Why Punjab needs an authority to regulate higher education Premium

The impact of privatization on higher education in Punjab, highlighting the need for regulatory reform for quality and transparency.

The opening up of higher education to non-state entities has drastically altered the educational landscape in the country. Presently, the higher education sector consists of a large variety of service suppliers ranging from highly commercial ones to those purely committed to serving public interest. In some cases, higher education institutions are like corporates, some standalone and some are a chain operating under the same management-cum-ownership.

Courses, curriculum designs, cost of education, location dynamics, student recruitment, and staff deployment practices have all changed. For-profit private players are dominating the education delivery matrix with with considerable market power particularly in the professional segment of higher education.

Noticeably, within the ‘for-profit’ sub sector, some exceptionally good quality self-managed and self-regulated institutions, albeit limited in number, are emerging with strong commitment to ethical and academic values and the goal of establishing universities/institutes of global standards in the long-term. They are striving hard to provide world-class education in a transparent and accountable manner by hiring globally renowned academicians specialising in the frontier areas of technology, management, legal studies, medicine, computational sciences and so on.

Ironically enough, on the other side, a huge chunk of service suppliers is guided by forces driven by business and political interests that are out to make a quick buck. Media has reported the rampant unfair practices they indulge in. The privatization of profits and socialization of costs, inherent in the market mechanism, necessitates the creation of a regulatory mechanism particularly in the supply of educational services where information asymmetry happens to be large between the creator of services and its user.

In 2010, the Government of Punjab notified the Punjab Private University Policy (PPUP). This policy initiated the process of establishment of self-financing private universities in the State through specific Acts of the State Legislature to be passed separately for each such university within the overall framework of this policy. As per the clauses (7, 8 and 9) of the PPUP, all the private universities have been given complete autonomy to start any course, fix the fee structure, and adopt their own admission process. They have the freedom to decide all the related issues including employment and service conditions of staff. These universities have been termed as ‘self-regulatory’ bodies in the PPUP (clause 7.3) thereby giving them complete freedom to take decisions on all important academic and administrative issues. In a way, the PPUP empowered the private universities to drive the higher education sector in Punjab as per their own programme of vision and action.

As per the University Grants Commission (UGC) website, Punjab has now 35 universities out of which, one is a Central University, 14 are state universities, 18 are private and two are deemed universities. As per functional autonomy provided to the private universities under the PPUP, that terms these “self-regulatory bodies”, there will naturally be a strong tendency among many of these institutions to concentrate relatively more upon those sets of professional courses which are more revenue generating.

The following case illustrates this. In the last couple of years ,many such private universities have started admitting excessive numbers of students (no cap on seats in each course) to the most sought-after course of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). The persistence of such a practice in due course may create deficiency of skilled people in other engineering trades which are foundational in nature.