I join JKLU: A small university with big aspirations

 As people following me on social media know, I have joined a small, young, private university in Jaipur as its next Vice Chancellor. The university is J K Lakshmipat University (JKLU), founded in 2011 by generous support from J K Organization. JKO, as any Indian would know is one of the oldest industrial house in India with businesses in diverse sectors and well known for its philanthropic activities.

When I announced my decision to seek retirement from IIT Kanpur and join JKLU, many of my friends were surprised. But I was itching to join a university which is open to doing things differently, one that had desire to achieve excellence, where the promoters were willing to invest in the future, and there will be enough autonomy to do all this. After having spent time at multiple institutions, it was becoming clear to me that I would have greater impact in private setting than public setting. I recall that of all the places I enjoyed my stint at LNMIIT Jaipur the most, and I believe that stint was the most impactful of all my leadership roles. Many friends who knew about my yearning for a new role tried to dissuade me. There aren't many such institutions in the country. But I didn't care. I didn't care if there were 100 such institutions or not. I only cared if there was one such institution. (And to be honest, I have come across several private institutions today who will meet this criteria. Higher education in India is changing.)

I had known about JKLU earlier. On 1st November, 2017, I had met Pramath Sinha and Asheesh Gupta regarding some other educational initiatives and in that meeting they told me about JKLU and wanted me to be advising the university. And so it started. From January 2018 to January 2019, I spent two days a month in most of the months at JKLU. I interacted with all the top leadership and faculty. Participated in their discussions on all academic matters. We had a faculty member from Olin College to help us in designing courses around project-based learning approach. (The Olin approach is very different from what colleges in India do in the name of project-based-learning.) The University was kind enough to send me to Olin in the summer of 2018 to learn the Olin way of education. I was part of faculty selections and we could recruit faculty from IITs and abroad. A Center for Communication and Critical Thinking was set up to support all academic programs as it was felt that these two skills are extremely important to future proof your education. We setup an office of Dean of R&D which supports faculty members when they submit sponsored research projects and want to file patents. We also created an incubation center. I was quite excited about my limited role and was extremely happy to see the pace at which things were changing. I knew that one day I would come back to this place for a full time role.

After joining PEC in 2019, I stopped going to JKLU. But they kept sending me their newsletter and I kept on learning of all their new initiatives. In 2019, they started their third major discipline - Design. (The first two were Engineering and Management.) They had recruited a truly exceptional faculty for Design and it could claim to provide education at par or better than the best design schools in India. There is a push to internationalization of education. We would like as many of our students to spend a semester in a good university abroad as possible and have a few agreements to support this. We have a very interesting program with Univ of Massachusetts, Amherst where the first year is done at JKLU and the second year at UMass with a very large scholarship provided by JK Organization to reduce the cost of education in US. We also support our students going to top Indian institutions, including IITs, for a semester exchange. 

We believe that the future lies with multi-disciplinarity. And as New Education Policy (NEP 2020) also mandates, we will be growing in other disciplines including basic sciences and liberal arts over the next few years.

We are tiny as the universities go. We do want to make an impact on the society and we understand that we need a critical mass to do that. We are growing in all three areas: Engineering, Management and Design. I am going to write a separate article on them soon. This one was just to introduce JKLU to my readers.

Should we try to retain students going abroad for higher education

 Recently there were media reports pointing out that the top ranker in JEE Advanced has joined MIT (though still in India due to online classes). Stories have also come out that 4th ranker has joined UCLA. This caused the social media to react. Some of them criticizing them to leave India for US. I too poked my nose into it, and wrote on FaceBook that it was their personal choice and instead of worrying about 2 of them studying abroad, we should worry about more than 100,000 going abroad every year for under-graduate alone. Yes, every year, 100,000 students are going abroad for higher education, and the number is increasing every year.

I suggested that we can retain a lot of them in India if we could have high quality educational institutions in India. Since high quality institutions require a lot of expenditure, it is unrealistic to expect government to put in that kind of money. And, let us not forget, they have expanded IIT, NIT, AIIMS, IISER and other high quality institutions in the last decade, but government will have its limits. So, one will have to set these up in private sector, and that will happen only if the private sector can charge high tuition. And therefore, we must allow private sector to charge high tuition particularly when they have invested initial money and proven themselves to be of high quality. In particular, I suggested that a private institution with a similar NIRF rank as an average NIT should be able to charge about Rs. 5 lakhs per student per year, which is similar to the cost that is incurred at an NIT. (May be slightly less than that since it is assumed that private sector will be more efficient than government sector in managing expenses.) And a private sector institution having an NIRF ranking similar to an IIT, could charge Rs. 10 lakhs per student per year.

