SPECIAL ARTICLE

Higher Education in the BRIC Member-Countries Comparative Patterns and Policies

Jandhyala B G Tilak

The BRIC member-countries Brazil, Russia, India and China are experiencing a very high rate of growth in the demand for higher education. But they do not have the fiscal resources to meaningfully meet the key challenge of catering for the exploding demand without compromising on quality and equity. Each of them has adopted a stratified system of higher education a few high-quality, elite institutions coexisting beside a large number of low-quality, mass institutions to address the problems of access, quality, and equity, all at the same time. This paper focuses on this aspect of development of higher education, and examines its real effects on access, quality, equity and funding, and attempts to draw a comparative picture among the BRIC member-countries.

This article is based on the presidential address at the annual conference of the Comparative Education Society of India on 10-12 October 2012 at the University of Jammu. It draws on a major international comparative study in 2012 by Martin Carnoy, Prashant Loyalka, Maria Dobryakova, Raq Dossani, Isak Froumin, Katherine Kuhns, Jandhyala Tilak and Wang Rong entitled University Expansion in a Changing Global Economy: Triumph of the BRICS? (Draft, Stanford University). The usual disclaimers apply. Jandhyala B G Tilak ( jtilak@nuepa.org) is at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

igher education is in transition in many countries of the world and the approaches of governments have changed considerably during the last few decades. One can note a few major global trends in the growth of higher education in the last quarter century. First, there has been remarkable expansion of higher education, the rate of growth in enrolments being very impressive. The rates of growth are much higher in many developing countries than in advanced countries. They are also the highest in the higher education histories of developing countries. Second, much of the expansion has taken place in the private sector. In some developing countries, there has been a virtual halt in the growth of public higher education, reducing the relative size of the public sector to a negligible level. Within the private sector, it is the for-prot higher education segment that is growing fast. Philanthropy and charity-based private higher education seems to be disappearing altogether in many developing countries. Third, cost-recovery strategies have become very dominant in public policies. Student fees and loans are increasingly viewed as sound and effective methods of nancing higher education, and are even viewed as feasible and desirable substitutes to public funding. Loans have replaced scholarships in public policies. Public funding has experienced a modest to serious decline in several countries, and remained at best stagnant in some others. Fourth, the expansion in higher education has been more in market-relevant areas of study. The demand for engineering and management courses has been increasing at a faster rate than enrolments in what can be called standard or traditional areas of study. The growth in such market-relevant areas of study in higher education has been at the cost of growth in the liberal arts, humanities and sciences. Fifth, the commoditisation of higher education is considered not only inevitable, but also acceptable. Prot, which is not considered right in education for a long time, has de jure entered into the education activities in a big way. Domestic as well as international trade in higher education has become an acceptable phenomenon, along with the emergence of commercially motivated new forms of internationalisation. These and similar trends can be observed in many developing countries and even in a few advanced countries. How are the BRIC countries Brazil, Russia, India and China, the four largest low- and middle-income developing economies developing as emerging economic powerhouses and how is their higher education system being shaped?
41

