Government universities & the dilemma of private education
I recently met an old friend from undergrad. He and I used to debate together and thus have a very similar outlook about things and life in general. This time around we disagreed quite a bit on a range of stuff1, however we ended up discussing two very interesting issues:
a) How do some government educational institutes still retain brilliant faculty in an atmosphere where the private institutes are willing to pay them exorbitant salaries?
b) Why private educational institutes, over a long enough time horizon and with expansion, tend to dilute in quality?
How are state educational institutes retaining good faculty?
This friend is doing his masters in economics from Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi campus and was telling me about his faculty - which by his own confession, was great. Like, really great. Great to the extent that one of his professors was cited in the recent economics Nobel prize winner’s work. This is an anomaly. If you attended college anytime from 2010 till now, you know how the advent of heavily funded private educational institutes has changed the hiring landscape in educational institutes in India. These colleges (Shiv Nadar, Ashoka, Jindal etc.) attract the best talent in country and abroad because they promise a great academic platform, but more importantly, a fat salary to the prospects. Naturally, in a marketplace of talent where the talent is in short supply, educational institutes have to compete on a host of factors, primarily on salary. And thus whoever offers the best salaries, attracts the best talent. However, by this logic - all talent from state institutes should have drained to private institutes. Which is not the case in reality. Which brings us to the conundrum itself. More precisely, me and my friend were discussing how is it that ISI, an institute that isn’t even that famous outside its niche, retains such great talent.2
A caveat before we start discussing further, I’ve observed that with young talent, they disproportionately choose salary over status i.e. young academicians are more likely to choose to teach at private institutes that offer them more money without other associated perks, over working at any government educational institute where the salary is not competitive, but if hired permanently, gives you many perks and a certain kind of status i.e. “govt job”. I think there are primarily two reasons for it. First is that, many government institutes have simply either stopped hiring permanently and now only hire on an ad hoc basis or disproportionately hire ad hoc(s), with a dismal salary and no guarantee of work. People, who by whatever reasons, now have a competent education will never choose to work in an atmosphere like this, and will naturally apply to private institutes. Second, aided by the ad hocization of the faculty, there has been a cultural dilution of the status associated with ‘government job’. Remember that this notion was created and cemented in pre 1991 India where you actually could not do a lot of things outside of government. However, things have since then changed and private sector has prospered to attract the best talent, in some sectors if not all.
So the kind of talent distribution we are left with is that private universities attract around 60% young freshly graduated talent and 40% old talent that earlier worked at public universities. And the makeup of public universities is inverse i.e. 60% old faculty (those who by now have become ‘permanent’) and 40% of young faculty who are either an exception to the rule in so far as they’ve purposefully joined public university despite an offer from private university, or have been admitted as an ad hoc faculty assumingly because they had no other choice.
What is interesting is the varied incentive and variables in these two systems. The private one has abundance of young faculty which is more likely to be more enthusiastic, more experimental, and more optimistic about teaching. I’ve also seen that there is some level of naivety associated with starting out as an academician that wears off with time and supposedly makes you into a cynic. Not to argue that that is the main reason why most old faculty seem to also be boring and unmotivated. Most professors or teachers largely loose interest. And where it’s not that, there’s skewed incentives. I once had a professor in my undergrad proclaim to the whole class that he didn’t really care if we were learning or not as his job was to just come in the room for an hour and teach and leave. The obvious reason is that once you become ‘permanent’, there is almost nil chances of your services being terminated. So most of the old faculty doesn’t really have an incentive to do well at the one thing they’re supposed to do i.e. teach. And because most public universities is filled with old faculty with skewed incentives, the quality of the institutions have considerably gone down. On the other hand, private institutions give no such guarantee to anyone they hire. They’re mostly performance based i.e. if you don’t do well at what you’re supposed to do i.e. teach, then you’ll be replaced. Thus that (ideally) pushes faculty, old or new to invest in their skill and ‘perform’ better. Even though, my own experience and intuition says that the feedback mechanisms in private universities are also not taken seriously, and more or less you are held to the same standards of conduct as a professor teaching performance as a public university. Of course, the former is a bit more sensitive than the latter.
Private universities and the scaling up problem
The second major theme of our discussion was around the unsustainability at the core of private university’s models. Simply put, given that private universities are for profit and that every such university wants to scale up and expand to generate more profits - the quality of education it offers is likely to lower with such scaling up because the profit motive and quality of education are inversely proportional.
Even though this argument seems intuitive, it is not. And the caveat before I give out my reasons for why I believe so is that I do not have the complete or definitive answer to this question. This is part guesswork, part intuition, and rest lived experience.
