JOHN HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT PROF. RONALD J. DANIELS GIVES TIPS
FOR PROMOTING EDUCATION, CALLS FOR ROBUST ROLE OF STATE
Jaipur: The President of the prestigious John Hopkins
University of U.S.A., Prof. Ronald J. Daniels, said here today that a
robust role of the state, establishment of governance bodies which can
resist political interference, first-rate colleges and universities,
regulations giving incentives rather than directions and targeted
investments in innovation and competition would go a long way towards
promoting quality education for millions of youths.
Delivering the P.D. Agarwal memorial lecture on “Frontiers of Higher
Education: Access, Quality and Innovation in India and the United
States” here, Prof. Daniels said the disparities in access to quality
post-secondary education were evident in both the U.S. and India. The
trends, depicted in 70 per cent people not having a college degree,
are closely related to the decline and eventual halt in the growth of
educational attainment and the withdrawal of state investment in
colleges and universities.
In the U.S., student debt is roughly one trillion dollars, or
one-sixteenth of the total debt of the country. “One can see the same
trends in India, where funding to support students from poor
backgrounds in accessing higher education is nearly absent. There are
disparities in access for students from rural areas, for women, for
the poor, for students from Scheduled Castes and Tribes,” said Prof.
Daniels.
According to 2008 data, 11.1 per cent of individuals in rural areas
in India attend colleges or universities, compared to 30 per cent in
urban areas. The gross attendance ratio for scheduled tribes was 7.7
percent, compared to a national average of 17.2 percent. By one
estimate, to merely keep pace with growth in demand, India will need
to add 90 lakh new post-secondary seats by 2016. Besides, India has a
dearth of roughly 4 lakh faculty members, said Prof. Daniels.
The Bhoruka Charitable Trust and the Institute of Health Management
Research (IIHMR) jointly organized the lecture to commemorate the
visionary and philanthropist, the late Mr. P.D. Agarwal, at Maharana
Pratap Auditorium in Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Vidyashram School here.
The lecture was presided over by the IIHMR Trustee-Secretary, Mr. M.L.
Mehta.
Prof. Daniels noted that the government support for research in both
U.S. and India had declined in real terms over the last decade. There
has been a 26 per cent reduction in funding for higher education in
the U.S. and additional serious budget cuts loom on the horizon. At
the very least, public funding is unlikely to return to previous
levels, particularly as other costs such as health care continue to
rise.
In India, the Yash Pal Committee has characterized funding as
“unpredictable, inadequate and inflexible.” Just last month, New
Delhi slashed the budget for higher education by 13 per cent.
Spending on all education in India as a percentage of GDP is lower
than in Brazil, Mexico, Iran, China, Botswana or Uganda, said Prof.
Daniels while emphasizing that as educators, scholars and citizens, we
must act briskly and effectively to meet these challenges.
The John Hopkins University is the largest university recipient of
the federal research funds in U.S. and is the home to a host of
pre-eminent schools and programmes. As the 14th President of John
Hopkins University, Prof. Daniels has focused his leadership on the
overarching themes of interdisciplinary collaboration, student
accessibility and community engagement.
The U.S. academician said there were failures to act in multiple
areas. These were normative (should states be involved in solving the
problem?), technical (how should they do so?), financial (where to
find the money to invest in a solution?) and political (how to
overcome the barriers set by those who would wish to preserve the
status quo?). He outlined five rules of engagement for how to address
these challenges in the coming years.
The state must play a fundamental role in promoting education and
make a sustained investment in colleges and universities. The
institutions of governance must be able to deflect and manage politics
that can distort policy formulation in the area linked to the core
goals of social transformation, equity and economic growth, said Prof.
Daniels.
“We must find a way to create durable regulatory oversight
mechanisms, the design, structure and composition of which limit the
scope for destabilizing political influence, goals that I know are
echoed in both of the recent Yash Pal Committee and the National
Knowledge Commission reports on higher education in India,” he said.
There was need to strike a more appropriate balance between the goals
of independence and accountability and do away with political
interference in education.
Prof. Daniels said the pinnacle institutes of higher education must
be supported. They include IITs in India or the elite private
universities like Harvard, Yale or Johns Hopkins or public
universities like the University of California in the U.S. These
institutions can set the high bar for the educational landscape and
their standards of excellence are emulated by other institutions.
One approach to building these peak institutions is to establish a
merit-based funding system, according to the U.S. academic. Over
time, countries such as China and the U.S. have moved towards funding
individual researchers on a project-by-project basis and over 30
percent of federal research funding goes to researchers at the top 20
universities in the U.S.
Prof. Daniels suggested that the regulation must move away from a
command and control model to an incentive based approach. “One might
favor federal payments based on performance benchmarks, such as
student completion, in order to address attrition issues that have
plagued many sectors of higher education in the U.S.,” he said.
Finally, given the needs for additional supply in the sector, we must
make sure we see innovation and do not create unnecessary barriers to
entry that would impede competition, he said. “Consider the potential
of technology to overcome the looming demand and access challenges in
higher education. Johns Hopkins and its peer institutions in the U.S.
are wrestling with how we can keep pace as information technologies
reshape the potential modes of education and discovery,” he said.
Prof. Daniels pointed out that 1.3 million people in India already
take online classes each year, and those courses hold the potential to
bridge geographic divides as never before, uniting a nation and
offering education to people from the rural villages in Tamil Nadu to
the streets of Bangalore that would otherwise go uneducated.
He raised similar questions regarding foreign participation in the
marketplace. “If we agree that exposing our students to the best
thinking is a key goal of education and acknowledge that globalization
has increasingly put knowledge from around the world in our hands with
a keystroke, then why not, as the Yash Pal Committee report suggests,
open the doors to the world’s best scholars and thinkers?” he asked.
The participation must be incentivized in such a way that attracts the
best actors. The Bhoruka Charitable Trust was founded in 1962 by Mr. P.D. Agarwal
to care for his native region in Churu district. The trust has
developed into one of India’s leading rural development NGOs, managing
a wide range of programmes in Rajasthan, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and
Andhra Pradesh. It has made a substantial contribution to the society.
-Kalyan Singh Kothari
Media Consultant
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