April 6, 2013

vol xlviii no 14

SPECIAL ARTICLE

Similarities and Differences There are several common features in the policies adopted by the BRIC countries. However, there are considerable differences in the approaches of their governments to expand higher education. These approaches are strongly inuenced by their initial conditions, their social and economic histories, the political character of their states, and a variety of other factors. Brazil and India are democracies. Russia, now dened as a democracy, is dominated by a complex authoritarian state-capitalist regime. China is a communist state with a state-capitalist economy, which has allowed the growth of a large free-market sector. The economic regimes in Russia, India, and China have undergone dramatic changes in the last three decades. They have adopted neo-liberal policies in various degrees, and policies to liberalise their domestic and external sectors, leading to large-scale privatisation of their domestic economies and policies of globalisation, including globalisation of their nancial sectors, and the lowering of barriers to free trade and international movement of high-skilled labour. All have become, or tend to become, free-market economies. Interestingly, all the BRIC countries introduced these economic reform policies when the power of the state diminished signicantly, and these policies, in turn, further weakened the state. The changing nature, character, and strength of the state has had a strong inuence on quite a few dimensions of higher education access, quality, equity, funding, governance, and so on. Among the developing countries, the BRIC countries are seen as dynamic and vibrant. They are developing fast and even posing challenges to the supremacy of the developed countries. These countries are economically growing even as most other countries, particularly developed ones, continue to experience slow to negative rates of growth. Together, they currently account for about one-fth of the world gross domestic product (GDP), compared to a meagre 8% in 2001. The dynamism and vibrancy is not conned to the economic sphere. In higher education, the BRIC countries produce and supply skilled manpower to the advanced countries at such levels that sectors like information technology (IT) in western countries critically depend on the manpower produced in India and China. China and Russia, and to a lesser extent Brazil and India, are increasingly viewed as real competitors to the western nations, both in terms of the quantity of science and engineering graduates and their quality. It is also feared by some that the poles of technological innovation could shift from the US, Europe, and Japan to the BRIC countries. All the four BRIC countries have been busy formulating and implementing various strategies to become developed countries, or rather developed countries of a distinct category. In the last two decades, there has been a rapid shift in public attention to the creation of a knowledge economy driven by the revolution in information and communication technology. Higher education is recognised as an important instrument in the process of becoming a developed economy. The internationalisation of higher education is hotly pursued in the BRIC countries. Though China and India are the largest importers of higher education, sending the largest numbers of students abroad, all the four 42

have developed, or are developing, strategies to attract international students in large numbers, both for enhancing the credibility of their education programmes and generating muchneeded additional resources from foreign students. At the beginning of the 1990s, enrolments in higher education in the BRIC countries were very low. The enrolment in India in 1990 was about the same as in the US in 1920, in Brazil, it equalled the 1935 enrolment in the US, and in the Soviet Union, it was the same as in the US in 1960. Enrolment in China was hardly one-third that in India. Together, they had about 8.5 millions students, compared to 13 million in the US alone. The four BRIC countries greatly expanded their higher education systems in the following years, recognising that higher education is essential for economic growth, particularly for knowledgeintensive growth. Economic growth, in turn, has had a very signicant impact on enrolments in higher education in these countries. There is also pressure to expand higher education from the increasing number of youth who have completed secondary education. The pressure is high as the economic payoffs of higher education are attractive, and even seem to be increasing. So, even if the state had not seen a rapid growth in higher education as necessary for economic development, it has had to respond to the explosive growth in private demand for higher education and expand educational facilities. It is widely known that expansion in higher education helps in establishing political legitimacy, and it did so in many developing countries in the 20th century. All the four BRIC nations are characterised by a relatively high degree of political stability and strong economic growth, even when revolutionary changes have taken place in Russia and China, or political struggles against military regimes have taken place in Brazil, or when there has been a shift away from a socialistic economic paradigm in India. In all the four countries, the state has been a major driving force in the expansion of higher education, primarily for enhancing its political legitimacy in the domestic and international spheres, and secondarily for boosting economic growth.
Enrolments and Economic Development

The absolute number of enrolments in higher education in all the BRIC countries has grown in leaps and bounds in the last few decades. Russia and Brazil had a relatively large base to start with and expanded their enrolments further. Among the four, Russia has the most developed higher education system, that too in the public sector. The gross enrolment ratio in Russia is now more than 80%, compared to about 50% 10 years ago. However, Russia is now experiencing a decline in its youth population, which has been affecting the growth in enrolments in higher education. The number of secondary school graduates in 2012 was expected to be half that in 2006. With a relatively low base, China and India have expanded their enrolments very rapidly in the last 25 years. China has raised its enrolment ratio from about 3% in the late 1980s to about 20% in recent years, and India from about 5% to about 17%. In Brazil, the ratio was 32% in 2008, compared to about 5% in the early 1970s. A 2012 study by the British Council entitled The
April 6, 2013 vol xlviii no 14
EPW Economic & Political Weekly