Coming back to the argument - a university is the aggregate of its professors, administration and students. Thus we will focus on how these three categories are impacted as a university scales up. Firstly, with professors. A private university that is small in scale with enough capital will hire the best faculty. The reason why the small scale is important to sustain quality is because any such university is also competing with other universities. It is much easier to get 5 excellent professors, than 50. We also have to understand that the number of great or even good professors is limited at any point in time. Even though it can fluctuate with time, at any given time - it is in short supply. Thus after a particular point in time in scaling up journey of a specific university, it becomes harder for the university to hire the same quality and amount of talent as it did before, because it is competing with other universities who are also scaling up and looking to hire the best talent, and all such universities are competing in a marketplace of talent which itself is limited. Thus, as a university scales up - it is likely to dilute the quality of talent it hires, firstly because it actually cannot hire all of the talent due to competition from other universities, and secondly, it needs to hire someone in order to maintain the teacher student ratio as it intakes more and more students.3
Coming to students, this is a real hot button issue. Students are the soul of a university, and funnily enough if you say this to most Indian colleges VC’s and administration - they’re likely to laugh at you. Anyhow, the issue with scaling up a university is that the same constraints of talent that apply to professors also apply to students. A small institute like ISI can afford to have a very hard entrance test so that it intakes the best talent in the country, which is likely to always preserve the quality of the institution. But a private university that wants to intake as many students to increase its profits will most likely dilute most and any pre requisites to join. As and when it does that, the quality of its students as a whole will dilute. When we say that the quality of its students will dilute, we’re really talking about the average student. Because regardless of the college, there will always be really smart students in the class. However, the correct measure of the university’s quality comes from the quality of its average student. So, a private university that has thousands of students will also have if not tens, at least hundreds of really smart kids. But the average student will be much worse, given that the university is likely to dilute intake requirements.
Because students are the soul of a university, if the proportion of really driven and motivated students decreases with time, the will to do good and great things within the university also decreases. Same goes for the faculty. And if a university wants to maintain this proportion, it cannot scale up beyond a point. And because it cannot or even better, doesn’t want to scale up - it will also not want to dilute its intake requirements, which in turn is likely to admit better and brighter students.
Until now we’ve focused on the first step i.e. how scaling up affects the intake requirements and thus the subsequent quality of students and professors. However, there is also a second step. Which is that given that on the professor side, the quality of new hires is likely to be diluted, the quality of education imparted per unit student is also likely to dilute. Let this quantity be X/Y. The term X is ‘quality of education imparted’ which is decreasing because the new hires that are hired to fulfill quotas aren’t necessarily top notch faculty, and the term Y is simply the number of students which is increasing because the number of students that the university intakes keeps on increasing. Thus the quantity “quality of education imparted per unit student” keeps decreasing as the university scales up. So not only are you diluting quality of students by diluting entry requirements, you are also diluting the quality of education that it imparted to these very students by compromising on hiring, which in turn is a natural consequence of taking in more students.
I have a term for why it becomes harder and harder to sustain educational quality with scaling up - it’s called the ‘increasing marginal cost of expansion’. The idea is that the coordination costs (of education, administration, outreach, scholarship etc.) increase manifolds as a university (or for that matter any organization) scales up, and thus is becomes more costly to add the next unit to your organization with every additional new unit. Instead of a diminishing marginal cost in case of technology businesses, in education specifically, we have an increasing marginal cost of expansion. Which is why, as a university scales up, which if it is a private university, it will invariably do due to profit motive, it loses its quality and excellence. Thus the real question that private universities must ask themselves, at least in India, is how big is big enough?
Two questions still remain, which I’d like to hear more from you on:
How do large private universities such as Harvard or Stanford maintain its impeccable quality despite its scale?4
What is the effect that profit motive has on education and the society?5
Find Ashish Kulkarni’s extensive and brilliant writing on this issue here, here, here and here.
The point of our disagreement was if VC is efficient in allocating money, and if VC is the best way to solve social problems.
Our guess was that most great talent that remains at these govt. universities is really old professors who have given in many years of service to the institution and thus have become heavily invested in the community. Which is probably one of the factors why they value that over the chance to ear more money. Another factor that we agreed on is the autonomy that some of these professors, such as professors at ISI have. You ideally develop an inertia if you become comfortable at any institution. Our guess for why some of this old faculty left their positions at govt. universities is that they were sold the narrative of being able to shape a whole department in a new and promising university. That is a very alluring proposition.
I haven’t explored this issue here, but given that there is an abundance of universities that will pay competent salaries to their potential hires, what becomes the competition factor then? On other words, if universities are not competing on salaries, what do they compete on? If you’re an academic who had to decide this, I’d love to hear more from you!
My guess is that they maintain the X/Y factor. And the only way to sustain that while not capping student intake is to hire the best faculty always, which in turn really means you have to be one of the best, if not the best, universities to be able to do that.
My answer is that they are good for society, and education. However it is not a simple case to make. A separate post sometime else.