Private sector key to higher college enrolment: Sibal

According to, human resource development minister Kapil Sibal, private sector participation in higher education alone could help India achieve its goal of 30-per cent college enrolment rates by 2020.

Speaking at the HT Leadership Summit today, Sibal said for India a critical mass of youth in higher education was necessary for the country to evolve from a developing to a first-world country.

Sibal's views on the need for private sector participation in higher education received enthusiastic support from Dipak Jain, former dean of the Kellogg School of Management and the dean-designate of Europe's famed B-school INSEAD.

CEO of the Apollo Group of educational institutions, Chad Eldestein of Apollo Group was the third speaker at the session, which focused on whether India could achieve both its quality and quantity goals in education.
 
''We are seeing the rusting of the West and the shine of the East in the sense that the West has human resources but no jobs and India has jobs but no trained human resources. Our first task as a nation needs to be to send a critical mass of students to college,'' Sibal said.

Only 30 million of the 220 million students who go to school in India, enter college at present. Jain said that top private educational institutions, like a Harvard need not work for profit.

Among the possibilities that needed to be explored to raise enrolmnet, Jain enumerated  greater partnerships like the collaboration between Kellogg and Wharton on the Indian School of Business, foreign direct investment in higher education and setting up knowledge cities.