NewslettersBorderless Report July 2011Germany and India: The national constraints to HE internationalisation Germany and India: The national constraints to HE internationalisation
Foreign and domestic policy can be conceptualised and transmitted separately, but together they tell a better story. In higher education, you would be hard-pressed to find a government that disputed the need to ‘go global’ – but what happens at domestic level directly affects how this unfolds. Germany and India constitute interesting and contrasting cases.
The Economist noted on 30 June that ‘No German institution is among the leaders in global rankings, and money is part of the problem’. Only two of the seven Länder that introduced modest tuition fees in 2005 now plan to continue with them. The argument was that the abolition of fees was ‘an odd way for Germany to push its universities into the top tier’.
Back in March, the higher education minister of was quoted as saying that institutions would be fully compensated for the loss of revenue – to the tune of some €249m per year. From a UK perspective it’s a topsy-turvy world.
Whether or not the Länder can afford this, the federal state seems to have more money than its European neighbours to invest in its HE internationalisation project – especially perhaps on the research side. In 2008 the federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) launched a ‘Strategy for the Internationalisation of Science and Research’ and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) implemented an action programme, ‘Quality through internationality‘.
The BMBF strategy was the normal foreign-policy mix of self-interest and global responsibility. It focused on research cooperation with internationally leading research groups; securing access for German companies to the world's leading and emerging high-tech markets and vice-versa; intensifying cooperation with developing countries in education and research for the purposes of socio-economic development and poverty reduction; and contributing to global challenges like climate change, health, security and migration. A new international strategy from BMBF is expected to be published soon.
The DAAD programme focused on more scholarships to attract ‘globally sought-after students and junior scientists’ to Germany and on increasing the share of education spending in foreign aid.
Germany has succeeded in the foreign aid objective. University World News reported this week that Germany is second in the world only to France as a higher education aid donor ($1.05bn versus $1.36bn, respectively). This education share of bilateral aid is about five times that devoted by the US and UK. This amounts to a realignment of what foreign aid means. The DAAD programme specified that it would ‘set up supra-regionally oriented excellence centres at selected universities in Africa’ but India and China are the big winners in the spending realignment. It is startling to see that China – with foreign-exchange reserves of $2,850bn at the end of 2010 and owed another $900bn by the US alone – receives $700m a year, though perhaps less so when aid in this case means mainly scholarships, and scholarships are an expression of the foreign-policy goals of the awarding countries.
DAAD has had an office in Delhi since 1962 but raised its game in 2009 through an initiative with BMBF called ‘A New Passage to India’, worth €4.3m annually to 2013. This goes beyond international recruitment to include support for international partnerships, joint PhDs, bilateral exchanges of young scholars, and the establishment of ‘Indo-German centres of excellence’. Nothing unusual in that, other than to note that DAAD continues to spend more than that in the US, Russia and China.
Most are aware of the Indian government’s ambitions for higher education excellence and expansion, and Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal’s insistence that the involvement of foreign universities are an absolute necessity in reaching those goals. Cue visiting delegations of ministers and senior academics and . Sibal’s counterpart in Germany, Annette Schavan, Minister of Education and Research, met in Delhi at the end of May to discuss how Germany fits in this plan.
The outcome as described by the Indian Press Information Bureau is similar in spirit and letter to the outcomes of other such meetings (set up mechanisms for faculty development, need for vocational education and skills development, mutual recognition of degrees would be useful), though this meeting also produced a plan for a ‘consortia approach’ to collaboration – a ‘meta-university’ in which two or three Indian universities partner with two or three German universities for degree-level courses. (This international meta-university appears to be a distinct concept from the Indian one recently advocated by Sam Pitroda of India’s National Innovation Council.) If Germany’s recent track record elsewhere is an indication (the German-Turkish University, for example), there is no doubt that these coordinated partnership plans will be realised.
The point is as described by a report from the Observatory for the UK HE International Unit in 2009: many governments have learned to talk about the pivotal role of HE in enhancing innovation and international competitiveness but a few countries, such as Germany, coordinate better at national level. There, international student recruitment policies are integrated with national trade and cultural policies, economic and research agendas drive international partnerships and recruitment, and collaborative partnerships are based on mutual gain rather than financial returns.
In India itself, the complexity and fragmentation of domestic politics and hyper-democratic nature of the discourse can and do act as a brake on the central government’s goals. The fate, over the past year, of the minister’s ambitions for the HE sector constitutes a textbook case of these constraints. The goals of sweeping regulatory reforms, a 150% increase in the gross enrollment ratio by 2020, and legal clarity for foreign university involvement in India all rested – or at least are seen by the outside world to rest – on the passage of key pieces of legislation which entered the Indian parliament in May 2010, and subsequently vanished in committee corridors.
Although some, from the start, have greeted the sheer scale and ambition of the reforms with scepticism, the Indian and foreign press have darkened their tone in the past few months (compare this article from the Chronicle with this one). If not yet at the post-mortem stage, there is more focus on the loss of momentum in Sibal’s great education project. (Sibal was also encumbered in November 2010 with two additional portfolios, including Communications and Information Technology, and it is clear from the Indian media that this morass takes up much of his time.)
Higher education internationalisation is everywhere affected by the cycles and whims of domestic politics. The situation in India is serious: the HE project for expansion and world-class excellence has lost some momentum and could go off the rails. Sibal retained the HRD portfolio in Tuesday's cabinet reshuffle but he kept Telecoms too. This vote of confidence in his abilities seems like a sort of punishment.
In Germany, domestic political pressure on the modest fees is probably not itself holding HE institutions back from world-class excellence. And the fact that they have a coordinated and funded approach to projecting themselves outwards keeps German institutions well in the game. From where Sibal is standing they are more than welcome.
WL