U.S. not the only place higher ed faces crisis

CHENNAI, India — “Higher education: The mess,” screamed the cover of India Today, one of the country’s leading news magazines.

“Welcome to the club!” I thought to myself, reflecting on how the cover echoed discussions in the United States.

In America, the mess in higher education has been a major preoccupation.

In particular, the financial aspects from a student’s perspective are increasingly bleak. The recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that more students are taking out loans thanks to the widening gap between the cost of attending colleges and universities, and the financial ability of students and their families to pay: “Nearly 53 percent of full-time undergraduate students borrowed money to attend college in 2007-8, compared with 49.5 percent in 2003-4.”

To make things worse, fresh college graduates find that there are few jobs waiting for them, a situation that has grown even worse.

After all the time and money invested, students and their families begin to wonder if college degrees were worth it.

Having seen quite a few students in those circumstances, some, including me, wonder whether higher education is an economic bubble that is waiting to burst, similar to other bubbles that already have burst in this Great Recession.

However, the problems pale in comparison to those in India.

There simply aren’t enough colleges and universities in India to serve the large population that is college-ready. Capacity is an important issue because, demographically speaking, India is a young country — almost half the country’s population is younger than 25 years old.

Such a choked structure makes higher education significantly less accessible to the less privileged — and there are a lot of them.

My parents’ neighbors tapped into their networks to get a seat at one of the evening colleges here in Chennai for an 18-year-old whose mother works as a maid. There would not have been a college seat for this teenager without this effort.

My parents and their neighbors have chipped in with financial assistance, which has made it possible for this young man to attend college after working for a couple of hours every morning.

A few aspects of the Indian “mess,” however, are simply beyond any comparison with the United States.

For instance, the India Today article reports that “on average most Indian universities revise their curricula only once in five to 10 years.”

Such a “stable” curriculum might have been acceptable in the early years of the 20th century, but not now when we are barely able keep up with changes that come every day.

In contrast, most of the universities in the United States, including the one where I teach, regularly update the curricula to reflect new insights gained through scholarship, and to prepare students for a rapidly changing world.

In fact, a college curriculum that is not considered current might be grounds for revoking an institution’s accreditation.

On top of this, within the academic walls, and in public forums, including this newspaper, we have intense debates and arguments about higher education — something sorely lacking in many other countries, including India. These help ensure that the typical American college is of significantly higher quality than a typical institution in most parts of the world.

Ultimately, however, it comes down to the quality of students. I think this is really where the Indian higher education system is in a mess.

Citing a study by the McKinsey consulting group, India Today reports that “only one out of 10 Indian students with degrees in humanities and one of four engineering graduates are employable.” This certainly warrants an OMG!

The dismal conditions in India do not mean that we do not need to work on higher education issues, particularly here in Oregon. We need to be constantly vigilant — not to fend off economic threats outside our borders, but because we ought to offer the best opportunities to our youth.

I am reminded of my childhood: Whenever we complained that a sibling or a cousin got more snacks, my grandmother admonished us to “just focus on your plate!”

In America, in more ways than one, we do, indeed, have a lot on our plate.

For The Register-Guard
Appeared in print: Monday, Aug 3, 2009

Has Obama lost healthcare reform?

Way back, on February 1st--yes, six months ago it was--I blogged about the Tom Daschle nomination fiasco as a major blow for healthcare reform. Not because I cared for Daschle. But because he would have been an influential cabinet secretary with extensive legislative connections--the kind of combination needed for all the political stuff that needed to happen. Further, the fiasco meant that Team Obama was back sorting through the list of qualified people, and more time was therefore going to be lost in the process.

Through all this, Obama played healthcare over-carefully. He tried to stay only at the big picture level and succeeded. And, at the same time, he did not seem to come across as eagerly and loudly a supporter of "his" healthcare proposals as he did when it came to the stimulus bill. In fact, one might want to refresh memories on how he went aroudn trumpeting the stimulus bill, bank rescue operations and, of course, the auto industry bailout where he even came across as the country's car dealer-in-chief.

Clive Crook has written more about this aloofness of Obama's when it comes to healthcare, and why reform is stalling:

This failure has three separate aspects. First, though politicians and commentators talk about the president’s plan, he does not have one. Learning the lessons of “Hillarycare” far too well, Mr Obama has set out broad goals for reform and some principles to guide the design, but no more. This self-imposed distance is bad both substantively and politically. It is substantively bad because left to its own devices an unguided, disputatious, difference-splitting Congress was bound to make a hash of it. And it is politically bad because the public understands this.

Opinion is turning against health reform partly because watching this initiative lurch to and fro on Capitol Hill without adult supervision is scary. Anything could happen, thinks the median voter, and probably will. Note too that when the president decided to glide above it all and take credit for whatever emerged, he squandered his political capital. He is still expending his popularity on making the case for reform in the abstract, not on advancing a specific blueprint. That was all right at the outset, but no longer. The debate has moved on to specifics, leaving the president behind.

