Global education and research

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India has a rich intellectual tradition of scholarship going back many thousands of years. India today encompasses not just science — the Indian space programme, atomic energy research, biotechnology — but also the social sciences and the humanities as well, including world-class centres of excellence in Indian universities and in the IITs. As in other markets, it is globalisation which determines the university education and research trends emerging today. We see greater student mobility. In 2003, global demand for international student places was 2.1 million; this will rise to 5.8 million in 2020.

For instance , the number of Indian students coming to UK for higher education has risen from around 4,000 in 1999 to 23,000 in 2007. Alongside this, we see the rise of transnational , or ‘borderless’ education, made possible by the huge advances in electronic media. Collaborative higher education provision is delivered in many ways: branch campuses set up by universities in other countries — even other continents; distance and e-learning , franchising and validation.

Pundits predict that the demand for such sources of university education will expand even faster than the increase in ‘international’ students. To date, some UK universities have set up campuses overseas — the University of Nottingham in Malaysia and China, for example, while Glasgow Caledonian has an engineering campus in Oman; the University of Liverpool has formed a partnership with Xi’an Jiaotong University to set up an entirely new institution in China.

Several US universities have established bases in London while Monash has campuses in South Africa, Singapore, the US and London. However, global education isn’t just about where students go to learn and the methods by which we teach them: it’s about what they learn and how equipped they are at the end of their degrees to enter the marketplace . Academic knowledge is no longer enough. We need to think seriously about developing our students’ employability, equipping them with the skills they need to succeed — and which their countries need to flourish — in the world of work. And yet, this too, does not go quite far enough — we need a new global knowledge infrastructure to encourage research, development and education.

For too long, I think, universities have operated as national servants to national ambitions . Today, however, it is only by ‘going global’ that universities can meet the challenges of globalisation and tackle the big issues such as energy, global security and the global environment. This requires collaboration and partnerships, especially in research. This is simply practical common-sense — this kind of vital research infrastructure can’t be set up in one university or even in one country