Thu, Mar 18 03:04 PMFor foreign universities, which haven't yet recovered fully from the aftershocks of the worldwide recession, India presents, to quote a word re-introduced into the English vocabulary by Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland , a 'frabjous' opportunity.More than 100,000 students leave Indian shores annually to study at universities abroad. Their presence has made foreign universities wake up to the incontrovertible fact that there's another 'creamy layer' below these students abroad whose families are prepared to pay upwards of Rs 2.5 lakh a year for quality education.Profs debate Foreign Univ BillWhat foreign universities Bill can't doInternational students are the economic mainstay of foreign universities, but these institutions are not in a position to meet the demand for the education they provide on their own campuses back home. This untapped market makes the business of overseas campuses that much more lucrative.For over a decade, foreign universities have been lobbying hard for the passage of the Foreign Education Providers Bill, which has been a pet project of HRD minister Kapil Sibal. The most recent of these exploratory visits was that of Robert A. Brown, president of Boston University, who was in the Capital in January to plan collaborations with leading universities here.He said there was an insatiable appetite for quality education in India and collaborations would mutually benefit both countries. US's Georgia Institute of Technology announced its plan to set up campuses in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam as soon as the Bill gets Parliament nod.Central Michigan University, meanwhile, has taken another route to plant its flag in India. It has been offering a collaborative MBA programme with the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, for the past five years.Experts associated with these universities explain the economic logic of their plans for India: the proliferation of private institutions in the country-especially in engineering, medicine, management and law - that charged fees upwards of Rs 2.5 lakh a year was evidence of the vast market waiting to be tapped.These institutions attract the second layer of the country's higher education market. These are students whose families can't afford foreign education (upwards of Rs 15 lakh a year), but want to be in the top four favourite streams.India, according the now-defunct National Knowledge Commission, needs 1,500 universities, compared with about 350 now, to raise the enrollment numbers from 7 per cent of the population aged 18-25 to developed country averages.But even before the Bill got the cabinet's nod, Indian universities had initiated the process of collaborating with their international peers to offer degrees or diplomas. A National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NEPA) report in 2008 pegged the number of these institutions at more than 130.For Bangalore University vice- chancellor A. N. Prabhu Deva, collaboration is the way forward."It will help a higher education institution rise to the standards of its foreign partner," he says. But for this collaboration to become meaningful, says R. Govinda, NEPA V-C, teaching must go hand in hand with research. "Only then will quality education and foreign collaborations be meaningful," he says.Either way, for foreign universities, this is a winwin situation. Narayanan Ramaswamy, executive director of the management consultancy KPMG, points to the "massive demand supply gap" driving the international higher education market.
Reproduced From Mail Today. Copyright 2010. MTNPL. All rights reserved.
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