The excellence of higher education institutions, both in India and internationally, is invariably determined by their reputation and prestige within society, the placement and progression of their students, and the research contributions of their researchers and faculty members, which manifest in publications, patents, and the monetisation of intellectual property rights (IPRs).
Above all, their capacity to attract, retain, and nurture talented faculty and the brightest students, as reflected by a high selectivity rate measured by the seat-to-application ratio, plays a pivotal role in shaping the perception of quality and excellence.
Such indicators of excellence bring exclusivity to higher education institutions, making them suffer from signalling and elitism biases. Such institutions seek to exclusively serve the social and economic elites by resorting to many means.
They restrict the entry of the masses by creating affordability barriers, such as levying superlatively high fees and user charges or devising selection criteria that tend to exclude the commoners, who constitute a dominant section of society.
Such institutions tend to exclude individuals through legacy admissions, favouring students from superior schools with elite upbringing, language fluency, social endowment, and networks.
Favouring faculty with foreign qualifications or hiring leadership, governance, and management teams with urban and elitist biases further perpetuates exclusion. Moreover, allowing pupils with the potential to succeed and excel in life into their portals further enhances their perception of excellence.
Assessing excellence using metrics such as these may not present much of a challenge in advanced countries, where income distribution is nearly equal and which possesses egalitarian attributes. The majority can afford and access excellence, with only a minuscule number being more equal than the rest.
Extending the idea to a developing economy with substantial income inequality presents a challenge. It may lead to heightened income inequality, increased concentration of wealth, and considerable restrictions on access to opportunities.
Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the National Institutes of Technology (NITs), the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs), the Institutions of Eminence (IoE), and the central universities (CUs), the usual claimants of excellence, for example, gobble up ….. percent of the central government funds for higher education, serve no more than ….. percent of the higher education students population and employ only …… percent of teachers in higher education.
In stark contrast, close to …. per cent of students in higher education are served by a multitude of small, underfunded, disadvantaged, and resource-poor higher education institutions. They are often mocked for mimicking higher education and good-for-nothing institutions.
They encompass the majority of publicly funded state universities, private universities, most deemed universities, higher education colleges, and independent institutions of various types.
The public-funded ones are reeling under resource constraints. They are barely able to maintain their existing infrastructure and are rarely in a position to create new ones. Known for their hand-to-mouth existence, they scrap monthly to pay their pension and salary liabilities.
They survive on self-financed programmes, sections and seats, for which they charge paltry fees from their students compared to elite institutions. They may, for instance, charge no more than five percent for their postgraduate management programme compared to any of the IIMs.
With their limited resources, they can hardly create and maintain a decent infrastructure. They also can’t afford the prevailing market salaries for highly qualified faculty and are barred from creating regular faculty positions for their self-financed programmes.
For various reasons, they cannot even fill the existing faculty positions. As a result, nearly sixty percent of teaching in these institutions is done by guest, part-time and visiting faculty.
Except for a few, the country’s typical private universities are in a precarious situation. They receive no financial support from funding agencies and must survive on revenue generated internally, mostly from student fees. Few have any endowment or societal contribution to supplement their efforts.
Most are hard-pressed to make their ends meet. They can’t charge high fees and must fill all their sanctioned seats and more to break even. With limited resources, they can hire only as many faculty members as are mandatory by the regulatory bodies and are often able to pay only the bare minimum prescribed salaries.
Despite these limitations, non-elite institutions offer higher education opportunities to individuals from the middle and lower tiers of society. They may struggle to attract top faculty and the most talented students. Nevertheless, they dedicate their energy, time, and resources to support these students throughout their studies.
They may not be exemplary in the elitist sense of the term, but they do play a vital role in nation-building. They transform their raw materials using somewhat antiquated tools through simple processes and are able to produce a product that is polished enough to meet an essential societal need.
When assessing the value added by higher education institutions in the lives of their students, it is likely that non-elite institutions contribute the most. They do real value addition by bettering their academic records over their past performance and making them ready for jobs that may not be the best by the market but at least the average.
In any case, their value addition can be best appreciated because they care for the lower middle class, if not the poor and marginalised. They could have otherwise remained only school graduates. After all, in a country where some sixty-five percent of the population has to be provided free food grains to help them survive, not many can afford elite higher education.
Furqan Qamar, a former Professor of Management at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, has served as an Adviser (Education) in the Planning Commission, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Rajasthan and the Central University of Himachal Pradesh, and Secretary-General of the Association of Indian Universities (AIU).