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India's 12th Five-Year Plan Offers a Unique Opportunity to Improve Quality

• Higher education institutions in India have a quality issue, as evidenced by a lack of presence on world ranking measures and low employment rates of graduates.
• It is challenging to improve quality under India's current higher education system, because the roles of various higher education stakeholders overlap substantially, and their agendas and the means by which they implement them often conflict.
• The call in India's 12th Five-Year Plan for a shift from "command and control" to "steer and evaluate" will require policies to support this decentralized governance.
• Three aspects of India's higher education system make it particularly suitable for adopting policies that link quality and funding: the large size of its higher education system, which may require unique policies to reign in quality across all institutions; the recent increases in India's higher education investment; and the consensus among stakeholders that reforms are needed.

Lessons Learned from International Approaches Linking Funding and Quality

• Countries that want to link quality and funding must find good measures of quality and apply these measures across all institutions.
• Careful planning and strategic implementation over time is necessary to implement policies linking quality and funding.
• Capacity-building is likely to be necessary, including building data systems and providing additional funding to those responsible for linking quality and funding.
• Stakeholder roles are likely to shift under these types of systems, with a larger role for institutions, students, and families.