SPECIAL ARTICLE

Shape of Things to Come: Higher Education Global Trends and Emerging Opportunities to 2020 projects that China and India will remain in the rst and second places in terms of the number of enrolments, with 37 million and 28 million, respectively, and Brazil will be among the worlds top ve countries by 2020. If meaningful strategies are adopted, there is a chance that these regional players may emerge as academic superpowers at the global level. It is quite interesting to note that when the US and Europe went in for expansion of higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, their levels of economic development were high, or they had high GDPs per capita, and they took much longer to raise their enrolment ratios to comparable levels. The present phase of expansion of higher education even in Russia and Brazil, the richest of the BRIC countries, not to speak of China and India, is associated with low levels of economic development and low GDP, but the expansion in all the four countries has been very fast. India is economically at the bottom among the BRIC countries, yet its growth in higher education in recent years is remarkable in terms of numbers and diversity. Further, while expansion in higher education in Europe and the US in the 1960s and the 1970s was at public expense, the current expansion in all the BRIC nations has been predominantly privately-nanced by high fees in public institutions and exclusive, fee-based private institutions. All the four BRIC countries have a somewhat weak scal base, and dwindling or uncertain budgets for higher education. They have not been interested in, or not been capable of, raising taxes to nance higher education. This goes well with the current ideology of neo-liberalism, but it also results in weaker scal capacity to nance higher education. Even if the weak state in these countries decides to liberally nance higher education, it is no position to do so. Public funding for higher education has been under serious strain, forcing the governments to adopt different strategies for development of higher education, including its funding. I hold that despite massive expansion, inequalities in access to higher education in the BRIC countries may not decline much, and may not inuence inequalities in their societies. This is essentially because of the nature of expansion of higher education. Two overlapping factors characterise the massive expansion one, the development of a highly differentiated system of higher education, which I prefer to call a stratied system; and two, the dominance of private higher education, resulting even in the displacement of the public sector. One of the important strategies adopted by the BRIC countries is the development of a stratied system of higher education, which has enabled them to address issues of access, equity, quality, and efciency somewhat simultaneously, though not satisfactorily and convincingly. I focus on this aspect of development of higher education, and how it is related to access, quality, equity, and funding, and attempt to draw a comparative picture among the BRIC countries.
Elite Institutions

In all the BRIC countries, including the two erstwhile communist states, a differentiated or a stratied system of higher education has developed a small number of elite institutions and
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

a large mass of non-elite institutions. Enrolments in lowquality and sometimes low-cost private and public institutions are rapidly increasing, and enrolments in the few high-quality elite institutes, which are mainly public, are also increasing, but the relative size and growth of the latter is very small. A very high fraction of the increased demand for higher education is absorbed by relatively low-cost and low-quality mass institutions in Brazil, India, and China, and to a lesser extent in Russia. A majority of the mass institutions in Russia and China belong to the state sector, while they are mostly private in India and Brazil. The governments in all the four countries seem to focus more on their elite institutions, increasing their per student spending in them. The spending is much less on mass institutions in China and Russia, and it is largely left to the private sector in Brazil and India. Chinas emphasis is on what were earlier known as national key universities or the C9 League, and the 100 universities covered by Project 2011 that began in the mid-1990s, or more particularly the top 39 universities covered under the project 985, launched in 1998. Russia concentrates its resources on national research universities. China and Russia have also intensied their efforts towards building world-class universities. In Brazil, the issue of world-class universities has not attracted much attention, and in India, the concept takes a marginally different shape in the form of research and innovation universities. The Brazilian government encourages spending on sending graduates abroad for high-quality training, while China sends abroad its higher education leaders for training. The Indian government spends more on some of its best institutions, and has doubled the number of central universities, Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management, National Institutes of Technology, and similar institutions. It has also allowed huge private investment in other institutions. But even in the institutions on which the government has increased its total spending, public spending per student has not signicantly increased in general, especially in research and development (R&D) and major academic activities. On the whole, the gap in public spending per student in elite and mass institutions has been large and widening. Since elite institutions in India, China, and Brazil are very few, their output is very small, compared to the total graduate output or the output of the mass institutions, which is of poor quality. Enrolments in elite institutions, according to crude estimates, vary between 10% and 15% of the total in the four countries. The underlying assumption seems to be that a few high-quality graduates are crucial and sufcient for rapid economic growth. On the whole, access to good public institutions is very limited. Historically, inequalities are quite marked in Brazil and India compared to China and Russia. And inequalities in China have increased over the years. Russia provides relatively equal access to universities. It does not have to bother too much about equity as it implemented strong policies of afrmative action during the Soviet era and also in the post-Soviet era, and higher education is now widely accessible, though the distribution of access favours the intellectual and political elite.
43

