Higher Education as a Corollary of Power: GER, Institutional Decline, and the New York Moment

In continuation of the previous post, certain facts may be marshalled to confirm the hypothesis concerning higher education and development. The United States, as a superpower and a super economy, historically deployed its power, knowledge systems, and institutional mechanisms to dominate global value chains, extracting resources, talent, and consumables from across the world, thereby securing relatively high-end and high-paying employment for its own citizens. This global positioning made a high Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education both feasible and functionally relevant, as advanced skills and credentials were required to occupy superior locations in the international division of labour. As this leverage now weakens, the United States appears to be attempting to reclaim labour-intensive, low-paying, and low-skilled jobs for its domestic workforce, a shift visible in crackdowns on immigration and the resort to protectionist trade measures such as tariffs. Similar tendencies are observable across other developed economies. In such a scenario, these countries would neither require nor be able to sustain higher education systems at the present scale, lending credence to the argument that high GER is more a corollary of development than its cause. Instead, higher education in particular, and schooling in general, is increasingly likely to be reorganised as an industry within a competitive global marketplace. A further supporting pattern is that once a country loses its global advantage, its institutions begin to lose their strength. Institutions that were originally instrumental in constructing mechanisms of power and wealth gradually turn into custodians of a settled order, but when that order fractures, these institutions face redundancy and decline. It is in this context that New York, long regarded as the epitome of capitalism and Americanism, now appears to be sliding into the grips of what may be described as third-worldism, symbolising a deeper institutional and structural erosion that also calls into question the sustainability of mass higher education in declining hegemonic economies.

Niraj Kumar Jha

GER: A Hypothesis

Developed countries typically record a Gross Enrolment Ratio of around 50 per cent in higher education. This is often interpreted as a causal determinant of economic development. A more plausible interpretation is that a high GER is primarily an outcome of development rather than its cause. Advanced economies occupy higher segments of global value chains where value addition, productivity, and wages are relatively high. This structural position reduces dependence on low-skill and low-paying employment and enables a larger proportion of the population to remain in extended formal education.

The ability of these economies to sustain high levels of participation in higher education has historically been supported by persistent economic surpluses generated through technological leadership, market dominance, and control over intellectual property. Global value-chain theory suggests that such advantages are not static. As late-developing economies acquire industrial capabilities and move upward within value chains, high-return activities diffuse geographically. This diffusion is likely to compress margins in advanced economies and weaken their surplus-generating capacity. As a result, a greater share of routine, labour-intensive, or lower-return work may need to be undertaken domestically within these economies. In such circumstances, maintaining very high enrolment in long-duration and resource-intensive higher education becomes fiscally and economically more difficult. What currently appears as a stable feature of developed economies may thus prove contingent upon a historically specific configuration of global economic power.

For India, the implications are twofold. First, educational expansion must follow a deliberate sequencing aligned with developmental needs and labour-market realities. Universalisation of primary education remains foundational. This must be followed by systematic vocationalisation at the intermediate level to equip a large workforce with employable skills. Higher education, in turn, should emphasise selective specialisation and excellence rather than mass expansion. Treating higher education as an undifferentiated good risks weakening quality, misaligning skills with economic demand, and dissipating limited public resources.

Second, higher education must be viewed not only as an instrument of domestic capability building but also as a tradable service embedded in the global economy. Countries that host high-quality universities attract international students, generate export earnings, conserve foreign exchange, and extend cultural and intellectual influence. In this respect, the recent establishment of foreign university campuses in India is a positive development. Such initiatives reduce outward capital flows, introduce competitive benchmarks, and place performance pressure on Indian universities, both public and privately managed, to improve academic standards, governance practices, and global engagement.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Dialogue and Conversation

Here, I present my understanding of dialogue and conversation in a comparative manner that is both descriptive and prescriptive. I attempt to assimilate what these two modes of communication are and what they ought to be. To me, dialogue concerns the exchange of thoughts; thoughts here possess a recognisable independence from their presenters. Dialogue is therefore essentially impersonal. In it, participants prioritise thoughts over human beings as they are: over how they feel, behave, or situate themselves emotionally.

