Foreign Universities may enter India virtually

Why do a lot of people go abroad for higher education. There are many reasons, and I say them in no specific order.

1. If you have any skills other than doing well in exams, you may not manage admission in any good university in India (and there are only a handful of them). And in such a situation, if you can afford to study abroad, you would go out.

2. Even if you are skilled in taking exams, you may be unlucky on that one day, and you may not get admission in any of the Tier 1 institutions. So you consider studying abroad (typically next year).

3. You want to emigrate to a country where you think you will lead a more comfortable life. Indeed, this is a common reason as the number of students to a country varies drastically as they change their immigration policies.

4. You want to study a subject not so popular in India, or a combination that is not available in India.

What is clear is that students or families have to be either very rich or they have to take loans and to repay those loans you need to be able to work in that country after your graduation. Some universities do have need-blind admissions, and they do provide some scholarships to enable students from places like India to study, but such scholarships are very few, particularly at the under-graduate level.

The online degrees are slowly changing that. Now, there is an option for Indian students to study "abroad" at a lower cost and even if one takes loans for those costs, the loan can be repaid with Indian salaries. However, before Covid, an online degree, particularly at the UG level, was not in demand. There were student doing Masters online, but a UG degree sitting at home is considered low-quality, both from the perspective of poor learning of academic content (no peer learning, no direct contact with professor, etc), as well as from the perspective of lack of campus life (sports, other extra-curricular, learning about different cultures).

But Covid is changing those perceptions and business models. With all the US universities forced to teach online for half a semester, the online education no longer appears to be poor quality. If MITs and Stanfords of the world can teach online, even as an emergency measure, there must be something good about it. (Actually, they have been teaching online for a long time. They have been live telecasting their classes, and/or recording their lectures and making them available for later viewing.)

But what about the campus life. And this too is about to happen. Campus life within your country while you study online from a far away university.

The universities abroad are facing a problem. They offered admission to international students, but can't let them join in the coming semester. Either the university is not opening up and plans to have an online semester, or even if they open, there are going to be travel and other restrictions because of which the student cannot join. They can offer a deferred admission to the student, but they fear that the student may look for other options.

So one of the ideas on the table is this: Contact a good university in the country from where you have admitted many students. Have a deal with them that they will host your students for a semester only for the campus experience. So they stay in the hostel, eat in the mess, use all the sports facilities, sit in the library, use WiFi network, and interact with so many other students around them. The education will be completely online directly from the foreign university. (May be they can have a deal to use some labs too, or the deal may include proctoring exams.) Not exactly the experience these students were looking for, but better than learning from home or doing nothing for a semester or two.

And if this idea works, that is, if the students like this model, this can quickly gain a lot of traction. And that would enable a large scale virtual-entry of foreign universities in India. That is, they can have a large number of Indian students, do all the academic activities online, and hence have no physical presence in India. So no regulatory hurdles. No need for any permissions. And some enterprising campuses offer "campus support" within India. These could be campuses of existing institutions who could build more hostels. Or these could be campuses of institutions that are closing down. They would be happy to have such a business opportunity.

The foreign universities, particularly those, who are beginning to offer online degree programs, would welcome such a combination as it allows them to increase the admissions substantially while retaining their focus on education and not having to worry about campus services.

What is happening is unbundling of university services as I mentioned in my previous blog and that is making these new options available to students. Students may not want to be on the same campus for all 8 semesters. They may want to spend a semester or two in the university campus abroad. They may want to work for some semester(s) while studying online. All those combinations can be served easily in the unbundled world.

Is this a good thing for the country, or should we be concerned.

My take is that we should be concerned. If such a degree takes root in the popular imagination, and industry accepts these graduates (which is likely, industry will only worry about your skills and knowledge), the numbers could be large. If 50,000 additional students (over and above those who are going abroad today) take up these programs, it would impact quality of admissions in our Tier 2 institutions. Our Tier 1 institutions will not see any impact in foreseeable future as face to face classes in top colleges (that too at hugely subsidized tuition) will continue to be preferred over online education.