In India, a college building boom

Sixty miles south of Patna, down a two-lane highway clogged with rickshaws, motorcycles and idling trucks, plans are under way to open Nalanda International University. The campus will be located near the ruins of a Buddhist university that, in the 5th century, drew students from around the world. The hope is that the new school will do the same.

For some poor students in Bihar, the universities are turning farfetched dreams of higher education into reality.

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(PHOTO BY SARAH GARLAND/THE HECHINGER REPORT) - Billboards for universities and tutoring services line the streets of Patna.

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Abhishek Ujjwal, 18, grew up in a small village in Bihar, where most people worked on farms and the roads out of town were unpaved. His father has a small business selling the milk of local cows and his mother is a housewife. Neither went to college. But in middle school, Ujjwal decided he would aim for admission to an IIT.

“It’s a very global brand,” he said. “You can go anywhere.”

A tutoring program for the poor called Super 30 helped him prepare for the entrance exam. Last summer, he qualified for IIT Bombay, a branch opened in 1961 with a stronger reputation than the one in Patna.

Ujjwal enrolled for the fall term in IIT Patna instead, because he wanted to be near his family as he embarked on the intensive course work. “They gave me moral support,” he said.

The founder of Super 30, Anand Kumar, said that for many in Bihar, the universities remain out of reach. One-room schoolhouses lacking basic amenities such as toilets are often the only option for children in slums and villages, even though the government is investing in elementary and secondary education. Many children drop out as early as age 10.

“With more and more institutions coming up, they will certainly increase access,” Kumar said. “For the poor students, however, it is tough as always to make the most of these opportunities.”

The new universities are also targeting the expanding middle class in an effort to keep talented students in India. More than 100,000 Indians study abroad, most of them in the United States.

Ravi Prakash, 22, a middle-class Patna native, might have chosen to study in Delhi or abroad. Instead, he opted for the Chanakya law school.

“Law is a means to bring social change, and I’m interested in developing my state,” he said.

Indian officials acknowledge that the rapid expansion of public colleges and universities will not come close to meeting the demand.

Privately run schools fill the gap through distance education, but often their offerings are of low quality, said Devesh Kapur, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. And corruption and nepotism are rife in the postsecondary system.

Pawan Agarwal, an adviser to the federal government’s planning commission on higher education, said that in 2012the Indian government will start to shift its attention “from rapid expansion to quality expansion,” although he acknowledges that solutions will be elusive.

India’s new institutions are fulfilling one mission already, however: They are raising the expectations of a new generation of Indians. “All the Biharis, now they are dreaming that ‘I will go for this institution,’ ” said Ujjwal, the IIT student. “We are imagining what we could be.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.