Education Bubble in US

My friend, Sunil Bajpai, shared this interesting article, based on an interview of Peter Thiel, who is claiming that there is an education bubble in US. Some quotes from the article:

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed.



[It is intensely believed] that you will always make more money if you are college educated.


It used to be a given that a college education was always worth the investment– even if you had to take out student loans to get one. But over the last year, as unemployment hovers around double digits, the cost of universities soars and kids graduate and move back home with their parents, the once-heretical question of whether education is worth the exorbitant price has started to be re-examined even by the most hard-core members of American intelligensia.

There have been other reports which have questioned whether spending a crore of rupees on a bachelor's degree is a good investment for an american.

I think India must take advantage of this situation. In India, the most expensive (not for the student but the total cost to government/student/others) engineering education is in IITs, where the total cost to government and student combined is about Rs. 5 lakhs per year, including tuition, hostel, mess, and all sundry expenses. The top US schools may be providing a better quality education, but certainly not worth 5 times the cost.

Would it be worthwhile for some foreign universities to setup a campus in India, solely to bring in students from US (and other such countries where the cost of education has reached a stage of bubble), and provide the education experience here, since the cost of faculty, staff, building, and everything else is less here. To attract the best faculty, they could pay a significantly higher salary than IITs. And they could provide them with an even better research environment than IITs. The student services (hostels/food) could be improved too. But with all these additions, the cost to the student would still be a fraction of Rs. 25 lakhs a year that students are spending to study in top US universities.

Of course, since this model does not increase the availability of faculty in India, at least not in the short term anyway, it will lead to poaching of existing faculty in IITs. Not a very comforting feeling, I must say.

Medical tourism is passe. Get ready to welcome education tourists.