April 6, 2013

vol xlviii no 14

SPECIAL ARTICLE

In other words, with a fair degree of access and less inequalities in higher education, Russia feels no strong need for any kind of afrmative action for the lower socio-economic strata of its population. It is under the least pressure on equity in higher education, but this does not mean that social differentiation in opportunities for higher education and access to it do not exist in Russia. Yet, on the whole, publicly funded higher education in Russia is more equally distributed across different socio-economic strata than in the other three BRIC countries. Of the four nations, China needs to be seriously concerned about inequities. But it is not. Equity in higher education has never been a serious consideration, with China focusing on ensuring equitable access to basic education. The secondary system has expanded, but the expansion of higher education had been tightly constrained by the state for political reasons. There is no special focus on promoting equitable access to higher education or reducing growing inequalities in higher education between different social classes. It is observed that China has become a very unequal society. Economic inequalities have increased sharply, with the Gini coefcient rising from 0.3 in 1980-85 to 0.42 in 2005-08, the sharpest rise among the BRIC countries. In higher education, China has the most stratied and hierarchical system of all the BRIC countries, and it is one of the most stratied systems in the world at large. Brazil and India are traditional democracies, and are subject to considerable social and political pressure to focus on equity. But social and political pressures to improve quality are not sufciently strong. India has a long history of afrmative action policies in higher education, as does Brazil. In India, afrmative action has expanded widely in recent years. It includes quotas in admission for various backward social groups of the population, the reimbursement of fees, and other nancial measures specically targeted at the lower strata. Quotas are provided in Brazil for the admission of black, mixed race, and indigenous students from public primary and secondary schools to public federal universities, which provide a better quality of education than private ones. But many middle- and upperclass students opt for private universities. Quotas in Brazil are meant to democratise education by strengthening public primary and secondary schools, and public universities. They also serve as disincentives for students to go to private schools and may check privatisation in general, including in higher education. In contrast, some policies of afrmative action recently adopted in India, such as fee reimbursement, which works in practice like vouchers, are clearly pro-private. Brazil has nancial incentive programmes such as conditional cash transfers for private universities to admit students from disadvantaged groups at a reduced tuition fee. Afrmative action policies, on the whole, are relatively stronger in India than in Brazil, though they have attracted strong criticism, particularly with the widening of their scope. However, the positive effects of these policies in India and Brazil may be limited. Of late, in both countries, social democratic redistributive policies have been mild and are pushed to the background. Compared to the other three countries, India faces more serious problems in
44

expanding higher education, improving its quality, and promoting equity.