Mr Obama’s second failure is even more surprising: one of salesmanship. He still pitches for comprehensive reform, but with apparently weakening conviction. In his televised talk on the subject last week, he seemed almost bored.

Worse, the president’s message is at odds with the product taking shape in Congress. This is all about controlling costs, he says: without reform, healthcare will bankrupt the country. That would be an excellent line if Congress was seriously trying to build control of costs into its bills, but it is not. Widening coverage is the priority. So it should be, you might argue – but in that case the president has to sell access and health security as things worth paying for, an entirely different proposition.

Every measure on the table would increase costs. The administration, despite all it says about “bending the curve”, is demanding only deficit-neutrality over 10 years. Every time Mr Obama stresses cost control, he diminishes his credibility.

The third failure goes beyond healthcare. Elected as a moderate, a centrist and a pragmatist, Mr Obama has repeatedly sided with the liberal left of his party on economic policy. The design of the fiscal stimulus, the shape of the budget, and Mr Obama’s willingness at every turn to support higher spending and higher taxes on the better-off – to pay for health reform, social security reform, infrastructure investment, expanded educational opportunities, wage subsidies for the poor, you name it – has delighted the party’s left and alarmed its centrists. The related charge of fiscal indiscipline is starting to stick, and it colours the health debate.

If health reform does go down to defeat, it will not be because of Republican opposition, but because of dissenting conservative Democrats and disaffected moderates in the country at large. In disappointing these people, Mr Obama has badly miscalculated. His political power depends on them. He must take the lead in devising a health reform capable of appealing to the centre. For his own good and the country’s, he needs to be the president the US thought it was electing.

In India, man has yet to make peace with nature

I visited Mumbai to spend a couple of days with my great-aunt, who lives with her daughter’s family in a suburb. Suburbs, according to a typical joke in urban planning, are places where street names bear the names of trees that were cut down en masse to make way for the development.

The Mumbai suburb that I went to, Mulund, has names of trees that are not even native to the local geography. The name of a multi-storied housing complex is “Silver Birch” and, oddly enough, there are quite a few other complexes in the same neighborhood with names such as “Pinewood” and “Silver Oaks.”

Of considerably more importance than names of alien tree species is how these residential complexes reflect a critical tension between urbanization and green space.

The geographic expansion into the suburbs has meant a slow encroachment on forest areas and the hills that surround Mumbai. Mulund is a poster-child for this encroachment. Loss of trees and green space has become a heated public policy issue here, and elsewhere. Finally!

As viewers of the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire” might recall, Mumbai is a huge metropolis with a population of more than 13 million — though it feels as if there are a hundred times more. The housing needs, as one might imagine, are immense, as was evident in the same movie, which is also why middle- and upper-middle classes commute for hours from distant suburbs.

Suburbanization has resulted in significant loss of green space. It is not that the government or the people were unconcerned; when a government is resource-starved, and with hundreds of thousands clamoring to find a place of their own, it was easier for everyone to be in denial. Or, a policy of benign neglect, as we sometimes refer to such practices in the profession.

But when urban forests have been replaced by concrete buildings that seem to be taller and wider than the redwood trees after which at least one building is named, benign neglect cannot continue forever.

Thanks to the work of environmentalists and the government, too, it appears that large-scale destruction of forests has been slowed down, if not completely halted. These efforts are also reflected in the manner in which metropolitan areas now review land development proposals. To such an extent that it was feared that the government would swing a wrecking ball to demolish all structures that compromised urban green spaces. Such a retroactive decision would, obviously, add to the chaos that characterizes life in India.

The courts have taken a rational view in their recent decision to regularize all developments constructed before 2005. The status of more recent constructions is not quite clear, however.

This competition between nature and humans is not merely in the metropolitan area of Mumbai. It is a story that is repeated in many ways all over the country. According to India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests, “Due to the impact of biotic pressure on our forests, many forest areas spread across the country have been depleted and degraded, which is a serious concern.”

Recent incidents are telling: A couple of hundred miles away from Mumbai, in the forest areas, villagers stoned a leopard to death, even while forest officials stood by. And the story gets even worse — it was the third such leopard-stoning in the country within a matter of days. The villagers pelted the big cat because it had strayed into the village searching for food and water and, in the process, attacked a couple of youngsters.

Also in the news a few days ago was a story about the absence of tigers in one of India’s tiger parks — Panna National Park — which is in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Apparently it was not the first occurrence in India — tigers have yet to be spotted in another reserve in the same state, and in a third protected area in the state of Rajasthan, which is in northwestern India.

It is clear that the flora and fauna will continue to face intense competition from humans in villages and cities alike. I hope that Mumbaikars and other Indians, too, will soon figure out how to peacefully coexist with nature, as much as we in Oregon — with “real” birches and oaks — have, by and large, worked out. We ought to thank pioneering visionaries like Gov. Tom McCall for that.

For The Register-Guard
Appeared in print: Saturday, Aug 1, 2009