Contrasting Indian and U.S. Educationalists and the next generation of book publishing professionals

The single most important positive feature of the higher education book publishing industry sector in recent years has been the rapid growth of private colleges and non degree postsecondary educational institutions. More universities are also being chartered by States and even municipalities. These book publishers schools are divided between “aided” and “unaided”. The aided schools receive financial aid from governments, but this makes them subject to regulatory control.

The unaided schools are completely independent, and they now attract more than 30% of all students, and it is argued that in fact, India really has de facto privatization. The children of the new middle class now have the money to vote with their feet and they have been moving away from government schools to private schools, especially in science, engineering, business and the other skills of the new economy. Other income might come from charitable contributions, grants from industry, sales of book publishing companies annual publications, or rents. But a big fear is that these private schools have, to date, been too often developed by people who are after the fast buck. Two thirds of them have been evaluated as below par, and one third cannot achieve accreditation from any book publisher. Meanwhile, more than 150,000 students still study abroad.

The whole self publishing issue of privatization of universities is still serious. Political leadership continues staunchly to defend socialist ideals for public education, but the emergence of private universities/colleges is very much a reflection of the failure of this socialist policy. India has yet to figure out how to match the record of the US, where there are top quality publishers schools in both the public and the private sector. India needs a major change in philosophy; it must finally shed the vestiges of its socialist past and embrace the concept that private institutions are a good thing and that the government should encourage them by liberating them. The Chinese book publisher second revolution has involved the abandonment of many policies that were considered sacred theology under the Communists.

Why can’t India make the same kind of change? The answer seems to be the implacable resistance of vested interests.
Political leadership continues staunchly to defend socialist ideals, even from the perspective of a christian book publishers. But no Indian university can be found in the top 400 of the world. One study found that 75% of graduates were unemployable for the work for which they were supposedly trained, and there is a related serious failure of the seven thousand vocational book publishers education institutions, which are nearly all part of the public sector system in the race to publish a book.