A Start of a Dream for me!

I have spent over a decade working exclusively in the Indian Higher Education Sector. I spent most of this time working in the Admissions, Outreach & Internationalization offices of some leading Universities in India. During this time, I also had an opportunity to work closely with some of the luminaries of the higher education reform movement in India, both at Ashoka University and, subsequently, O.P. Jindal Global University.

Ever since my young age, I have been fascinated with Universities and places of higher education. I have always felt a profound veneration and respect for areas of learning and teachers who lift society through their sheer dedication and ingenuity in knowledge creation and teaching.?

How does an institution become a brand? What makes it stand out from others? Why do alumni of some institutions feel connected to their alma mater even after years of graduating from them? Who are the people who ensure that institutions and their brands live for the ages? What attracts top-quality faculty to come and teach at an institution? These and many other questions have always intrigued me.

I am especially intrigued why we as a country have not been able to develop world-class universities; apart from a few islands of excellence, the vast majority of our students have to study in substandard colleges and universities, which directly impacts their employability and our productivity as a society. It is a well-known fact that if we as a Nation have to progress, our education, especially the higher education system, will have to be improved. One glance at the data can show us how badly we have fared in scaling up top-quality institutions within our country. Let us start with Engineering, where every undergraduate student wants to go to an IIT; the total number of seats in 23 IITs is 16,234, and the number of students who write the JEE entrance examinations is 850000. Let us take a moment to consider that less than 3% of our aspiring engineers make it to top-quality institutions in the country, while the rest have to study in mostly sub-standard institutions.?

Similar is the case for management, medical or social sciences education, where hardly 2-3% of the aspirant body gets to study in top-tier institutions. At the same time, the rest have to do with below-par or average institutions. I have always heard that India's large population and young demographics can pay us economic dividends, but what kind of dividends can we expect if our country cannot skill or impart quality education to our workforce??

Private Universities that were supposed to be the answer to this hunger for high-quality education have also largely failed to become the institutions that our country badly needed them to be. Very few out of the majority are focused on excellence. In contrast, the majority have become commercial enterprises with the sole focus on profit and revenue making with zero emphases on quality or excellence. This continued gap between what industry demands; our students deserve and what higher education institutions can generate is also a significant factor in students going out of India for higher education in large numbers. As per the latest Govt. of India data, more than 700,000 Indian students choose to go abroad for higher education every year, equivalent to billions of dollars flowing out of the Indian economy every year. A report by 2021 Red Seer estimates that Indian students' overseas spending on education will hit USD 80 billion by 2024.?

The below-par quality of our higher education institutions also impacts our ability to attract International Students to our country. The Study in India program launched in 2018 aims to double India's share of global education exports from less than 1% to 2%. Over the last decade, As part of my role as International Student Recruitment Officer at leading Indian Institutions, I have had first-hand experience travelling to and speaking with thousands of high school students, educators, post-graduate students, and research scholars in 35 countries across Africa, the Middle- East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. In all those conversations, I have seen constant urge by them to be evaluating the quality of our institutions globally with other leading education destinations, at which we fall short and lose out on increasing our share in the International Education Export market.

One of the leading solutions in my mind to improve the quality and set up world-class institutions in India can be Private or Collective Philanthropy in the Higher Education sector by wealthy Individuals, Corporations, or Foundations in India. Some of the leading US Higher Education Universities have been set up through the same model and are now world-class universities that attract students from around the globe. With the Indian economy growing, there have been some welcome moves in this direction, with private institutions like O.P. Jindal Global University, Ashoka University, Azim Premji University, and Shiv Nadar University, among others, being set up over the last decade or so. These institutions have fast become the choice of the best students in our country; some of them would have gone abroad if they had not gotten an opportunity to study at such top-ranked institutions in the country.

But, these handfuls of institutions are not enough; as per the National Education Policy Report 2020, the Government's goal is to increase the Gross Enrollment Ratio from 26.3% (2018) to 50% (2034). This increase will not be possible or impactful if the quality and number of our higher education institutions remain low.?

I want to pursue research in the specific area of How can the Indian Higher Education system be made more attractive for Private Philanthropy? What can we learn from the US model? What have been the roadblocks that have led to current challenges in attracting private philanthropy in the Indian Higher Education sector? How can we make processes and policies which can help enable private philanthropy in this critical area??

I do not think there is a better place for me to pursue this research than IIHED under the supervision of Prof. (Dr.) C. Raj Kumar, Founding Vice-Chancellor, O.P. Jindal Global University. I genuinely believe that IIHED will give me an environment to thrive in; access to top-notch faculty members, global research opportunities, and camaraderie with colleagues who share a similar goal of pursuing research focused on capacity-building in different aspects of higher education in our country.

Prof. (Dr.) C. Raj Kumar is my mentor and a scholar par excellence who has re-shaped the higher education landscape in our country. I have always been inspired by his vision, work ethic, and knowledge.?

The real-life story of how he came back to India at the young age of 34, leaving plum international opportunities to set up a world-class university(JGU) in rural Sonipat, and how he convinced JGU Chancellor Mr Navin Jindal to become the benefactor of this project is legendary and awe-inspiring. His immense understanding of the global higher education system and scholarly work will not only enable me to learn from one of the leading scholars of our times but also keep me motivated in my journey of pursuing a part-time PhD program. Having worked closely with him, I can think of no one else but him as my supervisor; in fact, one of the reasons that I have got the courage to pursue this path is because Prof. Raj agreed to be my supervisor for this project.?