Forms of Financing

Interestingly, all the four BRIC societies have moved from a free, highly subsidised public education model to a moderate-to-high fee-based public system and a private system where the fees are equal to, if not higher than, costs. The forms of nancing introduced in China and Russia include fees and educational loans. The universities are also expected to generate resources from non-governmental sources. The measures introduced in Russia include encouraging mobilisation of resources from non-budgetary and third-party sources, allowing the introduction of paid programmes and courses, implementing schemes for student loans, and introducing procedures for the greater nancial independence of institutes. Private economic payoffs to investment in higher education are high, and are rising in all the BRIC countries, which explains the growth in demand for higher education. The high growth in private demand for higher education has allowed governments in the four countries to shift its costs to families through increased fees and loans, and reduced public funding. This transition marks a big ideological shift. It can also be described as state opportunism, which may have an ideological component, but appears to be a pragmatic way of raising non-governmental resources. China and Russia rely more on the principle of cost-sharing and user charges in higher education, while Brazil and India rely on the private sector for expansion of higher education. In China, for example, government funding has come down from more than 80% in the 1990s to below 50% in 2009. The gap is lled by tuition and other user charges. Almost all students now pay tuition and hardly 20% of them receive limited nancial aid. In Russia, the tuition revenue per student in every category of university has increased in the last few years. In Brazil, nearly 70% of the students attend private institutes. In India, two-thirds of the students in general and more than three-fourths in professional elds attend private institutions. Funding is not as serious a problem in Russia as in other countries, though higher education institutions there suffered when there were drastic budget cuts in the 1990s. Strong efforts to rebuild universities have been initiated and public spending has been raised. Even in non-elite institutions, pubic spending per student has been increasing, as the number of students in general, and budgeted (publicly-nanced) students in particular, has been static and total public funding is rising. As a result, i e, mainly because of demographic change, per student expenditure on budgeted places has increased signicantly. Some mass institutions face the threat of closure as enrolments decline, and this has made Russia think of mergers in higher education. It has been busy with mergers, but not very successfully. After all, academic mergers are rather difcult. But mergers and rationalisation could affect low-income universities adversely. On the whole, the gap in spending on mass and elite institutions has increased in both Russia and China. In Russia, the higher education of academically bright students is heavily subsidised or even free in state institutions,
April 6, 2013 vol xlviii no 14
EPW Economic & Political Weekly

SPECIAL ARTICLE

while others join as fee-paying students. The number of feepaying students has increased dramatically to 54% of the total and it is set to increase further. According to some estimates, it is even as high as 85% in some public institutions. Russian public universities nd this mechanism quite attractive to augment income, and at the same time provide equal quality education to all. In India, academically bright students get admitted to subsidised public institutions of higher learning, which are of a relatively high quality, and the rest join low-quality private institutions that charge fees several times higher than that in public institutions. This is particularly the case in technical and professional education. In private institutions, which rely fully on fees, also known as self-nancing, expenditure per student is low, though income per student through fees is quite high. In China, the majority of students from the lower socio-economic strata end up in vocational colleges. Public expenditure per student (PPP$) is high in Brazil ($2,907) and Russia ($2,889), but much less in India and China. In Brazil and India, it has declined over the years, while in Russia and China, it has increased. Brazil and Russia spend 5.1% and 4.1% of their GDP respectively on education (2008), while India spends 3.7% and China much less. India has a goal of spending 6% of GDP on education, and the recommendation in China was 4%. These goals have been pending for the last three decades. There are constitutional norms in Brazil that stipulate that not less than 15% of the governments expenditure should be allocated to education, which is strictly adhered to. Brazil often spends higher than this, and the 2008 gure was 16.1%. Public expenditure on higher education constituted 0.9% of GDP in Brazil in 2008, 0.7% in Russia, and 0.5% in China. It is the least in India. Brazil and China have stepped up their expenditure, particularly on research, in recent years. As a result, their research output and patents have signicantly increased, though much of it is applied research short term and strategic, not basic and fundamental.
Control and Lack of It

On the whole, China and Russia heavily subsidise higher education. In India and Brazil, two-thirds to three-fourths of the students are in private institutions and most of them are not subsidised by the state. Private higher education has now become an integral part of the overall system in India, and it has been so for a long time in Brazil. The private education system is still to expand to considerable levels in Russia and China, though they are also promoting the growth of private higher education. About 20% of the students in China and Russia now attend private universities. A heavy reliance on the private sector is a poor strategy, and it may reect that the state is weak in resisting market forces and unwilling to accord high priority to public higher education. Poor student outcomes and the low value added by private institutions in Brazil and possibly India go against the argument of private efciency. The high growth of private education has serious implications for economic efciency and social equity. While private higher education is growing in all the four BRIC countries, the difference between the growth in China and
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

