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Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

In India, the Challenge of Building 50,000 Colleges

Author:     Ben Arnoldy
Source:     The Christian Science Monitor
Publication Date:     16-Jan-12
 Link: In India, the Challenge of Building 50,000 Colleges
Stephan:   We are drastically cutting back on our schools, last Sunday's 60 minutes proffering the latest Dickensian horror. And our universities are becoming unaffordable to ordinary middle class students. We are breaking one of our most precious assets. In India something rather different is going on. In spite of all its failings the system will eventually stabilize at an acceptable level of education quality because it will have to. When you assess how far they have to go it may seem daunting, but the end result will make India an international powerhouse in ways the U.S. used to lead.

New Delhi

Here’s a job most 27-year-olds never get: starting up a new university – from scratch. Like an Athenian at the dawn of Greece, Dhawal Sharma is converting 25 acres of farmland outside New Delhi worked by man and ox for millenniums into the kind of marble-and-grass campus that launches odysseys of the mind.

But Mr. Sharma, a recent business-school graduate, is also young enough to still be in a band. He drums in a metal-rock group that plays the songs of 1970s headbangers like Judas Priest.

‘I really wonder if any other person who is doing the same job is as inexperienced as I am,’ says Sharma, who is the project manager for the future Ashoka University. ‘I’ve been told this in a number of government offices as well – ‘you look too young.’ ‘

The truth is India needs the young, the entrepreneurial – and maybe especially the headbanging cymbal-crashers – to help carry out what may be the most ambitious experiment in higher education in the world today. It may also be the most daunting.

Consider just these statistics:

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