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web to provide long-distance education. There's also some interest in the United States to build entire
campuses in India, though officials say that is rather muted at this moment.
The Obama administration is providing a total of $250,000 in grants initially to U.S. institutions
interested in sending representatives to India to lay the groundwork for substantive partnerships. The
administration hopes the U.S.-India higher-education partnership will eventually strengthen into a $10
million effort, provided the U.S. Congress approves of the expenditure.
Meanwhile, two universities from New Jersey, a state with a heavy Indian expatriate population, are
hoping to become pioneers who lead the rest into the new Indo-U.S. higher education frontier.
Rutgers University began working on a joint program with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in
Mumbai more than a year ago. David Finegold, a Rutgers vice president, said faculty members from his
university are working with Tata researchers to help India effectively educate more of its college-age
citizens and move beyond churning out a relatively small number of highly trained, English-speaking
graduates proficient in high-tech fields.
Rutgers faculty are also helping Indian officials plan for a national vocational university to train students
for blue-collar careers. NJIT is in the early stages of establishing a focused master's level program for the
employees of one global technology company begun by an Indian expatriate - a different model than the
inter-university links envisioned under the U.S.-India higher education partnership.
The NJIT program, set to begin this spring, will offer a 12-credit graduate program to the employees of
the NeST Group in Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram. NeST founder Javad Hassan said that his employees
will receive the same rigorous education that students at NJIT's Newark campuses receive.
The NJIT program marks a different experiment, one that bypasses the governments of India and the
United States. Hassan said there may be no need for government involvement given the technological
linkages already present between the two countries.
The NJIT program, he added, is designed to teach his employees not just advanced technical skills but
also soft skills such as the ability to communicate effectively and work collaboratively across cultures.
Those soft skills are increasingly valuable - and something U.S. universities are uniquely equipped to
teach Indian students, according to Sam Pitroda, an adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Speaking at a conference on the Indian higher education system organized by Penn State last October,
Pitroda outlined a litany of problems that the Indian government is trying to address within the next few
years:
• Raising the quality of instruction at Indian institutions;
• Promoting world-class research by Indian faculty members;
• Getting professors to teach students to be creative problem solvers rather than stressing rote
memorization of facts and figures;
• Making it possible for more of India's poor to gain higher education.
"We believe the next three to five years are going to be critical for us to focus on expansion, excellent
and equity," Pitroda told the U.S. university officials in attendance, seeking their help. "We need to
really design better models for cooperation. We need to link universities here to universities there, not
only to top-tier, but also second-tier and third-tier cities."
But Pitroda also pressed for prompt action from the U.S. side. "We need concrete programs," he said.
"Otherwise we'll have more conferences like this and won't be able to translate programs (into)
execution."