US colleges not as good as thought of

Under the able supervision of the government, the Indian university system has all but collapsed. Except for a few institutions, an Indian degree is not of much use.

So parents, who can afford it or whose children are good enough to get funding, have started to send their children abroad, mostly to the United States. Last year, nearly 75,000 Indians went there for studies, about 40 per cent of them for undergraduate degrees.

But how good are American colleges? A review* of four books on the subject by Andrew Hacker shows that they are not what they are cracked up to be. They are better than Indian colleges, doubtless, but certainly not worth the tuition they demand, which is around $25,000 a year, give or take 10 per cent.

"Since 1980, average tuition at private colleges has more than doubled, rising from $10,954 to $23,505 in today's dollars. Schools charge what the market will bear". But the high fees don't seem to have deterred Indians and other Asians from applying and getting in.

Most people, Americans included, think the high fees are fine because their children will benefit from all those distinguished professors and the intellectual experience at the university. But that, in fact, isn't the way it works.

". . . most of the tuition money is allocated to expanding the top tiers of the faculty, both in numbers and in what they are paid. During the last twenty years, Harvard's roster of full professors has grown from 533 to 777, Columbia's from 462 to 589, and Duke's from 284 to 399, while student enrollments have remained essentially the same."

On average, the salaries of full professors in the best universities have risen 45 per cent and they swallow 65 per cent of their faculties' budgets. "Full professors there are still receiving the biggest share of their institutions' budgets."

And what do the kids get in return? This is the real shocker. "As matters stand, one measure of a university's prestige is how little teaching is asked of its tenured professors."

This means undergraduates are taught by "graduate assistants, adjuncts, and part-time faculty who will never be promoted. Some even handle full loads for a third of the $100,000 that professors get  --  even if they don't teach. That saving is what makes the six-figure salaries possible."

At even some of the best universities there are professors who have stopped publishing after receiving tenure. In that sense, they are like our government servants, including university teachers. Getting the job is like winning a lottery that insures you for life.

Not all colleges are like this, of course. But enough are, to make one pause and wonder.

The admissions process depends on SAT scores. For the top colleges, you have to get between 1500 and 1590.

The universities then arrange the applications in descending order of scores, which are written on the envelope containing the application.

It is perhaps this that has led to the huge increase in the number of Indians and Asians who do extremely well in their SAT. "They make up less than 4 per cent of the nation's college-age population, but account for 35 per cent of the undergraduates at MIT, followed by 27 per cent at Stanford, 20 per cent at Columbia and Penn, along with 18 per cent at Harvard."

As we saw, they are taught by graduate assistants, adjuncts, and part-time faculty, not by the big shots.

I have been arguing for a long time that if only the government here would let go and let private universities find their own level via the market, India can become a leading exporter not of undergraduates but of undergraduate teaching.

All we have to do enforce just a small amount of discipline in the faculties in UGC-funded colleges and let the market do it in the private ones. Not too much to ask, surely, if the rewards can potentially so huge?