Trump’s war on US universities will help India only if we can fix our higher education mess

Without a great higher education system, no country can achieve any sustainable greatness. The stakes are very high, and both government vision and private initiatives are essential.

Donald Trump loves battles—especially the ones that he starts. The latest sector into which he has sent in a barrage of missiles is US higher education. He wants to limit the number of foreign students in US universities to 15% of the total student body.

This is going to affect thousands of Indian students hoping to study in the US in the immediate future. Currently there are more than 330,000 of them in the US, from undergraduate to PhD levels. In the worst case scenario—unlikely, but one never knows with Trump—many of them could even have their visas cancelled.

But can India use this sudden change of policy as a wake-up call? And build a long-term plan for world-class domestic higher education? For, without a great higher education system, no country can achieve any sustainable greatness. The stakes are very high, and both government vision and private initiatives are essential.

Trump’s Threat

On his mission to bring to heel the US higher education system, Trump has chosen Harvard—arguably the most well-known of US universities—as his flagship target. After freezing more than $2.6 billion in federal research funding for Harvard, he found a new bugbear—foreign students.

At Harvard, about 27% of its current student body is from overseas, including around 800 Indians. In fact, Indians form the largest chunk of foreign students in the US—nearly 30%.

Trump has now ordered US embassies worldwide to stop scheduling student visa interviews.

The Cost of Student Outflow

For several decades, the US has been the most preferred destination for outward-bound Indian students. This year, many thousands may have got admission for the fall semester which begins in late August or early September and do not know right now if their visas will come through. Hundreds of thousands of others may be preparing for SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) or GRE (Graduate Record Examinations) or GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) to apply next year or the year after. Trump’s actions have suddenly made their prospects uncertain.

And it’s not only the US. The total number of Indian students studying abroad in 2024 decreased by approximately 15% compared to the year before. All four favoured destinations saw declines—the US by 12.9%, Canada 41%, the UK 27.7% and Australia 12%. These were almost certainly due to stricter visa policies, higher rejection rates and security concerns.

According to the Indian Student Mobility Report 2023-24 published by the educational consultancy firm University Living, Indian students were projected to spend $17.4 billion in the US alone this year, including $10.1 billion on academic expenses. This is forex outflow for India. For all Indian students studying abroad, the number was estimated as $71.3 billion. India’s current forex reserves are $692 billion.

The Lows of Indian Higher Education

It’s hardly a secret that our higher education sector, other than a few centres of excellence that you don’t even need all your fingers to count, lags far behind global standards.

Over the decades, Indian billionaires have poured thousands of crores of rupees into higher education with good outcomes, but not much to have grand celebrations about.

Several Indians have also endowed US universities. Not surprisingly, the focus seems to have been Harvard. The university has the Mahindra Humanities Centre, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute and the Murty Classical Library of India, funded by the family trust of N.R. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys.

Trump’s tantrum makes this the right time for Big Business to invest strategically in India, in tune with a broader national vision to build a robust future-facing Indian higher education system. It will take many years and the road will have many twists and turns, but a start needs to be made, and the men need to step up.

Act Strategically

This may sound harsh, but I do believe that India should now focus its energies almost exclusively on STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) higher education rather than the Humanities. I have nothing against Humanities studies at all, but we need to fit our strategies to the country’s long-term goals and needs. As China has been doing for the last three decades.

Economics studies may be encouraged, partly for social purposes. Economists mull over the same set of data and reach wildly different conclusions. This raises our everyday life from its mundane boredom and can lead to exciting addas.

Selecting the critical STEM areas is hardly rocket science. Some of the topics pop up immediately—artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics and automation, material sciences, biomedical sciences, renewable energy, environment, aerospace, defence and so on. The next decade will belong to these technologies.

India is far behind in the teaching infrastructure in almost all of these disciplines. A leap forward cannot be done without very strong private sector involvement. Indian industrialists certainly know which technologies will dominate the near-future—a glance at the list of hi-tech manufacturing collaborations announced in the last two years tells the story. And they certainly have the money.

Indian firms with a long-term view should be building an indigenous workforce that can complement the scientists and engineers of their international partners. And one day, have their own best-of breed design labs.

Globally competitive mass-scale manufacturing is great, but not enough. Unless we start doing the designs ourselves, we will constantly be two generations behind in technology, and under the threat of becoming tech hostages at the whims and fancies of advanced nations and international partners. For this, it is essential that we have our own world-class STEM institutes.

As the recent Operation Sindoor has shown, we have the talent in India to produce breakthrough technologies. But we need much more of it, which includes trying to convince some of our most meritorious students from settling down in the West.

Home Comfort Needs To Compete

No democracy has any right to keep its talent from seeking a place anywhere in the world where it believes it has the best chance of achieving its potential. Nor should we expect Indian talent to stay back for nationalistic or ideological reasons. We have to create a system that can give them the same chance in the country where they were born. This is at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels.

Many of the students standing in the visa queues today could consider staying back if the same level of education is offered at home, which obviously will be many times cheaper than the dollar fees.

The real challenge lies elsewhere.

The R&D Challenge

The difference between a great STEM institute and a great law college is research, and STEM research is expensive—it involves hi-tech labs and equipment. The returns on investment are at best uncertain and certainly won’t accrue for a long time. Yet the biggest brands in STEM education like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and Georgia Tech have been built mainly through their research accomplishments. A great research infrastructure and freedom to experiment attract the best scholars and professors. And without them, one cannot hope to attract the most curious minds as students.

This appears to be a chicken and egg problem—how do you build a great research infrastructure without great researchers and mentors? But this too can be solved. There are several models—Japan, South Korea, China—from which we can choose the best elements and adapt them to our Indian needs and environment. What we need is long-term vision and commitment.

We need to build several more Indian Institutes of Science and many more super-IIT-class universities, either privately funded or through public-private partnerships. Private participation—along with foreign collaborations with best STEM universities in the world— will bring in discipline, target orientation and accountability. Specific government policies can be devised to incentivise such private efforts.

The core of the mission of keeping India’s best STEM talent home has to be raising research capabilities several grades higher—and fast. The solutions are not very difficult to find, but are we ready to take up the challenge?