This BRIC emerging economy ranked last for overall higher education in Universitas 21’s 2012 list, edged out by Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey, Croatia, and Mexico.
India is one of the most populous countries in the world, and to accommodate the estimated 600 million Indians currently under the age of 25 who are expected to enter the education system in the next 10 years, the country is in need of some 51,000 colleges and universities; and fast, according to this Monitor report.
The need for more institutions surely plays a role in India’s ranking, but work is also needed in areas such as government and private investment per student (resources), a curriculum that meets the economic needs of the country (environment), proportion of international students studying in India (connectivity), and articles produced or research published at universities (output) in India. India ranked in the bottom four for all four indicators considered for the overall countrywide higher education ranking.
India was second-to-last in terms of resources, registering just seven points higher than dead-last Indonesia, and in terms of connectivity, environment, and output, India came in fourth-to-last place for all three indicators.
The report does note, however, that “more work is required on how to rate higher education systems in countries with very large populations,” like China (which ranked 39th overall) and India.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
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