Higher Ed Links

1. Ila Patnaik in The Indian Express: Set the Campus Free:

   The paper finds that the first element that pulls down the rank of a university is the process of budgetary approval from the government. The average European university that sets its own budget has a rank of 200 while the average European university that needs approval from the government has a rank of 316. In other words, giving a university autonomy to set its own budget on average yields an improvement of 116 ranks. The message for India: in order to obtain high-quality universities, we need to give universities autonomy.

2. The paper that Patnaik refers to is entitled The Governance and Performance of Research Universities: Evidence from Europe and the U.S., and it's by Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Caroline M. Hoxby, Andreu Mas-Colell, André Sapir. (The paper is summarized in this NBER Digest article by Linda Gorman). Here's the abstract:

   We investigate how university governance affects research output, measured by patenting and international university research rankings. For both European and U.S. universities, we generate several measures of autonomy, governance, and competition for research funding. We show that university autonomy and competition are positively correlated with university output, both among European countries and among U.S. public universities. We then identity a (political) source of exogenous shocks to funding of U.S. universities. We demonstrate that, when a state's universities receive a positive funding shock, they produce more patents if they are more autonomous and face more competition from private research universities. Finally, we show that during periods when merit-based competitions for federal research funding have been most prominent, universities produce more patents when they receive an exogenous funding shock, suggesting that routine participation in such competitions hones research skill.

3. Charu Sudan Kasturi in The (Kolkata) Telegraph: India’s higher education regulators have accused the Yash Pal panel on reforms of exceeding its terms of reference in recommending their termination as independent entities.

4. Hemali Chhapia in The Times of India: Every second student in India enrols in private college.

5. Deepa Kurup in The Hindu: Aiming for New-Look Universities.

6. Aarti Dhar in The Hindu: Kapil Sibal says Yash Pal Committee report will be implemented in 100 days.