Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India's Higher Education

by Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta

In India, few things open faster than colleges, but few sectors reform more slowly than higher education. Demographic changes, economic growth and integration into the global economy, the rising demand for higher education, and the increase in the number of private colleges have led to a massive expansion in Indian higher education. While challenges of access and cost have been long-standing, much of this expansion has been of dubious quality, the result of sustained and deep regulatory and governance failures. This book analyses these and other complex challenges facing higher education in India, and suggests possible solutions to some of them. The contributors highlight a range of issues facing higher education today, through a deeply moving account of the decline of a college in north Bihar; discussions on the various types of post-secondary educational institutions the research university, teaching colleges, and vocational training institutes; initiatives, such as community colleges, to address the problem of skill development in India; and the financing and governance of higher education in India. The book combines diverse methodologies: ethnography of institutions, case studies and data-based work, to present a complex landscape. These critical insights into higher education in India will be useful to scholars and researchers in education, political science, sociology, and public policy.

Genres: Education

284 pages, Paperback

Published February 6, 2017

About the author

Devesh Kapur is the Starr Foundation South Asia Studies Professor and Asia Programs Director at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C.

From 2006-18, he was the Director of CASI, Professor of Political Science at Penn, and held the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India. Prior to arriving at Penn, Professor Kapur was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and before that the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard. His research focuses on human capital, national and international public institutions, and the ways in which local-global linkages, especially international migration and international institutions, affect political and economic change in developing countries, especially India.

His book, Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India, published by Princeton University Press in August 2010, earned him the 2012 ENMISA (Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of International Studies Association) Distinguished Book Award. Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs (co-authored with D. Shyam Babu and Chandra Bhan Prasad), was published in July 2014 by Random House India. The Other One Percent: Indians in America (co-authored with Sanjoy Chakravorty and Nirvikar Singh), published in October 2016 by Oxford University Press, received widespread acclaim. His latest edited works are Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India’s Higher Education (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta), published in January 2017 by Orient BlackSwan, and Rethinking Public Institutions in India (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav), forthcoming in May 2017 by Oxford University Press.

Professor Kapur is the recipient of the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize awarded to the best junior faculty, Harvard College, in 2005. He is a monthly contributor to the Business Standard. Professor Kapur holds a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University; an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota; and a Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.