Transforming Higher Education

Thanks to the rapid expansion of private colleges and universities, India has been able to raise gross enrollment ratios in higher education at a satisfactory pace during the last twenty years. There has not been similar success in raising the quality of higher education, however. India has no universities in the top one hundred in any international rankings, particularly lagging behind in social sciences and humanities. This chapter argues that the key bottleneck is the highly centralized governance system flowing from the archaic University Grants Commission (UGC) Act of 1956. Drawing on the experiences of the United States, United Kingdom, and China, this chapter suggests a complete overhaul of the system, giving autonomy to colleges and universities in all matters and establishing an accreditation system that would evaluate all institutions, with better-performing institutions receiving a larger volume of government funds. Institutions will also be freed to raise their own resources.