Russia on the one hand and India and Brazil on the other is that it is happening under strict government control in the former, while it is out of government control in the latter and left to the mercy of the markets. The Indian and Brazilian governments are not in a position to develop any strong, effective regulatory mechanisms. The state in India is not able to regulate the growth in private higher education, or regulate commercialisation, and failing standards. In a sense, the capacity of the state to steer the system of higher education is on the decline. It is important to realise that a well-organised state is crucial even in market economies, and its need is much higher in developing countries like India and Brazil where markets are imperfect. The state in Russia the central government has a strong control on the higher education system. Russias universities receive central funding, and no local funding, which partly explains the tight central control. The Indian federal system provides for a decentralised system in the development and governance of higher education. The union government has little control over the overall growth of higher education, and resource-starved state governments rely heavily on the private sector for expansion. The role of the union government is conned to a few universities and institutions of higher education that are known as central universities and central institutions of higher education. The union government formulates policies and regulations mostly through the University Grants Commission (UGC) and other public bodies. A majority of the higher education institutions are set up by state governments. So, much of the governance of higher education in India is left to state governments. As a vast majority of higher education institutions are private, one can state that they are controlled very little by the union or state governments. In short, both governments are very weak in effectively governing the growth of higher education, which is left to the markets or laissez-faireism. Brazil also has a highly decentralised system with little direct control over its higher education system. Historically, the private sector has been dominant in Brazils higher education system. Private institutions enjoy a high degree of freedom with a minimum of state control, but this has not necessarily meant they are all doing well. In general, higher education institutions and faculties in Brazil have enjoyed great autonomy (except for periods of military dictatorship), more than in any other BRIC country. So, elite institutions in Brazil have been able to produce quality output and innovations. In terms of the global innovation index 2012, prepared by the Institut Europen dAdministration des Affaires (INSEAD, or European Institute of Business Administration) eLab, and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO, a specialised agency of the United Nations), Brazil, with a rank of 58, is far ahead of India (64), but behind China (34), and Russia (54). Brazil is not as aggressive as China in focusing on elite universities with extra investments. The centralised power of the Communist Party explains the tight control of the Chinese government on universities and other intellectual activities. This, along with Confucian values, is generally felt to hamper innovation in research. The Russian and Chinese systems are controlled by large bureaucracies. In China, the hierarchy is rigid and the administration is
45

April 6, 2013

vol xlviii no 14

SPECIAL ARTICLE

non-transparent. In both countries, academies have a large role, and they control higher education. They also lay special emphasis on promoting research in the elite institutions. In the recent past, a good number of higher educational institutions in China have been transferred to the control of regional authorities. Yet, with self-censorship and state controls, academic autonomy is rather restricted in China and Russia.
Question of Quality

With the rapid growth of higher education, particularly private higher education, quality has become a matter of serious concern. As the BRIC countries tend to focus on improving quality in only a few elite institutions, the gap between the elite institutions and the mass ones is very wide, and the overall quality of higher education is very low. Very few universities gure in the top 200 in global university rankings. No Indian university gures in the top 200 and only a few from China and Russia gure on such lists. A majority of the institutions in India and Brazil are private, and the quality of most of these institutions is very low. Cost efciency in operations, not quality, is the main concern of private institutions. Incentives to improve quality are non-existent or very weak in Brazil, India, and China, more particularly in non-elite institutions. Funding is not related to quality and performance. Some incentives that exist, say, in China, can be described as marketlike incentives that work in elite institutions. Teachers with doctoral qualications are few in Brazil, China, and especially India. In Russia, the situation is much better and is comparable to the US. India suffers from a grave shortage of qualied faculty. Professional education suffers more. Though qualied teachers (with PhDs) are reasonably well available in Brazil, mass private institutions hire only a few of them. Brazil and China have a higher proportion of qualied PhDs. Legislative measures to raise the minimum educational qualications of faculty members and measuring outcomes are some of the steps being attempted in Brazil to raise the quality of higher education. Among the four, Brazil is the most focused on improving quality system-wide, but the approach is inuenced by market-relevant quality and market-oriented competition. China is more concerned about quality than India and Brazil, but only in elite institutions. In terms of publications, China surpasses the US. Brazil and India have improved, but their absolute numbers are still very small. China decided as early as 1997-98 to invest signicantly in a limited number of universities. It is committed to developing elite institutions, research-oriented universities, and world-class universities. In a sense, it very early on envisaged emerging as a world economic leader. This explains much of its policies and approaches regarding investment in quality in elite institutions and the neglect of mass institutions, which has led to the development of a stratied system. Russias concern with quality and measures to improve it began a decade later than China. Both China and Russia have intensied their effort to fortify a few elite universities to produce high-quality research. Strongly focusing on producing world-class universities, China lters away candidates from
46

