Importing Universities
The scheme is simple. Students pay the same tuition fee as they would if they had gone abroad. But they save on boarding and lodging. These fees range from Rs 3 lakh to Rs 6 lakh for the entire course and have to be paid in dollars. The Reserve Bank of India now permits Indians to buy up to $30,000 for financing education abroad. (However, one wonders what the babus of the RBI will make of an application which doesn't actually require a sojourn abroad. Will they insist in rupee payments?) These courses are usually for 18 months and require some very hard work. The syllabus is identical to the one in the foreign university and the examination is also the same. The evaluation is done abroad and it is only in the matter of faculty that there is a slight difference. In India, there is no permanent staff, only visiting lecturers from different disciplines. Overheads are thus kept very low and the only fixed charges are some administrative expenses and the cost of hiring an air-conditioned lecture hall. In short,
it is a cheap and efficient way of delivering a service from abroad for which there is huge demand. It is hardly surprising, then, that the idea seems to be working. After all, who wouldn't mind a foreign management degree for around Rs 4 lakh on an average? Indian degrees cost about half of that and the premium is well worth paying if the jobs at the end of course are better paying.
This, however, is only the first step in the globalising of education. A time will no doubt come, rather sooner than one imagines, when the Internet will offer courses and for which some enterprising university will design an examination and offer a degree. This would be the electronic equivalent of a correspondence course and should not, therefore, cause much alarm. In other words, we may be witnessing the slow death of the university as the world has known it during the 20th century. This is a trend that should be welcomed because teaching has become a major distraction. The universities will be able to get on with research, for which they were really invented.