Indian higher education’s dirty secret is out. According to a recent report of the US-based Institute of International Education (IIE), in 2016-17, students fleeing India’s 38,000 colleges and 800 universities — some of them established 150 years ago but not ranked anywhere in the World University Rankings of the London-based QS or Times Higher Education — spent $6.5 billion (Rs.42,025 crore) on higher study in the US. This staggering amount is almost three times the aggregate foreign direct investment of American industry in India in that year ($2.37 billion). More significantly, it is more than half of the budgetary outlay of the Central government on education (Rs.79,686 crore) in 2016-17 

The institute’s report elaborates that despite the fees explosion in America’s colleges and universities, the annual exodus of Indian students to US higher ed institutions is rising at the rate of 30 percent a year. And mind you, this report is confined to Indian students entering US universities. If one adds up all the fees that Indian students pay abroad — and one hates to contemplate the huge sacrifices that their households make to give them a half-decent education — the annual expenditure of Indian students overseas could well aggregate $10 billion (Rs.65,000 crore). 

Even though the IIE report stops short of making the connection, it’s patently clear that continuously falling standards of teaching and research in the overwhelming majority of this country’s institutions of higher education, where the highly bureaucratic University Grants Commission, All India Council for Technical Education and the notoriously corrupt Medical Council of India — all Central government organisations — keep issuing circulars and firmans to tighten their grip over higher education, are to blame. 

But neither tenured professors drawing comfy Seventh Pay Commission salaries for the old recycled lectures they deliver, nor children (that’s not a descriptive error) continuously agitating against fees despite tuition fees in India’s higher education institutions being the lowest worldwide, care about the quality of education or the worthless, faux degrees being dispensed to them.