U.S. Colleges Tap Indian Market
By Somini Sengupta
It was an unusual university entrance interview.
Late one recent evening here in steamy southern India, Vijay Muddana sat in a mercilessly air-conditioned room, leaning forward in his chair and talking to the wall. There, projected on a screen by videoconferencing equipment, were administrators from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where the early morning was blanketed in snow.
Muddana, 21, was among a dozen ambitious young Indians vying for a graduate degree in information technology offered jointly by Carnegie Mellon and a small private college here.
The exchange was one of the many ways in which American universities, eager to expand to markets abroad, are training their sights on India. Some 40 percent of the population is under 18 and a scarcity of higher education opportunities is frequently cited as a potential hurdle to economic progress.
The American schools are just dipping their toes in the water because the law here is still vague on how foreign educational institutions can operate. But that may soon change.
President George W. Bush’s envoy for public diplomacy, Karen Hughes, is visiting India this week with a coterie of a half-dozen American university presidents to promote Brand America in Indian education. The United States wants an easing of rules under a draft law on foreign investment in Indian education, which is due to be introduced in Parliament in April.
If the law is approved, foreign institutions would be exempt from strict rules that currently apply to all government-accredited universities in India on fees, staff salaries and curricula. The government has already proposed setting up an expert committee to review the standards and reputation of foreign universities that want to establish independent campuses here.
The growing American interest in Indian education reflects a confluence of trends. It comes as American universities are trying to expand their global reach in general and discovering India’s economic rise in particular. It also reflects the need for India to close its gaping demand for higher education.
Among Indians aged 18 to 24, only 7 percent enter a university, according to the National Knowledge Commission, which advises the prime minister’s office on higher education.
To roughly double that percentage – effectively bringing it up to par with the rest of Asia – the commission recommends the creation of 1,500 colleges and universities over the next several years. India’s public universities are often woefully underfunded and strike-prone.
Indians are already voting with their feet: the commission estimates that 160,000 Indians are studying abroad, spending an estimated $4 billion a year. Indians, along with Chinese, make up the largest number of foreign students in the United States.
Madeleine Green, vice president for international initiatives at the American Council on Education, calls India “the next frontier” for American institutions, many of which have already set up base in China.
“The pull factor is the interest of India and the opportunity that India now presents,” she said. “The push is from American institutions saying, ‘There’s a world out there and we need to discover it. It’ll make our grads more competitive.’ It’s part of their push to internationalize.”
At the moment, however, instead of setting up satellite campuses as in China, Singapore or Qatar, most American institutions are choosing to join hands with existing Indian institutions.
Columbia Business School, for instance, launched a student exchange program earlier this year with the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad. The institutions teamed up to write case materials designed to teach American students about doing business in India.
“For us it’s market access; for them it’s access to a bigger business school,” said R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School.
Columbia is the latest of several foreign business schools to tie up with the Ahmedabad campus, reflecting what its director, Bakul Dholakia, sees as a growing appetite to train future executives about India. “Companies out there need managers now who have a unique Asian perspective,” he said.
The Americanization of Indian education is following a variety of approaches.
Champlain College, based in Burlington, Vermont, runs a satellite campus in Mumbai that offers degrees in one of three career- oriented subjects that college administrators found to be particularly attractive to Indians: business, hospitality industry management and software engineering.
A 2005 study commissioned by the Indian government found at least 131 foreign educational institutions operating in India, the vast majority offering vocational courses.
Still, Champlain’s degrees are not recognized by the Indian government, something that is still typical here. One government official who looks after private education estimated that at least 100,000 students graduate from entirely unaccredited private institutions. The study found that students did not consider that unaccredited college degrees could be a hindrance to getting jobs in the private sector.
California State University, Long Beach, has agreed to help start American-style, four-year degree programs at Lucknow University in northern India. Its vice chancellor, R. P. Singh, said the California institution would help draft the curriculum and train faculty.
Cornell University, whose president is among a flood of American university officials visiting India in recent months, is seeking to expand research collaborations, particularly in agriculture and public health.
Rice University envisions faculty and student exchanges, particularly in technology.
“What’s in it for us is opportunities for our students, opportunities for our faculty in terms of research collaboration,” said David Leebron, the university president, who was also in India in February. “At this stage we think we are best served by developing partnerships with Indian institutions.”
For its part, Carnegie Mellon offers its degree in partnership with a small, private institution here, known as the Shri Shiv Shankar Nadar College of Engineering. Most of the coursework is done at relatively inexpensive rates in India, followed by six months in Pittsburgh, at the end of which students graduate with a Carnegie degree.
The arrangement circumvents most of the usual Indian government restrictions. The curriculum is designed in partnership with Carnegie Mellon, and students are chosen jointly by faculty from both schools.
There are no affirmative action requirements for student admissions, as there are in accredited colleges. Fees are not regulated by the state. It is expensive by Indian standards, though nearly all of the students are subsidized by scholarships funded by Shiv Nadar, the college founder and the chief executive of HCL Technologies, a leading Indian technology company.
The applicants were eager to please their gatekeepers from Pittsburgh. They addressed them politely with a series of “yes, sirs.” Asked what they could contribute to Carnegie Mellon, some of them seemed flummoxed. One young man said he wanted to develop software designed for the “global citizen,” by which he meant a way to transfer money across continents using a mobile phone.
Muddana, who had a bachelor’s degree in information technology and had spent the last eight months as a software developer for an Indian firm, saw the program as a cost-effective ticket to an American degree and a chance, perhaps, to work for a few years in the United States.
His father, he said, failed to grasp his ambitions. Why would he quit a secure, well-paying job to go back to school, his father wanted to know.
Muddana smiled at the memory. His father teaches at a government school in a rural district in neighboring Andhra Pradesh state. He earns today roughly what Muddana makes fresh out of college. The son said the father was bewildered by his dreams and by how much it would cost to get a master’s degree. “He’s presently thinking only of the investment,” Muddana said, “not the outcome.”
(c) 2007 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.