higher education with the help of entrance examinations introduced after the Cultural Revolution, and diverts large numbers of secondary-school graduates to pre-tertiary vocational and other programmes. China could expand its higher education with less funding because faculty salaries are very low in many universities, and this is partly true in Russia as well. According to a 28-country study (Paying the Professoriate: A Global Comparison of Compensation and Contracts [2012]: Philip G Altbach et al (ed.), Routledge: New York and London), in terms of average salaries (in $PPP), Russia and China are at the bottom of the list, ahead of only Armenia. While salaries in India and Brazil are high, these two countries and China have allowed student-faculty ratios to increase to between 15 and 26. In Russia, the ratio has improved over time and is now 11 students per faculty member. In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the average is below 15. In Brazil, India, and China, the lack of qualied faculty has become a serious problem, and the number of part-time teachers and contractual appointments is rising more of course in mass institutions than in elite universities.
Technical Education

Inuenced by the fast-emerging global knowledge economy, all the BRIC countries seem to be focusing on developing strong and widespread technical education. In Russia and China, there is an increasing demand for high-skilled technical manpower, and the situation is no different in the recently liberalised Indian and Brazilian economies. The increasing demand is not conned to domestic labour markets, and the international demand for engineering graduates is high. The economic payoff of engineering and technical education in all the four countries is estimated to be high, which explains the high demand for courses in engineering and computer sciences. Engineering and computer science education is growing rapidly in all the countries, sometimes even at the cost of other disciplines. Today, the BRIC countries produce more than half the worlds engineering graduates each year. The relative number of engineering students is the smallest in Brazil, followed by Russia, where one-sixth of the students in higher education are enrolled in engineering institutions. In contrast, one-fourth of the student population in India and nearly one-third in China are enrolled in engineering institutions. In the US and a few other advanced countries, the corresponding share has actually declined. Interestingly, while half the students in Russia are enrolled in postgraduate courses, their numbers are insignicant in the other three countries. The transition rate from postgraduate courses to PhD courses is a high 52% in Brazil, compared to 27% in China, 4% in Russia and 1% in India, according to the World Banks International Benchmarking Study (2012). In terms of producing engineering graduates, China and India exceed all others in the world. In India, engineering education seems to have over-expanded, and there are signs of a contraction, particularly in low-quality private institutions. Yet, in all the four BRIC countries, the private rates of return are high for engineering education. Russian technical higher
April 6, 2013 vol xlviii no 14
EPW Economic & Political Weekly