Why the number of students seeking foreign degrees increasing at a fast pace. I think as we integrate with global economy and more of us travel around, our aspirations are going up. As our economy becomes larger (ignoring covid related downturn in this trend), the ability to afford foreign education is going up. With ease of travel, ease of connectivity through video calls, and increasing numbers of Indian students on various campuses globally, the resistance to sending an 18 year old in foreign land is reducing. And as online education becomes mainstream, I suspect that many students in India will go for programs which allow him/her to spend may be 2 years in India at lower cost and 2 years on the campus abroad as that becomes easily affordable. So my prediction is that within 2 years of post-Covid times (say, 2023 Fall admission), there will be 200,000 Indians enrolled in foreign degrees (including those online from India).

Is this a good thing for India. An exodus because of poor quality of education cannot be a good thing for any country. Spending a massive 15 billion USD in foreign destinations instead of Indian campuses is depriving our economy of that much boost. Our economy desperately needs to reduce import and increase exports. And this is an avoidable import of service. Having high quality educational institutions in India would also attract foreign students (so we not only decrease import of service, but increase export of service). As these high quality institutions will not just be for these 1-2 lakh students, but for everyone else, we will also have a better trained manpower which is desperately needed by our industry. Many high tech companies are finding it difficult to recruit high quality personnel and the growth is slow because of that.

Seems like a win-win situation for everyone. And, of course, government has been talking about greater autonomy, including in setting up fees, attracting foreign students, becoming Vishwa Guru. The system of "Institutes of Excellence" and "Graded Autonomy" were started with these goals in mind.

But surprisingly, I found a lot of opposition to the idea. The arguments were primarily these:

1. These 100,000 are mostly going out because they want to emigrate and setting up high quality institutions in India would not stop them. A lot of them are any way low merit students (couldn't get high rank in JEE), and going to low quality institutions abroad. We shouldn't worry about them.

2. Even if somehow we can retain these 100,000 in India for the UG education, they will leave for jobs/higher education abroad. So our industry/society will not benefit from them. It is best they leave early, particularly the few meritorious ones in this group, because they would waste a good seat in India by leaving India after graduation.

3. High tuition will cause inequity. It is better to have everyone get poor quality education (except a few colleges like IITs which the government can afford to subsidize), than to have some colleges with poor quality education and some colleges with high quality education. The assumption here is that there can be no model of financing a high quality education in private sector, and hence private sector cannot be allowed to set up a high quality educational institution.

Let me answer these objections. The 2nd one is the easiest to handle. Would you want to have a car component factory in India if they are only exporting their products to a car manufacturer outside India. Of course, yes. Whatever economic activity we can do in India helps out economy. If a substantial portion of that 15 billion dollar can be spent in India, it is good for our economy.

As far as 1st objection is concerned, there is really no data. Everyone has different anecdotal experience. The argument that hardly anyone will stay back if there were high quality private institutions in India does not sound right because of my anecdotal experiences. When I talk to students at Ashoka University, for example, I do find many of them saying that they were considering universities abroad. Not only that, once we have something like Ashoka, we are able to attract a lot of foreign students. So even if only a few of these 100,000 will stay back in India, the high quality institutions will be good for economy by bringing in foreign students.

How about equity. I strongly believe that it is possible to come up with a model which allows people from financially weak families to study in expensive universities. For example, why can't and why shouldn't government say that anyone from a weak background will get a voucher to study and they can take that voucher to any of the good quality institutions, whether government or private. Already many of the schemes for SC/ST students allow studying in private institutions, we could extend that for EWS as well. So that pays for a significant part of the cost. The universities can get philanthropic funds to provide some scholarships. Some part of the cost can be taken care of through bank loans. There could be newer models like income sharing agreements. When we compare 100% poor quality versus 90% poor quality and 10% good quality, the latter is bad only if these 10% are all from privileged backgrounds and would cause the gap to only expand. But if we can find ways to ensure that there is representation of under-privileges students in this 10%, then it is definitely better for the country to have more well educated citizens.

