'We haven't seen much traction in foreign universities coming to India'

We are also building an international collaboration metric into our next edition of the QS World University Rankings, says Ben Sowter, Senior Vice President, Quacquarelli Symonds

Ahead of the 20th anniversary of its flagship World University Rankings (WUR), leading international higher education network QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) is bullish on India, which registered the biggest improvement among geographies in the recent edition last year. So much so that newly appointed CEO Jessica Turner and Senior Vice President Ben Sowter, known as the architect of the QS Rankings recently held an India specific summit on higher education in Goa. In an interview with Vinay Umarji, Turner and Sowter talk about how the NEP is setting India up for success and what Indian institutions need to do to break into the global top 100 in WUR. Edited excerpts:

What have been some of the key takeaways from the QS India Summit?

Ben: The clearest takeaway (from the summit has been that) just how important India is being seen externally not just as a source of students or future labour and manpower for many countries around the world but also as a rich source of partnership and collaboration.

I have been coming to India for 24 years and I have seen a number of policy introductions. Most of them don’t necessarily seem to be felt on the ground by people inside institutions that are supposed to be acting on them. However, we have observed in the past couple of years that the NEP is different. There is a new sense of energy and ambition at all levels, though not without reservations and concerns.

Jessica: We were pleased to see colleges are broadening their curriculum to include research-focused and the sheer vastness of the education sector in India with the number of institutions and colleges. And yet the pace of change given the scale in India has been outstanding.

How relevant is India as a geography for QS? Why? 

Jessica: India is vital to the international education community in terms of research collaboration with the excellent research that’s happening in India. The flow of particularly post graduate (PG) but also undergraduate (UG) students with the kind of focus on skills such as STEM programs, management education and high quality student population have been vital to universities and economies around the world from India. QS has offices in India with centres of excellence and 30% of our 750 strong global workforce are here in India.

Ben: India is vital as a source of students for the international market, influenced by the post-study work environment in destination countries. But there is a shift towards more in-depth partnerships. NEP has ambitions of bringing international universities to India operationally to establish deeper operations here. But we haven’t yet seen as much traction as we would like to see.

How realistic and achievable are India’s ambitions to bring foreign universities to its shores?

Ben: International universities are operational off-shore in a variety of places around the world. So from a point of view of being realistic, there is physical evidence that it is realistic. India is one of the markets that foreign universities are excited about and keen to develop talent in and relationships with. So there is no philosophical obstacle from the institutions.

The challenge is a little bit in a way it is being thought about and talked about. There is this notion that the NEP “allows” international universities to come as if they had been waiting for decades for this opportunity. Whereas what it really needs to do is to encourage, invite and establish well benchmarked conditions to get that party started and to assuage concerns about the potential risks that might come from future policy changes.

What factors are driving changes in methodology for global ranking agencies like QS?

Ben: Over a five years response window, QS has got 151,000 academic respondents, 100,000 employer respondents, and over 450,000 student respondents. Nobody else comes close to matching this data in terms of stakeholder opinions on higher education.

Since the beginning of the QS ranking journey, our principal target stakeholder has been the students. This is why employer reputation and employability has been baked into the QS approach from the start. One of the things we are doing is extending the emphasis that employability is going to play in the QS ranking recipe from the next edition which will be our 20th anniversary edition. One of the reasons is that that is what the 450,000 students surveyed in our rankings have been telling us more about. Not only overall rankings, even our subject rankings have included employer dimensions since inception.
 

These same students are also telling us that sustainability is increasingly important to them. As a result of that, we released our sustainability rankings in October 2022 and we will be building a sustainability component to our main QS World University Rankings in our next edition as well.

We are also building an international collaboration metric into our next edition of the QS World University Rankings. The focus is on research collaboration, and specifically targets and credits institutions that are not only producing a lot of research that are attracting impact but also assertively doing so in partnership with international colleagues around the world in order to maximize its reach and impact. 

How has India evolved and performed in the last couple of decades and recent years in global rankings? How is NEP helping it?

Jessica: We were pleased to see during the India Summit so many examples of how quickly the sector has evolved under NEP. The increase in internationalization and research collaboration, the breadth of education being provided here and the widening anticipation across India are all things that are going to help India in the future to help to connect the sector globally. India is enabling international institutions to come here and even Indian institutions are extending their campuses internationally. So there’s a number of things that have progressed that will be seen in the rankings in the longer term.

Ben: One of the things that has changed over time has been the rise of the private sector. In recent years, private institutions are amongst those selected for the ‘Institutes of Eminence’ program and many of them are respected as being comparable in quality to many public institutions. That’s been transformative for India in its capacity to engage internationally.

But NEP is a little bit like pushing a snowball downhill and we have just got it moving and it is gathering momentum. There is a mindset shift but we are yet to see the full impact of what that is going to bring about. It is going to be a very exciting couple of decades for Indian higher education.

What ranking parameters still remain a challenge for Indian institutions? What do they need to do to break into the top global 10, 20, 50 and 100?

Ben: The top most Indian institution in our ranking currently is placed at 155. So there is a journey to the top 100 before we start talking about top 50 or 20 or 10. Research productivity is pretty strong and citations per paper is truly world class and measures up to other institutions around the world. However, (international research) collaboration is a challenge that Indian institutions face. When we look at how many international partners a particular research has produced in cooperation with, India doesn’t stack up quite so well.

Another area where Indian institutions do quite well is in the employer reputation component. However, their academic reputation internationally doesn’t measure up to their research performance.  Arguably the biggest challenge for Indian institutions is in attracting international students and faculty where typically Indian institutions are behind the curve. So while there are challenges in driving international participation in programs and faculty participation in Indian institutions, it is definitely an area that could benefit from serious additional focus.

What impact do you foresee on global education and international students of the recent layoffs across sectors and verticals?

Ben: As for QS, we are hiring. Moreover, we have been seeing excessive skills development and an upsurge in demand for tech skills over the past few years that has been a profound driver of the kind of things that universities have been trying to do in developing the latest emerging tech skills and making sure that they are keeping pace with the likes of Google and Twitter and various other tech giants. But the parallel axis is around work readiness capabilities, creativity, resilience, adaptability, character, and integrity that haven't necessarily been instilled as fully as they might have been alongside those harder technical skills. And that would enable greater adaptability in times of challenge.

One of the realities that is emerging now, for example in the case of QS which is not intrinsically a tech company, is that we still rely heavily on technology. This is true for an accounting firm as well as an automobile firm. We all need cloud skills, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Google and other tech companies are currently facing some difficulties. But they are not the only place to employ these powerful capabilities that all of these people have. So students and institutions who are guiding them need to cast their nets a little bit wider and maybe think about other organizations that have requirements of the same capabilities but are not necessarily subject to the same cycles of demand.