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There should be an elite group of institutions that focus on global competitiveness. ''India produces some of the world's brightest students and academics, yet none of its universities appear in the top-200 lists of the leading world university ranking surveys, compiled by Times Higher Education, Quacquarelli Symonds and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Indian institutions fare worse than their counterparts in South Korea, Turkey and Israel, not to mention those in Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa, its companions among the so-called BRICS economies. The results have caused dismay at the highest levels of government.
India's president, Pranab Mukherjee, speaking at Puducherry University's convocation in September, said, ''It is a sad reflection on us when the universal rankings of universities comes out.'' Earlier this year, at a conference of academic heads of state-run universities, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rued that ''it is a sobering thought that not one Indian university figures in the top-200 universities of the world today.'' With 25.9 million, India has the world's second-highest number of students enrolled in higher education, according to Ernst & Young. Yet although 58.9 percent of these students are enrolled in private colleges and universities, the smartest applicants are drawn to publicly funded ones, including the 17 much lauded Indian Institutes of Technology (I.I.T.s) and the 13 Indian Institutes of Management (I.I.M.s). In the 2013 global rankings, only publicly funded institutions featured anywhere at all. Competition to get into elite state-run colleges is fierce. ''Our education sector is, in some respects, overregulated and under governed,'' said Shashi Tharoor, head of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, which oversees higher education, in a telephone interview. ''We need to be less regulated and better governed.'' The three ranking surveys use methodologies that emphasize academic research and faculty citation in journals, followed by other measures like employer reputation, academic reputation, faculty-student ratio, and the international composition of faculty and students. Indian universities lose out on many of these fronts. In addition to lack of research citations, they perform badly on other metrics like faculty-to-student ratios and lack of internationalism.
(Fonte: G. Rangachari Shah, International New York Times 27-11-2013)
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