Thankfully, despite the objections listed above, the government is going ahead with its policy to attract good quality private institutions even by allowing higher tuition. Some states have started allowing high quality institutions to charge high fees. And states which are rigid on this issue will not attract quality institutions and their residents will suffer. Remember quality institutions not only provide high quality education, but also do research, their alums tend to setup companies in the neighborhood of the college.

 

JEE Counseling in Covid era

 I have been receiving emails and phone calls ever since the results of JEE Mains were announced about three weeks ago. Some of them weren't going to take JEE Advanced and wanted to know where to apply. And some others were sure about their ranks in JEE Advanced and wanted to know where to apply. Each one of these parents (and never a student) would tell me that everyone gets a better rank in JEE Advanced compared with JEE Mains and there is a rule of thumb. If you had 2X as your rank in JEE Mains, your rank in JEE Advanced is likely to be around X. Go figure.

I would start off with my favorite statements. Don't think about placement. Think of your interest. And if you are normal and therefore, haven't found your passion yet, just get admission to the best college you can get into. Also, travel to a few institutes which you are considering seriously and talk to some faculty and students there.

But as I finished discussion with 20th parent (just two students so far), I have come to realize that Covid has changed the way we should consider choosing a college. And the change is not only about the inability to travel.

Till last year, if someone said that they are interested in Computer Science (and 90% people said that), one would quickly get into a discussion of Civil at an old IIT versus CS at a 2nd generation IIT, or Meta at an IIT versus CS at an NIT, and so on. I believe the discussion ought to be different today.

The concern in the recent past has really been this: I don't know my interest and you are telling me not to consider placement numbers. What if I just take admission in an unpopular discipline in an IIT, and then I don't like the discipline and I will be forced to change career through an MBA route. It was a serious enough concern. A 12th class student hardly knows about various disciplines and has no easy way to find out what s/he would like. So over the last decade or so, most progressive engineering institutes have been having a large number of electives in their curriculum, which could be used to do a "minor" program within your degree program. So if you were interested in CS, you could at least do 4-5 courses in CS. But that was not enough to gain sufficient confidence and sometimes even capability to compete with those who are doing may be 15 courses in Computer Science. And hence the minor programs ensured some relief, it wasn't enough. You needed another 3-4 courses to really get into that discipline.

This is where Covid has come as a savior. Today, the online education is more widely available, the quality has been improving, and most importantly, the market has started to appreciate online courses. So now, if you join an unpopular program, and you realize that this is not what you want, just do the minor program offered by the college in the discipline of your choice, and do an additional 3-4 courses online in the summer or even in parallel with your semester courses. With 7-9 courses, you have pretty much all the skills of that discipline that you need in the beginning of your career and you can keep learning on the job or online.

So earlier I would suggest that if you are interested in CS, study CS even if that meant taking admission in a somewhat "lesser" college. Now, I would suggest that you better be passionate about CS to take admission in a somewhat "lesser" college. The better strategy is to take admission in another discipline in the top college, do a minor in CS, do a few online courses in addition, and you are as good as anyone else.

This means that the most important question that you must ask is "how easy it is to do a minor in a popular discipline?" All IITs, I am sure, would proudly display on their website that they offer minors and lots of electives, flexibility in curriculum, etc. But is that flexibility for real. I know some CS departments would argue internally that if everyone were to be allowed a minor in CS, their teaching load would go up substantially. Why should they do this for students of other departments.  You shouldn't be joining these IITs if the goal was to keep the option of CS (or any other discipline) open.

So the ordering has been simplified, thanks to Covid. Order all IITs based on whatever criteria you like. Whether you prefer big city or small city, whether closer to home or away from home, whether your friends joined there last year or not, whether they already have most of the academic infrastructure built or not, and so on. Then those IITs where you have a strong chance of getting at least the least popular program, find out how much flexibility they have in curriculum. Specifically, do they have a minor program in all disciplines you might be interested in. Second, how many students graduated in 2020, and how many of them were able to do a popular minor like CS. If this ratio is small, remove that IIT from your list. And now, you can specify all the programs of the remaining IITs.