Consider how the next 30 years might look if the creation of a “Princeton Mumbai,” a “Harvard Hyderabad” or an “Oxford Kolkata” were to be permitted?
Firstly, most of the top U.S. universities would be reluctant to proceed such. As to why? You will find it out eventually! Branch campuses of Ivy League schools do exist, such as the Yale-NUS College in Singapore for example, but they are usually smaller and aren’t considered as relative if compared to the home university. Top Universities tends to guard their positions as exclusive institutions thereby reducing the importance of their branch universities all the more. Although Students do get enrolled in them, but it’s just not the same. And to be very honest, it won’t be easy for Harvard to hire faculty of comparable quality in India in most areas of academic study.
Even if Harvard hesitates, schools such as the University of Texas at Austin, Georgia Institute of Technology or perhaps one of the nearby Singaporean schools would not. And the possibility of some schools in the top 100 to start operations in India cannot be ruled out either.
However, according to some, the schools that have warmly accepted the extended offer by India and welcome expanding their India operations will rise considerably in reputation. After all, India is in the midst of a phenomenal explosion of talent in diverse fields and shares 2% of world brain or prodigies out of 17%. To name a few, SundarPichai of Alphabet; Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft; Nobel Prize winner in economics, Abhijit Banerjee; the human-computer, Shakuntala Devi and VishwanandAnand is one of the world’s top chess players. Indian writers are famous around the globe such as Rupi Kaur, Shashi Tharoor and so on. All of them are borne out of Indian soil and has greatly impacted and influenced the global community.
The universities that will open their significant branches in India, without a shadow of a doubt would be counted among the very best Institutes in the world — not the top 100, but among the top 50. Due to the brunt of overflowing competitive pressures, the very top schools that initially were reluctant to enter India would find themselves drawn in. Currently, India itself is in a situation much like that of the U.S. in 1900, when most American universities and scholars lagged behind those of Europe but overtook them in mere decades.
So the question is, does India actually needs all of these foreign branches when it has some superb schools of its own? Like the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Management, for instance. Well, some Indian institutions of higher education will improve and force some competitors out of its system— shall we say UC Berkeley? However, despite that, many talented Indians will find attending a branch of Harvard or Yale to be a rather more appealing option. Furthermore, the possibility that these top foreign schools may form alliances with Indian institutions, giving students the best of both worlds cannot be ruled out either.
This future sure looks quite ambitious but over time, the population of Indian alumni of prestigious U.S. universities will increase than those who studied and graduated in America. As a result, America’s top schools will become locomotives of opportunity. And the probability that the students attending in the U.S. are underperforming will become a reality. And maybe some of those keenest and most ambitious American students will prefer to study in India rather than in America. Wouldn’t you want to study with the very best of your peers, knowing you might be sitting next to the next generation’s Einstein, von Neumann or maybe even Ramanujan?
