Doors closed for ‘profit-oriented’ universities in India
Despite the Foreign Education Bill being passed in India, the University of Phoenix, the aggressively expanding Monash University of Australia, or Britain’s first private company-university BPP College of Professional Studies would not be permitted to set foot in the country. This is because India plans to shut its doors to the world’s public and private universities that operate for profit.
This has been mentioned by the Union Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry in the in the third restrictive clause of the Foreign Education Providers’ Bill. The other two conditions include forbidding foreign universities from repatriating funds to their home country and setting up a minimum corpus of US $11 million.
“We are not going to permit every foreign university to come in. For one, universities listed on any stock market as well as for-profit universities would not be allowed to set up campuses in India,” a senior official in the HRD ministry told a leading daily.
Though the Cabinet has approved the bill, it is still not clear in what form are the universities planning to come to India. Some have only so far declared to setting up a research centre or starting joint programme, but so far there have been no talks of building up a campus in India.
“Not allowing for-profit colleges and universities would narrow the scope of institutes that can come in, but they are clearly in the education sector for financial gain and we are not very comfortable in allowing such players,” added the HRD official.
Experts around the world say it’s difficult to separate the for-profit universities from the private ones in countries where government supervision is unclear. Also there is no specific count of such universities so far.
“How do you differentiate the not-for-profit from the under-the-table for-profit institutes? And India should know this is a tough zone,” said Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education, Boston College.
Source Link: http://learnhub.com/news/1003-doors-closed-for-%27profit-oriented%27-universities-in-india
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