Careers360 World-class universities: What can India learn? | Page 6

Indian

Expenditure
Universities with over Rs 300
crores annual spending

Rs.Crores

All India Institute of Medical
Sciences, New Delhi
Aligarh Muslim University
(AMU), Aligarh

Columbia
University

Cornell
University

University of
Chicago

University of
Wisconsin Madison

29,749

27,616

26,818

21,517

19,910

18,973

17,598

“Harvard Campaign” (http://campaign.
harvard.edu/) with a goal to set up a
huge 6.5 billion US dollar fund for priority areas.

438.34
434.31
371.85

Indian Agricultural Research
Institute, Pusa, New Delhi

316.82

University of Mumbai

300

How much does the student
fee contribute?

Where do
universities spend?

Most of the income from endowments is
spend on bursaries, named scholarships,
particular issues or areas of enquiry,
chair professorships, initial seed funding for new lines of research etc. For
example, the MacArthur Fellowships (a
private foundation awards the fellowship) target talented individuals who
have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits. The fellowship demands nothing
in return other than a commitment to
pursue interesting lines of enquiry from
a select group of US professors who are
awarded. There are almost no similar
lines of funding available to an Indian
professor. Ananya Vajpaye, an academic
with Centre for Studies in Developing
Societies, New Delhi laments that most
of her work on Indian political thought
was made possible by being located in
the United States or European universities, a fact many other good academics
readily concur.

449.35

University of Delhi

Harvard
University

Postgraduate Inst. of Medical
Edu & Res, Chandigarh

IIT Madras

Johns Hopkins
University

499.68

Panjab University, Chandigarh

Stanford
University

521.7

Banaras Hindu University
(BHU), Varanasi
All Figures in Rs.Crore

1160.6

So many things determine the quality of an institution. If you compare
institutions in India and the US and
look at the management institutions,
this year IIM-Ahmedabad and
IIM-Calcutta have been ranked 18th
& 19th in the Financial Times ranking, these institutions do not have
the resources of even one-tenth of
what universities in US have. So,
it is possible for Indian institutions
to come up to a level. They might
not have all the resources but the
resources should be adequate.
Prof Shekhar Choudhuri
Director, SME, Shiv Nadar University

35

Careers

360

January 2014

It is endowments that help universities defray the cost of education. And it
is here that Indian universities drastically differ from global best practices. In
India most institutions are totally funded either by government grants (as in the
case of public universities) or by student
fees (as in the case of private universities
in general). World over student fees do
not contribute to more than 30- 35 % of
a university’s total expenditure, in India
it is almost 90% or above, sans government funding.

Does Government help?

Our spending on higher education is
woefully inadequate. The best Indian
universities have budgets in the region of
Rs. 300 – 600 crores per annum, which
is 1/10th or 1/20th of the global average.
Prof C NR Rao was not way off when he
contended that we spend peanuts on
research. And whatever little government spends is spread evenly. Barring
the University with Potential for Excellence Scheme, there are very few competitive funding mechanism with well
defined output expectations in India.
Even that programme offers between