Political interference on campus is wasting India’s demographic dividend
Saikat Majumdar | 23 August 2023 | Times Higher Education
“As they say in India,” the economist Pranab Bardhan wrote in an influential paper on corruption, “in the US corruption is in the process of ‘making’ laws, in India it’s mostly in ‘breaking’ laws.”
While Bardhan cites legally approved paths of US campaign finance that would be illegal in most countries, his remark makes me think of the different ways in which higher education is being corrupted in the two countries.
In the US, structural forces – demography and economics – are undermining colleges’ bottom lines and causing students and parents to question the value of degrees. In India, meanwhile – where those forces are very much in the country’s favour – individuals, politicians and ideologies are doing a great job of squandering what could have been a golden period of higher education through flagrant violations of institutional norms.