Integrating higher education: Why govt policy must differentiate and support private universities Premium

Explore how India's policy must differentiate private universities by mission and capability to enhance higher education quality and innovation.

Every Union Budget is a moment when sectors ask whether public policy is aligned with the future the country is trying to build. This year, as government attention rightly centres on technology and artificial intelligence, higher education warrants closer scrutiny. India’s ambitions in technology, healthcare, research, and innovation will ultimately be shaped by what its private universities are allowed and enabled to become.

India has committed to raising its Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) to 50% by 2035. Today, higher education enrolment stands at about 4.3 crore students, corresponding to a GER of 28.4%. Achieving the target implies a system serving roughly 7.6 crore students, an addition of more than 3 crore learners in just over a decade.

That arithmetic leads to an unavoidable conclusion that India cannot meet its higher-education goals without private universities playing a role. The more important question, however, is what kind of private universities this expansion will produce.

India has encountered this dynamic before. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, private engineering colleges expanded rapidly to meet demand from the IT sector. Access grew quickly, but differentiation was weak. Most institutions prioritised early financial self-sufficiency over academic depth, and the system eventually corrected through consolidation and closures, often at significant cost to students and society at large.

The lesson was that rapid expansion without credible mechanisms to assess and reward quality creates an opaque marketplace, in which students bear disproportionate risk.

That risk now confronts the private university sector at a much larger scale. While policy has enabled the establishment of private universities, the system continues to treat them unevenly. Often through broad-brush regulation that does not adequately distinguish between institutions with very different missions, governance standards, faculty strength, and research ambition. Treating all private universities as broadly equivalent is likely to constrain the strongest among them while allowing weaker models to persist.