Indian and American leaders gathered here Tuesday vowed, in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to be “more purposeful” in building sustainable partnerships between higher-education institutions in both countries.
In her opening remarks to the U.S.-India Higher Education Dialogue, Ms. Clinton challenged participants: “If we are determined to make these conversations and connections more purposeful and more focused, then we will each benefit.”
Her counterpart on the Indian side, Kapil Sibal, the minister in charge of higher education, agreed. “We need to move away from the spacious highways of collaboration to the dedicated corridors of connectivity,” he said.
Tuesday’s daylong meeting focused on a few areas important to both countries: expanding work-force training, fostering student exchanges, using technology to make educational opportunities available to greater numbers of people, and undertaking joint research in priority fields, such as food security and climate change.
The talks are the latest in a nearly three-year-old effort by the administrations of President Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to increase cooperation in higher education between the two countries, a $10-million joint commitment to further academic collaboration and exchange.
Improving higher-education capacity and quality is a pressing need in India, where just 12 percent of the college-age population is enrolled in college. If it cannot substantially raise college-going rates, India cannot become economically competitive, Mr. Sibal has said. Meanwhile, American students and faculty members need to be more internationally engaged to help meet global challenges, Ms. Clinton and other U.S. leaders maintain.
And while significant hurdles, including India’s often-confusing regulatory structure, remain, this latest meeting highlighted what Mr. Sibal characterized as “well-nurtured saplings grown from a few green shoots": the first recipients of the Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative awards. The eight projects—four led by American institutions and four by Indian universities—will focus on building partnerships in areas critical to economic growth and educational reform, including sustainable energy and public health. Each $250,000 grant will support scholarly exchanges, joint research, and the development of junior faculty.
One of the grant winners, Cornell University, will work with two Indian institutions, the University of Agricultural Sciences and Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel University of Agriculture and Technology, to build curriculum in food processing, plant breeding, and seed production. Some of the courses will be put online, where they can be accessible to students, researchers, and even farmers, said K.V. Raman, a professor of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell, who is the project leader.
The grant will also enable faculty members from each of the three partner institutions to spend several months at another of the universities. Although Cornell has a long history of research relationships in the country, the opportunity to spend time in Indian classrooms and laboratories will introduce Cornell faculty to new ideas pedagogical approaches, informing their teaching, Mr. Raman said.
Another grant, to Rutgers University, working with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, in Mumbai, will help jump-start planning for a national vocational school. India’s need for skilled workers, particularly in fields like automotives and health care, is acute—the country’s often-antiquated vocational programs produce just a third of the necessary work force.
To meet the demand, Mr. Sibal pledged Tuesday to open 100 new vocational schools, based on an American community-college model, by the end of next year. The national vocational school to be created by Rutgers and Tata eventually could serve as many as one million students a year, Rutgers officials said.
Indeed, the meeting’s entire afternoon session was devoted to community colleges and work-force development, a discussion Meghann Curtis, deputy assistant secretary for academic programs at the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, characterized as “lively.” (Reporters were permitted only to attend the more-formal opening and closing sessions, and Ms. Curtis spoke during a later briefing.) “The Indian government has really seized on” work-force development as an area for collaboration, she said.
DeRionne P. Pollard, president of Montgomery College, in Maryland, described much of the conversation as intensely practical, focused on approaches to curricular development, faculty preparation, industry partnerships, and governance. Her two-year institution is the recipient of an earlier State Department grant to build vocational education in India and is working with private foundations and companies in India to help meet Mr. Sibal’s goals.
At the same time, she said she emerged from the meeting re-energized. “It’s great to see someone really get it, to believe deeply in the community-college mission,” Ms. Pollard said of her Indian counterparts.
And because India has the opportunity to build its vocational-education system largely from scratch, Ms. Pollard said she thinks American institutions can learn a lot from partnerships there. “I remain convinced they will leapfrog U.S. community colleges in a decade,” she said.
Her comments were echoed by Molly M. Teas, senior adviser for education in the State Department’s Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. “This is not about the old narrative of America helping India,” she said. Noting that both Ms. Clinton and Mr. Sibal emphasized easing the way for more Americans to study in India, Ms. Teas added that the “next generation of leaders” needs to understand places like India.
James B. Milliken, president of the University of Nebraska, said he too hopes to expand student and faculty exchanges. But Mr. Milliken, who spoke during a morning session on research and innovation, said he is most excited about opportunities to tackle real-world problems, “big issues that are important to India and to Nebraska.” That’s part of Nebraska’s land-grant legacy, he said. Already, the university system is working with Indian partners, in both universities and the private sector, in areas such as early-childhood development, public health, and green energy.
Ms. Teas and other State Department officials said they hope both Tuesday’s meeting can have a “catalytic effect,” spurring more university-to-university partnerships.
While acknowledging some of the challenges, Ms. Curtis said she felt progress was being made and that education serves as an important cornerstone in the two countries’ relationship. “We have a lot of shared interests, shared values in this space,” she said.
