“The Dilemmas of Higher Education: India in Comparative Perspective”

A Public Talk by Professor Devesh Kapur

Monday, November 14, 2016 | 4:00 – 6:00 pm
Orozco Room (#712), 66 West 12th St., NY, NY

In the last two decades the expansion of higher education in India has been the most rapid in human history after that of China. The talk will first document the characteristics of growth and change in higher education in India. It will then address the tensions among the core goals of growth, access, cost and quality and the paradox of large skill premiums despite massive increases in supply even as underemployment among the college educated has been rising. Finally, the talk will examine the political economy of higher education in India, and why there has been so little change in the regulation of higher education and the governance of higher education institutions – and its consequences.

About the Speaker:

Devesh Kapur was appointed Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India in 2006. He is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and holds the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India. Prior to arriving at Penn, Professor Kapur was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and before that the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard. His research focuses on human capital, national and international public institutions, and the ways in which local-global linkages, especially international migration, and international institutions, affect political and economic change in developing countries, especially India. He is the author of Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India (Princeton University Press, 2010).