India must stop replicating the Western model of higher education

India is at the cusp of economic takeoff. Its working-age population is the second largest in the world. The ratio of old and young dependents to workers will be low for many years to come. To benefit from this demographic dividend, India must stop replicating the Western model of higher education.
US colleges and universities are the envy of the world. Students flock to them from all over. Institutions of higher education in advanced economies are being Americanized. Princeton and Stanford are models for world-class universities in emerging market economies. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. But such sycophancy is undeserved for two reasons. First, the US model of higher education is becoming outdated. Second, the attempt to duplicate that outdated model is infeasible in India.
Educational attainment is an instrument to serve other ends—an informed citizenry, an egalitarian society, and a productive workforce. After World War II, US college education mushroomed in the attempt to democratise it and to make it a useful adjunct to government military and socio-economic policy. However, a deep malaise now afflicts it. US higher education is no longer the royal road to enlightenment, equality, or employment.
In 1947, five percent of the US population had completed college. In 2021, thirty-eight percent of Americans did so. Today, almost all members of the US Congress have a college degree. A highly educated Congress and a better-educated public have not produced a more enlightened polity. Instead, government dysfunction and political polarization mar US politics as perhaps never before in all the post-war years.
The hope that education offers a ladder to economic equality and social equity is just as misplaced. Income inequality in the US has significantly grown over the past half-century, even as the population has become more educated. Higher education seems to amplify the advantages of privilege instead of dampening them.
Nor is the connection between education and employment as obvious as it seems. In the US, too many college graduates are employed in low-skilled jobs. Over half of them are underemployed in their first job. Remarkably, about forty-five percent remain underemployed ten years later. On average, college grads earn in 2022 what they did in 1990. The so-called premium for college degrees is an artifact of declining wages for high school diplomas.
Americans are beginning to realize that more education does not necessarily lead to an informed citizenry, an egalitarian society, or a commensurately employed workforce. This is one reason that enrollment in US colleges and universities has been declining for over a decade.
The US model of higher education is not only dated but also unrealistic for India. It is conventional economic wisdom that greater doses of higher education lead to faster economic growth. Increasing the Gross Enrollment Rate in higher education is assumed to be a necessary detour on the way to increasing the Gross Domestic Product. Unfounded optimism is sometimes necessary to make dreams come true. But unexamined assumptions more often trap one in the dreamworld.
A cursory analysis of the underlying facts suggests caution. About 43 million Indian youth are now enrolled in institutions of higher education. In six years, the number of college-age youth will exceed 200 million. It is impossible to expand the Indian higher educational infrastructure fast enough to absorb and educate such numbers.
Moreover, the number of potential workers in India will reach 1.4 billion by 2030. A little more than half of the current working-age population is employed. Ninety percent of them labor in the informal sector. The lack of jobs in the formal economy means that Indian college graduates are disproportionately unemployed and underemployed. And worse, less than half of them are employable. Higher educational credentials may not increase relevant skills. But they do raise expectations about economic opportunities and social equity. And frustrated expectations fuel a restive population.
Thorough diagnosis must always precede suitable therapy. Yet it is already obvious that for India to imitate Western models of higher education is untimely, infeasible, and therefore inappropriate. Confining youth in educational institutions before releasing them to the workplace is a prejudice that must be discarded. So too the presumption that paid service providers should replace self-sufficient peasants and artisans. India needs to innovate, not imitate. Real innovation demands rethinking what we think we know. The good news is India is bursting with the talent, energy, and ideas to invent as yet unknown and unexplored roads to its promising future.
( Author Sajay Samuel is MBA Faculty Director and Clinical Professor of Accounting at Penn State University. Views expressed are personal.)