Conversation, by contrast, begins with the acceptance of the person, and only thereafter do participants immerse themselves in what they share through expressions. Here, people take cognisance of one another as fellow human beings and respond with caring, sympathy, and attentiveness. Though these two forms of communication belong to different domains of human life, broadly speaking, dialogue pertains to public life, while conversation belongs to the private and personal sphere.

What I urge here is the need to bring the spirit of conversation into public dialogues, which I here conflate with debates and discourses. However, getting into a conversation on public issues is an exceedingly difficult task and remains a rarity. I identify several factors behind this crisis of people not being genuinely conversant with one another.

The first factor is obvious: poor education. Many lack command over language and suffer from inadequate knowledge. Yet this is the smallest hindrance. The more critical impediment arises from ideologies that respond to existential anxieties and from the manner in which these ideologies are appropriated. Another overlapping, but more general, hindrance is the sway of instinctive, bestial drives wrapped in the language of values. These drives are sustained and legitimised by a form of contrived intellectualism, which supplies ready-made justifications and shallow abstractions. This results in a vicious circle in which such values and contrived intellectual inputs enter, reinforce, and circulate within the socialisation processes of communities.

A knowing person, therefore, cannot enjoy the ease of conversation in public dialogues; instead, engagement in such conversations becomes a burden. It is the burden of being in the know and of remaining corrective while conversing on public issues, yet doing so without becoming condescending or imposing.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Constructive Engagement or Conflictual Estrangement

It is the enduring legacy of alien imperial rule and foreign intellectual domination that people view social relations as inherently conflictual, despite the reality that they are organically integrated. This is not to say that social relations are free of problems, but such dichotomies and disharmony are universally present across all groups, including conjugal and fraternal relationships. The root of all such conflicts is, surprisingly, the same: scarcity and a weak distribution mechanism. The problem lies in the tendency to view relations as essentially hostile and unavoidably irreconcilable.

The point is to be positively proactive in ensuring individual well-being and, through that, collective prosperity. People must be sympathetic and cooperative toward others. One must consider feasibility according to one’s means and position, but one must nevertheless incline toward the good of all to the greatest extent feasible. 

What I have written here may appear too idealistic, but there is no other way to achieve improvement. The alternative is only endless conflict, poverty, and misery.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Appropriating Technologies for Humanism, Stability, and Progress

Internet connectivity, knowledge machines, inter-machine communication, and artificial intelligence have fundamentally reshaped human life and social roles, and continue to do so with increasing intensity. Agile and forward-looking political communities will proactively harness these technologies for their collective benefit while redefining human roles to prevent disruptions and instability. This transformation must proceed in two complementary directions: first, by integrating emerging technologies into societal functions without compromising humanism; that is, preserving the centrality of the human being in all arrangements; and second, by reorienting human roles within the new, machine-mediated order. Communities that move early and thoughtfully will lead this transition, while those that react late risk becoming laggards and, ultimately, suffer in the new world.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Moorings Loosened and Adrift

The American founding fathers, leaders of a successful military campaign against the mightiest empire of their time and intellectual giants, wrote a brief document, the American Constitution. Appropriating the best constitutional wisdom of the age, they built an order, the most exemplary, and created a template for the world to use. They were creators of a new era based on democracy, republicanism, and constitutionalism, all engineered to protect the dignity and liberty of human beings, each and every one of them.

Now, conversations such as What if the President does not comply with a court order? Or what if the President orders the execution of rivals? expose the fragility of the system. What has happened to the United States at a time when humanity has reached such a phenomenal level of technological advancement, and the country itself stands at the forefront of that progress?

As ageing affects organic beings, is the same true of human organisations? A system to remain alive needs continuous renewal. Did Americanism become too fixated on older frameworks? Or did their knowledge reproduction turn esoteric, impractically normative, insanely utopian, or simply go to Disneyland, as the unable-to-develop countries remain muddled in abstruse ideas and busy creating structures of useless grandeur?

There are too many unanswered questions. A world unsettled by the American random moves now needs to know how to set its moorings afresh.

Niraj Kumar Jha