In five year’s time, India will have the largest number of students enrolled in higher education. The UK can’t sit back, it must go to India, urges report

UK universities must go to India if they are to benefit from a shake up to international higher education which will see India enrolling the largest number of students into tertiary education in the world by 2020, warns a British Council report.

Universities are being urged to move away from focusing on recruiting Indian students to forming partnerships in India, creating new opportunities for UK students and academics to study and teach there, as well as encouraging collaboration through research.

“By 2020, India and China will produce 40% of the world’s graduate talent pipeline,” says Lynne Heslop, British Council’s senior education advisor in India and author of the report. “We can’t sit back and rely on this talent to continue coming to the UK.

“Other countries are also looking to capitalise on these new opportunities, and the UK will miss out unless our sector can increasingly engage with India, in India.”

The Indian government’s five-year plan to reform higher education aims to create 40 million new university places and train 500 million people by 2020. Heslop says it is the largest transformation in higher education that any country has attempted.

But universities need to see this collaboration as mutually beneficial, says Sir Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of the University of Exeter, speaking about the report at a British Council event.

He says there is a historic relationship with India, and unintentionally, we echo that imperial relationship by using language like “send us your best and brightest students”, suggesting that India can’t educate them.

Frankly, he says, “it cannot work unless it’s a win-win situation that is based on respect”.

Yet collaboration in India won’t come without its challenges. Currently the UK collaborates with just 2.5% of the Indian higher education sector. Although India is a fast growing economy, it has few universities in top 200 world university rankings and there is little data available about Indian institutions.

“The real issue is quality,” says Pramath Raj Sinha, founder and managing director of 9.9 Media, and “that’s where the UK comes in. There’s also a central problem with academic staff, in terms of both quality and quantity”. Between 30% and 40% of departmental positions in Indian universities are vacant.

Although two thirds of Indian students go to private rather than government-run universities, the government’s lack of trust in private providers also makes it a tough place to operate in, says Sinha – “you get treated like a crook”.

He says the real opportunity for the UK is not building new universities in India, but helping Indian institutions with quality and access.

Rod Coombs, professor and deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, says the education opportunities in India should be taken “very seriously” by the UK.

“In five year’s time, 40% of all university students in the world will either be in China or India. So if you are running a global university you absolutely have to take that very seriously and work out how to expand your connections with the country.”

Coombs says he would like to see Manchester University working with India in three different ways: collaborating on PhD projects with research-intensive organisations in India, finding ways to deliver blended learning products in India, and working with corporate partners in their research labs in India.

But one of the big unanswered questions is: who will fund these projects? “If you are looking at higher-level partnerships you need to see what frameworks are in place and what the limitations are within the policies and laws of the Indian government,” says Stuart Shorthouse, international recruitment manager at Strathclyde University. “And that’s not really clear at the moment.

“We’ve heard that it is open for business but we really need further guidelines to say this is exactly what we can do and these are the constraints.”

As part of the reforms, the Indian government’s plan to hand over money to the state also makes the situation complicated, adds Shorthouse. “It will depend on what stage of the reform each state is at, otherwise universities might find themselves all trying to do deals with the couple of states that are ahead.”

The India-UK Advanced Technology Centre (IU-ATC) – which supports collaborative PhD and research projects in telecoms engineering between India and the UK – was one of the first initiatives to be successfully established between the two countries in 2006.

But it wasn’t easy, says professor Gerard Parr, the academic lead for the project. “The UK was not a partner of choice for many academics in India – they were eighth or ninth in the pecking order, and this is because there was no funding mechanism in place to sustain any collaborations.”

He adds that the UK will not be a partner of choice unless it puts money on the table.

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