Regulating Academia
I write this as someone who has watched ideas about education circulate between policy rooms, campus corridors, and the inboxes of students and teachers. Regulation in higher education is not an abstract policy exercise — it shapes what gets taught, who teaches, who learns, and how societies evolve. My view is pragmatic: regulation should protect quality and equity while enabling creativity and autonomy.
Why regulation matters
- Universities are repositories of trust. When that trust erodes — through grade inflation, unaccountable governance, or opaque hiring — the social compact weakens.
- Regulation sets minimum guardrails: student protections, research integrity, transparent funding flows, and accessible grievance mechanisms.
- Yet regulation can also be a blunt instrument: heavy-handed compliance kills innovation, while fragmented rules create perverse incentives.
Principles for sensible regulation
I believe regulation should be designed around three simple principles:
- Proportionality — rules should match the risk and scale of the activity. Not every college needs the same compliance burden as a large research university.
- Outcome-focus — measure what matters: learning outcomes, employability, research quality, and societal impact — not just inputs or box-ticking.
- Enablement — regulations should expand capability (funding, digital infrastructure, governance reform) rather than only constrain behavior.
Tools and levers that work
Here are practical levers I return to when thinking about better regulation:
Performance-linked funding: Direct resources to institutions that demonstrate improvements in learning, research outputs, and student mobility. This is not a bait-and-switch; baseline funding for access must remain.
Autonomy with accountability: Grant operational freedom — curriculum design, hiring, collaborations — in exchange for transparent reporting and external audits. Autonomy without accountability breeds capture; accountability without autonomy stifles excellence.
Standardized, digital curricular platforms: Digital Boards of Studies (e-BoS) or interoperable curriculum registries reduce duplication, ease credit transfer, and speed updates. I wrote about the promise of e-BoS as a bridge to interoperable, modular education and how it can align with digital university reforms e-Board to standardise curriculum across universities.
Flexible online regulation: The past few years have shown the potential of online modalities to increase access. Regulations must allow partnerships between universities and credible ed-tech providers while safeguarding academic standards (assessment integrity, proctored exams, secure credentials).
Addressing chronic problems: faculty shortages and employability
Two chronic failures shape much of the regulatory debate:
Faculty shortages and aging professoriate undermine core teaching and research. Public data and prior reports have highlighted alarming vacancy levels in many institutions, which must be addressed through recruitment pipelines, teacher incentives, and career pathways.
Graduates who cannot meet employer expectations indicate a deeper mismatch between curricula and workplace needs. In earlier reflections I pointed to this vicious circle: institutions struggle to attract teachers because teaching is less attractive to talented graduates; employers then find graduates underprepared The case of missing mentors.
Regulatory responses should tackle both supply and quality:
- Incentivize teaching careers with clear career ladders, research support, and reduced bureaucratic load.
- Encourage co-designed curricula with industry and civil society so that learning remains relevant without becoming vocationally narrow.
- Support modular learning and credit mobility so students can assemble multi-disciplinary skillsets across institutions.
Where regulation should avoid overreach
- Avoid one-size-fits-all accreditation thresholds that privilege legacy institutions and exclude emergent models.
- Resist regulatory measures that make collaboration with private innovators impossible, as that stifles experimentation.
- Do not fetishize rankings or input metrics. They obscure what students actually learn.
A few concrete actions I would advocate
Introduce performance-based grants targeted at state public universities to address faculty vacancies and infrastructure gaps, while protecting enrolment and access for disadvantaged students. (This echoes debates and recommendations visible in contemporary policy discussions.)
Roll out national interoperable curriculum registries (an expanded e-BoS concept) so credits, micro-credentials, and course outcomes are discoverable and portable.
Pilot autonomy-accounts: bundles of operational freedom, accountability metrics, and seed funding for experimental programmes in a cohort of institutions.
Create a national teaching fellowship programme to attract early-career scholars into higher education with mentorship, research time, and clear promotion criteria.
Closing reflections
Regulation is not a destiny; it is a set of collective choices. We can design rules that protect students, nurture teachers, and catalyze innovation — or we can allow fear and inertia to calcify the system. My own writing has been consistent in urging practical, digitally-enabled, and student-centered reforms; the proposals above are simply an extension of that thinking. Good regulation needs humility, iteration, and an unwavering focus on learning outcomes.
If you are a policymaker, an academic, or a student, ask: does this rule improve the learner’s experience? Does it strengthen trust? If the answer is yes, we should try it; if not, we should redesign it.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
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