Higher education in India: efficiency, quality and sustainability

Abstract

In a world where data and information are ubiquitous and omnipotent, education plays a prominent role in almost all aspects of modern life. Governments and various global agencies ramp up their efforts for propagating education at all levels. Research on education has focussed on various aspects of education. However, research on higher education is disproportionately low, more so for developing countries. Further, research on higher education has been mostly focussed on the research part, leaving out the teaching aspect of education. In the first part of this thesis, we evaluate Indian states and Union Territories on their teaching efficiency. Using a 2-stage framework of Data Envelopment Analysis and truncated regression, we also determine the factors behind efficiency differentials between states. Productivity trends of states are tracked through Malmquist indices. Further, we evaluate quality of education imparted and combine quality and quantity together to arrive at a composite evaluation framework for states. Our results reveal that while south Indian states are high on quality, few north Indian states are high on efficiency. Prominent regression results show that public spending in higher education is inefficient but access to education loan increases state efficiency in higher education. Malmquist indices depict that states high on efficiency have maintained higher productivity compared to others.

Second part of the thesis is similar to the first part, but the unit of evaluation is university. We find that large universities have lower efficiency but higher quality. Further, we observed that consistent performance is uncommon amongst universities. Second-stage analysis suggests, among other findings, that size of the university positively affects university efficiency.

Third part of the thesis looks at the adoption of sustainable development practices in higher education in India through a qualitative study of top management and technology institutes. We find that top Indian institutes work proactively on sustainability issues but are vocal only on accreditation and rankings. Lower tier institutes though follow top institutes on many aspects, but ignore sustainability aspects in higher education, possibly due to lack of publicity from top institutes in this matter.