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India and the global market for education

John Makinson

There has been an educational explosion in various countries, including India. There have also been growing pains. The solution to the twin challenges of `massification' and globalisation lies in doing three things successfully.

IN 1972 and 1973, I was lucky enough to be employed as a teacher at the Lawrence School in Lovedale; and in 1974, I spent a summer working in Chennai with a great school educationalist. Education in India has moved on in the intervening 32 years — and how. There are few areas of our life that have received such sustained focus in that period — from governments at every level as well as from families across the country — as education. And the reason is obvious. Education is a passport to economic prosperity and it is also the best guarantee we have of a free, open, and civilised society.

When economists at the University of Ottawa used the International Adult Literacy Survey to estimate the skills of people in 14 countries entering the workforce at different times between 1960 and 1995, they found a clear and significant association between investments in "human capital," a particularly awful term to describe the teaching of those needed skills, and a country's subsequent growth and labour productivity in each period. A rise of 1 per cent in literacy scores relative to the international average was associated with a 2.5 per cent relative rise in labour productivity and a 1.5 per cent rise in GDP per head.

The three countries with the fastest improvements in people's knowledge — Belgium, Finland, and Italy — showed the fastest growth in output per worker. And the three with the least improvements in skills — New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States — showed below-average output growth. Raising the "knowledge" skills of the population can bring tangible economic gains.

What we have witnessed since I was struggling with the general knowledge class at Lovedale is a literal explosion in education. Here I am going to discuss mostly higher education but the themes are equally relevant to primary and secondary school education.

My first theme is growth, what is sometimes called by educationalists — and it is a very ugly word — `massification.' Across the world, enrolments in higher education increased from 13 million in 1960 to 80 million at the end of the century. In developed countries, half the population of graduating high school students goes on to higher education. It is seen as a right, just as secondary education became a right in Europe and North America some 60 years ago. In China, the proportion of the population in higher education has doubled in a decade, while here in India the number of students in higher education almost doubled from 4.9 million to 9.4 million in the 1990s.

Growth, as we all know, creates growing pains and these have been felt at the institutional as well as at the national level. The University of Rome now has 180,000 enrolled students; the National University of Mexico has 200,000 students; and Turkey's Andalou University boasts a student roster of 530,000. How is it possible to maintain quality, to ensure that each student receives a personal education, in the face of these enormous numbers?

And it is not as if we are all trying to manage this growth in a stable domestic environment. Higher education is now an open and globally competitive market, in which the most talented and best funded students, as well as the best qualified professors, are drawn to those countries and institutions with the greatest resources and reputations. There are the problems and challenges, as well as the opportunities, presented by the flight of technically qualified Indian graduates to the West. But we have our own NRI issue in Europe. The European Commission has calculated that there are now 400,000 European scientific researchers working in the U.S., and 300,000 of these have indicated that they have no plans to return.

We Europeans are also, of course, beneficiaries. The number of non-European students in British universities increased by 60 per cent between 1997 and 2003, driven largely by an influx of Chinese students, who now number over 30,000.

So how do we address these twin challenges of massification and globalisation?

The solution, I believe, lies in the selective introduction of private capital into the educational system, in the intelligent application of technology, and in the customisation of education to local needs and — through the power of technology — to the individual.

Let me start with the issue of private capital. No educational organisation that works in partnership with institutions funded by the taxpayer can succeed unless it recognises, and respects, the balance between the shareholder interest and the public trust. It's something we think about, and act on, day in day out. What does private capital offer? Well, to be plain, one thing we offer is money. Governments around the world find it easy enough to see the return on investment from education — in terms of enhanced skills and labour productivity — but not so easy to find the necessary resources. Not many of us doubt the pre-eminence of U.S. universities in higher education, as they dominate every league table of academic excellence. Thanks to a unique private/public model that attracts both philanthropic and commercial funds into the arena, the U.S. spends twice as much per student as the OECD average — $22,000 per year per student. The U.S. invests 2.7 per cent of its GDP in higher education, compared with just over one per cent in the United Kingdom. Money isn't the only reason for the excellence of U.S. academic institutions but it certainly doesn't hurt.

There are many successful models to look at beyond the U.S. In Malaysia, private universities were first established in the mid-1990s and now outnumber public universities. Here in India, we have witnessed the growing contribution of the private sector. There have of course been quality problems. But we have all watched with admiration how NIIT has built on the huge success of the Indian Institutes of Technology in technology education, building a network of 40 centres and 2,000 franchised operations here in India, and now exporting that model to Britain and the U.S.

I would like to put in a plea for more private engagement in school education in this country. When we visit China, we receive every encouragement to participate in the immense project of raising standards in primary and secondary schools across the country. To some, China may seem to have taken the private system to excess. Not everyone would agree, for example, that professors should be paid according to the number of students they attract, as they are in China. But the system does seem to be working. Here in India, several States — Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka — are actively considering public-private-partnership models. But the obstacles, political and cultural, are still formidable.

So private capital is one way of addressing the twin challenges of growth and open competition. The application of technology is plainly another. In the United States today, the plain vanilla college textbook is almost a relic. What we sell instead are products that marry conventional text with supplementary web-based materials and support. The programmes are interactive, allowing direct communication between student and professor, making it easy for the student to progress at his or her own pace. The content is customised for the requirements of the individual college and professor, and we embed assessment tools that allow progress to be assessed on a continuous basis.

Of course it helps to have a strong technology infrastructure to accommodate those tools. But broadband networks are not essential. In the Philippines, in partnership with Nokia, we distribute teaching guidance to schools in remote areas via mobile telephony. In the U.S., we found that the barriers to the introduction of technology tools were less technological than psychological, among both students and professors. But those barriers have simply evaporated. In a world that boasts two billion cell phones, conducts one billion Google searches a day, and sends 9,000 billion emails a year, e-learning is really no big deal.

India has a huge opportunity in this respect, simply because of the country's world leadership in the application of computer technology. Indeed, some of the most advanced research into the use of content management systems in education is happening in South India. One enormous benefit of the introduction of this technology is that it makes the customisation of learning materials so much easier. It suddenly becomes possible to teach the individual rather than the class, at the pace of the individual rather than the class average.

Not that customisation needs to have a technology component. The balance we are trying to strike as an international publishing company is to make the skills, financial resources, technology tools, and research assets of a global organisation available and relevant at a local level. There aren't many words uglier than `massification' but `glocal' may be one of them. It means being global and local at the same time. Yet that idea has been critical to our own success in India.

Do I feel optimistic about the future of education in India? I certainly do. The elements that have driven the growth of outsourcing in this country — an expertise in technology, a fluency in the English language, and an entrepreneurial spirit — are all equally relevant to the education sector. If we can harness the power of technology and develop a strong partnership between public institutions and private capital, there is no limit to the opportunity.

(John Makinson is Chairman and Chief Executive of the Penguin Group. This article is based on his recent address to the academic fraternity attending the first anniversary celebration of Pearson Education-Chennai Operations.)

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