engagement within Indian institutions to build a coherently synergistic plan, that can facilitate faculty and student mobility with a hub and spoke model within India to create a ripple effect through consortia-driven approach.
* Disrupt and improvise the online education regulations and make them more liberal to export India’s soft educational and civilisational assets such as Yoga, Ayurveda, Culture, Literature, Music, etc to uncork the explosive potential through export of India’s soft intellectual assets.
* Policy for creation and promotion of joint online courses using SWAYAM by Indian and foreign faculty for Indian and foreign students.
* Regionalise/globalise National Testing Agency with an action plan to attract Indian diaspora worldwide and foreign students from regional neighbours to begin, and later with a detailed road map to attract students from distant geographies.
S Vaidhyasubramaniam
Vice-Chancellor, SASTRA Deemed University
Let the first few steps to climb the global edu-skyscape be taken. vaidhya@sastra.edu