‘Rethink academic model’ as India suffers from talent shortages

Fears are growing that India is running out of academic talent as universities race to expand to meet aggressive enrolment targets.

But academics argue the roots of the problem go beyond simply being a pipeline issue and should prompt a rethink of institutional design.

Jaideep Chatterjee, a former dean of the Jindal School of Art and Architecture said “anyone who has tried to build departments” has faced problems with recruiting academics.

“In disciplines I’m familiar with – sociology, design, architecture – we’ve seen a quantum leap in the number of programmes being offered without a corresponding increase in people available to staff them,” he told a webinar organised by education consultancy Jetri Dialogs examining India’s higher education ambitions.

India’s higher education system is under pressure to scale up as policymakers push aggressive enrolment targets and float plans to establish hundreds of new institutions.

Chatterjee said while the shortages were real, it was too simplistic to treat it purely as a pipeline problem. “It’s more complex than simply saying there isn’t enough talent,” he said.

“We need to ask what we imagine a faculty member to be. We need to ask what we mean by expertise. We need to think about how we frame academic jobs and the work itself.”

Comparing India’s higher education expansion to its telecoms boom, he said there had been a failure to confront more fundamental questions about institutional design.

“We haven’t asked whether we need to repeat the same models other countries followed to become higher education hubs, or whether we can rethink what the university space itself is,” he said. “We haven’t asked that question seriously, and that’s a structural issue.”

Shradha Kanwar, chief academic officer at Jain University, said PhD enrolments in India had increased by roughly 20 per cent over the past five years but this had not helped address the shortages, and “even the best institutions struggle to recruit.”

Kanwar said the challenge needed to be understood across three dimensions: overall faculty numbers, how institutions distinguish between qualified academics and effective teachers and whether academic careers are designed around the needs of a future workforce.

“A faculty member today is expected to actualise student potential, deliver research outcomes and support student wellbeing,” she said.

“But the process of becoming a disciplinary expert doesn’t automatically equip someone to translate that knowledge into something actionable and value-creating.”

That gap, she argued, was especially visible in a system as diverse as India’s, where faculty outside major cities may have strong credentials but limited institutional support.

“With the information overload students now face, this becomes even more challenging,” she said, adding that continuous upskilling and cross-skilling was needed to be actively built into university systems rather than treated as optional.

Both speakers warned that rigid academic career structures were narrowing the talent pool and accelerating attrition.

Chatterjee said India’s default insistence on PhDs as the primary marker of academic merit was not always appropriate.

Institutions, he added, also struggled to differentiate between teaching-focused and research-intensive missions.

“Most universities want to do everything,” he said. “I don’t think the comprehensive, multi-disciplinary university with every department is necessarily the future.”

Kanwar said Jain University was experimenting with more diverse academic pathways, allowing staff to specialise as research analysts, academic administrators, learning-experience designers or teacher-entrepreneurs, rather than progressing through a single linear ladder.

“External performance indicators push everyone towards the same narrow criteria, which flattens originality and discourages innovation,” she said. “This flexibility has been very well received.”

tash.mosheim@timeshighereducation.com