A recent report published by The Economist shows a massive rise in China’s educational institutions which are at par with global ones. It specifically mentions about China’s rising Tshingua University.
While India has been quite at par with its counterparts in building world class universities, this time it’s China which has stolen the show where incidentally higher education wasn’t faring any better than India’s as recently as the early-2000s.
The report talks about the rapid rise of Tsinghua University which excels in maths and computing research was ranked 66th in 2006-09 and 1st in 2013-16. While Tsinghua had the largest individual share for number of papers in the top 1% of the most highly cited ones in maths and computing in 2013-16, the top 15 universities were from just four jurisdictions—the US, China, Hong Kong and Singapore—and, crucially, the Chinese share of the pie was larger than the US’s, even if just so.
Meanwhile, the number of Indian institutes and universities that break into the top-100 to 300 universities globally has remained low.
China has been pumping billions of dollars into its universities to catapult it to the global domain. First project 211 was aimed at preparing 100 Chinese universities ready for the academic demands of the 21st century.
Since 2015, the Double First Class Plan that aims to nurture two groups—one, leading universities, and the other, specific departments in a larger pool of institutions—could soon see Chinese universities replace Western universities.
The main reason for this amazing growth is the funding the Chinese authorities are making to these institutes and universities. The payments for a paper published have risen from $25 nearly three decades back, to as much as $165,000.
For STEM research in Scopus, the world’s biggest catalogue of abstracts and citations, China’s share has risen from from 4% in 2000 to 19% in 2016, beating the US. Research originating in China has been cited 39.2 million times between 1996-2017; Indian research has been cited less than a third as much in that period.
The spending by the private sector in China as well as its universities on R&D far outstrips that in India.
The Chinese pipeline for research, in terms of gross enrolment ratio (GER) in tertiary education, too, has seen massive growth leaps—China’s tertiary GER in 1995 actually lagged India’s (4.48% of the school-leaver age cohort in the respective national population vs 5.5%) but is now close to 50% while India’s is a much lower 26%.
China’s focus on encouraging research has brought back home Chinese talent educated in top-rung Western universities.
Meanwhile, India needs to address its higher education regulation, to begin with. India also loses a massive chunk of its talent to ‘brain drain’ as it’s evident that there is no paucity of Indian-origin academics in foreign nations winning laurels.
India must take inspiration from China if it wants to create world class institutions that it so often talks of.