Internationalisation of higher education vis-a-vis national education policy: in alignment or conflict?

This paper focuses on the implications of the prospective entry of foreign education providers for the qualitative and quantitative progress of the higher education sector in India. The initiation of the legislative process to allow foreign Universities to set up offshore campuses in India alongside other measures to address the deficiencies of the sector, is an indicator that the Government of India perhaps views FDI in higher education as a plausible strategy to reform the sector.

This paper argues that the expectation that the entry of foreign education providers will make a positive contribution to the progress of the sector is based on some critical assumptions whose validity is crucial for the translation of the perceived benefits into benefits actually realized. One such assumption is that even though there may not be a perfect overlap in the objectives of national education policies and those of the foreign providers, there may not be a conflict either. The paper attempts to analyse the factors driving internationalization in higher education on the supply-side, on the background of the current objectives of education policy in India and assesses the degree of alignment/conflict in interests of these two standpoints. The paper observes that working of FEPs is likely to run contrary to the objectives of current national policy towards education. On this background the paper infers that the expectation that foreign providers can play a positive role in correcting the qualitative and quantitative imbalances of the sector appears to be a matter of misplaced faith and questions the rationality of the strategy of internationalization as a plausible policy for reforming the sector.