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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.

India has joined a worldwide trend in which nations are seeking to improve the quality of their higher education systems by giving greater autonomy and accountability to lower levels of government (e.g., states) and to the higher education institutions themselves. India's 12th Five-Year Plan, released in December 2012, suggests a range of reforms to higher education to change the role of the national government from "command and control" to "steer and evaluate." One approach that has proven effective in other countries is explicitly linking funding to well-defined quality measures and quality assurance processes. While India's 12th Five-Year Plan discusses the importance of quality improvement and funding, it does not discuss how quality and funding can be linked to support quality improvement under a "steer and evaluate" approach to governance. In this report, the authors review India's and other countries' efforts to reform their higher education systems and suggest seven policy actions that the Indian national government and other stakeholders can take to improve higher education by linking funding to quality.

• Chapter One

  India's Current System of Higher Education

• Chapter Two

  India's 12th Five-Year Plan: A Paradigm Shift

• Chapter Three

  International Experiences with Decentralized Governance and Policies That Link Funding of Higher Education with Quality

• Chapter Four

  Implementing the 12th FYP's New Approach to Governance and Introducing Policies to Link Quality and Funding in India