SPECIAL ARTICLE

education institutions were meant to produce manpower for state-sector industries, which are now in decline. This is reected in the falling number of students in technical education. High-quality engineering education is conned to elite institutions in India and China. With its focus on elite institutions, China has been aggressive in encouraging publication and patents. According to preliminary ndings of the International Benchmarking Study (2012), with about 25,000 articles (in English) on engineering published in 2011, China ranked very high, this as compared to about 5,000 in India, 3,000 in Russia, and 2,000 in Brazil. Russia and India also fare very badly in terms of publications per faculty. China also produces a huge number of 30,000 engineers with PhD degrees every year, while the corresponding number is 4,500 in India. Even the US turns out only about 25,000 PhD engineers a year. The high production of engineers and their migration from the BRIC countries have helped the west. Brazil and India produce very few high-quality scientists and engineers. India is paradoxically the worlds largest exporter of IT services after the US. But unlike Brazil, the Indian state invests little in technical education. Its expenditure on R&D per student is insignicant, the lowest among the BRIC countries, while Brazil spends the highest. Given that elite institutions are few and the focus on quality is very low in other institutions, scientists in all the four BRIC countries tend to migrate to the west. China has been working on several incentives to persuade its top academics abroad to return home. India hopes its changed economic and academic environment will lure some of its diaspora back. There are some signs of a brain gain, though the numbers are very small 9% of the Chinese students in science and engineering in the US, 11% of the Indian students, and 52% of the Brazilian students have plans of returning home after completing their studies. But a large number still prefer to stay back, mainly because the starting salaries for graduates in all the four BRIC countries are very low.
Conclusions

Let me conclude by summarising the main trends in higher education in the BRIC countries. With rapidly growing higher education systems, the BRIC countries are transforming themselves from regional players to global players in higher education. Each of these countries is a major player in its region. Brazil has the most vibrant higher education system in Latin America, and its public universities are research powerhouses for the region. India is the best in south Asia, and if its language advantage is factored in, may even be one of the best in Asia. China with a small but increasing number of universities in the global university rankings is emerging as a major player in east Asia, competing with Singapore and South Korea. Russia is much ahead of the other three BRIC countries, but it still has a long way to go to emerge as a major player in Europe. The BRIC countries are experiencing a very high rate of growth in the demand for higher education. But given that the scal capacity of the state in all the four countries is under strain, they have not been able to meaningfully meet the key challenge of catering for the exploding demand without compromising on
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

quality and equity. The state in each of the countries has adopted a stratied system of higher education a few highquality, elite institutions coexisting beside a large number of low-quality, mass institutions to address the problems of access, quality, and equity, all at the same time. The elite and the mass in higher education are not necessarily dened in economic terms. The elite institutions are of high quality, but they are mostly publicly-funded and ensure fair access to all. Public funding is highly skewed in favour of these institutions. The mass system receives less public funding, offers poor-quality education, and is mostly left to the private sector. It is not the poor, but those from the middle- and high-income groups, who can afford high fees, who attend these institutions. The mass institutions produce large numbers of graduates, while the elite ones produce a small number of high-quality graduates. There is a chance that some of these elite institutions may gure among the top 100 or 200 universities in global rankings. Interestingly, the development of a stratied system of higher education has not encountered any signicant level of public opposition even in democratic India and Brazil. For, the policy has allowed rapid expansion of the higher education system, partly supported by policies of afrmative action, and it has met the educational aspirations of the high- and middle-income groups. With a clear long-term policy and heavy investments in the quality of higher education and R&D, though in a few elite institutions, China seems to be relatively successful in developing higher education and its economic outlook seems promising. Russia is yet to make signicant moves to transform its higher education system to suit the needs of the 21st century global knowledge economy. Though highly innovative and open, Brazil faces the challenges of quality and inequity created by a huge private sector. India, lacking a coherent longterm policy, confronts much bigger challenges in ensuring quality, quantity, equity and governance in higher education. To sum up, while all the four BRIC countries face tough challenges in improving all aspects of higher education, they are more formidable in the case of India, while macroeconomic conditions seem to favour China over the others. I end with a few questions that researchers in comparative education and policymakers in education would do well to ponder. It is widely held that the expansion of higher education will contribute to growth and also improve income distribution. Will a system of higher education characterised by stratication and dominance of the private sector be able to contribute to sustainable growth and better income distribution? In the long run, will the expansion of mass, low-quality higher education spell trouble for the goals of high economic growth? Can such a stratied system of higher education help in the rapid economic transformation of todays societies into ones that support inclusive and faster growth? How far is the public policy of fortifying a small group of elite institutions to produce high-quality research and graduates socially justied, economically efcient, and educationally sustainable? Does such a stratied system really address the issues of access, quality, and equity in higher education? Is there no better alternative?
47

April 6, 2013

vol xlviii no 14