Future of Higher Education in India

Higher Education has seen a major success in Indian education industry. Many institutes have started over the last few years and are attracting suitable candidates for the same. Over 1.4 lakh students of age group 18-23 year enrolled for higher education in India and the rate is rising every year. IIT’s, IIM’s, AIIMS, NIT and other institutes of India are able to emerge themselves in most reputed institutes globally.

Current Status

• §According to data reported by DIPP, total FDI inflow in education sector has stood at US$ 1383.62 million from April 2000 to Dec 2016.
• §More than 36000 higher education institutes are present in India.
• §59.7% of market share in education industry of India is contributed by higher education.
• §Higher education spending is over Rs 46,200cr.
• §Spending is expected to rise at more than 18% annually in India.
• §There is still capacity of over 40 million students to enrol in higher education in India.

Vision 2030
As higher education system provides ample amount of opportunities to grow over the next decade, many investors might be attracted towards it.
In 2030, it is estimated that higher education system in India would be:-

• §Adoption of transformative and innovation approach in Higher education.
• §Augmented Gross enrolment ratio to 50% is estimated.
• §Reduce state-wise, gender based and social disparity in GER to 5%
• §Emerge as a single largest provider of global talent, with one in four graduates in the world being a product of the Indian higher education system.
• §Be among the top 5 countries in the world in terms of research output with an annual R&D spent of US$ 140 billion.
• §Have more than 20 universities among the global top 200.

EY-FICCI Report
Indian government and report from EY-FICCI has stated their vision that they have regarding the higher Education System.

• §Multi-disciplinary, career-oriented, entrepreneurship, skill-based courses, and adoption of transformative and innovative techniques such as blended learning, flipped classroom and experiential learning will be expanded over the years.
• §Ease in faculty recruitment norms, tenure and reward based system to retain quality based teachers for better education, incentives and facilities will help faculty development and exchange programs.
• §Adoption of various models that will help improve research capabilities of institutions in India, promoting collaborations amongst international institutions, industry, and research centres for generating high-quality basic and applied research.
• §Strengthen education industry academic links and build relation with skill-based training providers to enhance employable talent for the education industry.
• §Incentives for high-quality teachers to attract private and foreign participation in higher education, and increase in scope of virtual classrooms and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)
• §To promote individual based funding, provision for access to public research grants, encouraging corporate and alumni funding and linking public funding to institutional performance.
• §Higher education institutions are moving towards autonomy and self regulation by introducing mandatory authorisation, creating a repository of all information related to higher education and introducing reforms in the leadership structure of institutions.

Expert Speaks

As per Sanjay Padode Secretary of Centre for Developmental Education(CDE), IFIM Institutions quoted "Indian Economy is expected to be a USD 10 Trillion economy by 2030. Presently we are the fastest growing economy and it is expected that we will average a growth rate ranging between 7.5 to 8.50 percent every year till 2030. India is also poised to benefit from the demographic dividend expected from its 1.3 billion citizens. To harness this dividend India will have to build a robust tertiary/vocational education system which is able to educate/train more than 350 million students in 2030. The only way this could be achieved is by liberalizing education and bringing in reforms that will encourage the private sector to invest into education.

Education will resolve the issue of literacy and to some extent employability however it will not create employment. Thus it is important for India to make radical changes in curriculum to make our students innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs. Graduating entrepreneurs will enhance employment opportunities and hence provide employment opportunities to the students being churned out by our education system." 

As per Jaideep Gupta,CEO & Founder of Univariety quoted "I foresee a promising future for India’s education sector. India, having one of the largest populations in the world will contribute over one-fourth of the students falling into the higher education age bracket in 2030. One out of four graduates around the world would have passed out from the Indian education system. The stronger emphasis will be on the quality of learning rather than the marks or grades. Employment will become ultra competitive and companies will employ students on the basis of their skills.

There will be an enormous change in the kinds of pedagogy utilised in schools. Teaching will happen in equal part, from experienced faculty as much as from machines, algorithms and simulations. A larger part of the learning will be online and therefore "anywhere" and "anytime", and the regular physical infrastructure of universities and colleges will be used as a gathering place to collaborate and transform together. Learning will not be focused on knowledge or employability, but rather it would be a lot more on a much broader range of qualities and characteristics. Additionally, age will be just a number, learners from varied age groups would participate and not just the typical college age students that are prevalent today."

CONCLUSION
Initiatives and investments in education sector will only be able to fulfil all these visions that we see for our future education sector.