Higher Education: Is Academic Accreditation a Just System Today?

The Indian higher education system has been a domain for the unfolding of the neoliberal project. This unfolding encompasses three components. First, the expansion of private higher education at the expense of public higher education. Second, the commercialisation of higher education that began many decades ago continues to proliferate. Third, the trend of saffronisation of higher education that has aggravated after 2014. Let us consider each of these processes in broad outline.

Public higher education is persistently being squeezed for funds, resulting in its decline. This decline manifests as crumbling infrastructure, fee hikes for students, faculty shortages, dilution of academic content, adverse service conditions for faculty, increasing contractualisation of staff, besides overall neglect.  

This policy-driven attenuation of the public higher education system is driven by the need to make the higher education system a secure site for capital accumulation. Thus, poor service conditions, contractualisation, etc., in the public higher education system ensure a steady supply of teachers, with declining rights, to the private higher education system. This process is sought to be consolidated by enabling non-academic denizens of the neo-fascist dispensation to directly administer public higher educational institutions. 

Likewise, the deliberate dilution of the academic content of the syllabi leads to migration of students from relatively high-income families to elite private institutions. Further, both the shortage of seats and fee hikes in public higher education systems compel students from relatively low-income families to move toward non-elite private higher education institutions, which nevertheless gets them saddled with debt. 

Fund cuts to the public higher education system has been justified with the introduction of academic accreditation. Let us see how. For the sake of argument, let us assume there are three public higher education institutions: X, Y, and Z. Further, suppose that each received 100 units of public funding, adding up to a total of 300 in the immediate past. As part of the academic accreditation process, Y secures the highest rank, X stands second and Z is third. Consequently, public funding to Y is increased by 10 to 110, funding to X remains unchanged at 100, and funding to Z is cut by 30 to 70. The total public funding is now 280, a reduction of 20.

However, this aggregate cut is masked as follows: first, members of Y are likely to feel their work and performance have been recognised; second, members of X may believe their efforts have allowed them to keep their hold; third, members of Z are likely to blame themselves for the lower rank and funding cut. Lastly, those outside these institutions may view this ranking framework as a reasonably appropriate way to evaluate higher educational institutions. 

Yet these ways of thinking reflect what transpires within the confines of the neoliberal project. Take our stylised example: Y secures the highest rank partly because accreditation criteria favour institutions with historical advantages, such as geographical location, regularity of public funding, or cultures that favour the privileged. Conversely, these criteria disfavour X and Z to varying degrees. But what social purpose does academic accreditation serve? 

The purpose is firstly to manufacture consent for aggregate fund cuts by distributing them unequally across institutions. Even highly ranked institutions are “encouraged” to pursue financial autonomy through student fee increases and corporate funding—synonymous with commercialisation. 

A paradoxical feature of this privatisation and commercialisation is that converting higher education into a site for capital accumulation undermines the publicly proclaimed (but dubious) ambition to ascend the technological ladder of global production networks. This occurs for two reasons: first, private higher education produces fewer graduates; second, graduates from this system require higher wages to repay student debt. Both factors militate against labour arbitrage. 

This manoeuvre by capital is reinforced by saffronisation, an integral part of neoliberalisation in India, which has corrupted course content, autocratised administrative procedures, and undermined the teaching-learning processes. Saffronisation diminishes India’s ability to become a destination for labour arbitrage, let alone ascending the technological ladder. When saffronisation becomes a metric of academic accreditation then the hurdles confronting the aforementioned ascent become more arduous.

Saffronisation also obscures antagonisms between metropolitan capital and Indian democracy by entrenching neo-fascist hegemony. Academic accreditation works toward the same objective of obscuring these antagonisms by resulting in the vain quest for “world rankings” by concentrating the declining quantum of public funding on fewer elite public higher educational institutions or transferring these funds to those private higher educational institutions that are run by the corporate cronies of the neo-fascist dispensation.

Achieving the aforementioned neo-fascist hegemony, involves a differential squeeze on working people (which operates in the domain of public education through processes such as academic accreditation), with saffronisation working to manufacturing consent through historical revisionism and neo-fascist vigilantism. 

Therefore, the neoliberal project in Indian higher education is guided by three imperatives: 

1. Redistributing profits from privatisation and commercialisation between metropolitan capital and domestic oligarchies; 

2. Confining the Indian economy to the lower reaches of global production networks; 

3. Using saffronisation and academic accreditation to manufacture consent for the first two objectives.

C. Saratchand is professor, Department of Economics, Satyawati College, University of Delhi. Radhika Menon is an Associate Professor in a University of Delhi college. The views are personal.