Part 2 of 2. Read Part 1 here.
Part 1 argued that India’s prioritization of higher education over a strong school foundation was misplaced. That priority would be defensible if higher education delivered returns that clearly justified it. Has it?
In this post, I will draw on my experience to highlight some problematic aspects of India’s higher-education system.
Too Much Control, Too Little Accountability
Until recently, public universities dominated higher education, rigidly controlled from outside, with limited flexibility to decide what they taught or how they operated.
The government could decide that naval architecture should be a major at an IIT and establish how many graduates the field should produce. Planners presumably used some formal rules to estimate demand, but from a distance those estimates often missed what students wanted and what employers needed.
The mushrooming of private institutions brought autonomy but not necessarily excellence: with loose regulation and many students primarily seeking a degree, it is easier to make money by filling seats than by investing in quality education.
Public institutions have too little autonomy; many private ones have too little accountability. Neither produces the conditions for excellence.
Selecting Talent Is Not Building Excellence
India takes pride in its premier institutions, such as the IITs and IIMs, whose entrance exams are fiercely competitive. But filtering elite talent at admissions is different from becoming a world-class institution.
World-class universities excel at creating new knowledge. On that metric, Indian universities lag way behind leading Asian institutions such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, or Seoul National University.
The IIMs have emphasized teaching and executive training, which is fine. But even teaching-focused institutions owe students faculty who know their subject deeply and keep learning it. They don’t have to do groundbreaking scholarship; they need to be intellectually active.
I taught at a regional, teaching-focused American university, but faculty were still required to meet a modest research standard. I doubt IIM scholarship consistently meets even that modest standard, let alone what its reputation suggests.
Spending Without Discipline
Given its limited resources, India should concentrate spending where education and research create tangible value. Instead, it has spread money across too many fields, resulting in excellence in only a few.
Discipline is also missing in how it spends. Consider management education. A rich country can afford lavish campuses; a resource-constrained one should not. I believe publicly funded IIMs have invested more in their campus infrastructure than management education really requires. Management education runs more on intellectual capital and institutional culture than on concrete and steel.
My school experience also showed that culture matters more than concrete. Of the four good private schools I attended, the one where I learned the most had modest infrastructure. Basic facilities matter, but beyond them, leadership and vision made the bigger difference to my learning.
Strong Students Can Mask Weak Teaching
Another problem gets less attention: instructional quality.
When I was choosing a college major, engineering was the expected path, and I studied it at a National Institute of Technology. I later realized I lacked the aptitude for it, though I wonder how much of that was the teaching. Very few of my professors had the mastery or pedagogical skill to bring the subject to life. My MBA experience at IIM was not entirely different; several faculty were neither accomplished researchers nor compelling teachers.
That is one way some elite institutions maintain their reputations: their success is partly driven by the students they admit, who compensate for uneven teaching.
Credentialism and the Affiliation Trap
Unlike the standalone IITs and IIMs, the vast affiliated-college system suffers from a different problem: credentialism.
Because higher education in India is heavily subsidized and exams are undemanding, many students pursue degrees as a credential to list rather than to learn.
Consider a student at a Delhi University–affiliated college, majoring in sociology with little interest in the subject. Come exam time, they might memorize answers to 10 or 15 commonly asked questions and clear a very low bar.
This isn’t a one-off problem—it’s built into the system. Dozens of colleges are affiliated with universities that prescribe curricula and conduct exams, while the colleges themselves have little autonomy and no research culture. And unlike elite institutions, many have no strong admissions filter to compensate.
The result is a system where degrees are easy to get and learning is not, one that hands out certificates and calls it an education.
Islands in a Sea of Uneven Quality
So we have a higher-education system with a few islands of excellence in a vast sea of uneven quality. And, a significant share of graduates from premier institutions emigrates, a loss on the public investment in their education, though the diaspora does yield indirect benefits.
Beyond the premier institutions, many graduates emerge without the knowledge their degrees imply. In my experience, some Ph.D. holders never develop the research skills a doctorate requires. Weak institutions produce poorly prepared graduates, some of whom become teachers and pass the weaknesses on.
Where the Next Rupee Belongs
India unquestionably needs excellent higher education, but the existing system has not delivered enough of it.
India cannot build a world-class education system from the roof down. Its next policy priority has to be where it all begins: teachers, teaching, and the quality of education children receive long before they sit for an entrance exam.
The case for that reordering only gets stronger in the age of AI. Much of higher education’s emphasis on specialized knowledge in a narrow domain is increasingly within AI’s capabilities. What AI cannot substitute for is our ability to read carefully, think clearly, and critically evaluate what a machine tells us. These skills are best built early.
Several decades of education politics suggest that the gap between saying and doing is wide. But making the case forcefully, widely, and continuously is where the argument has to start.