What is India's education story?
26 August 2025
A recent Forbes article suggested India had become the leading Asian market for initial public offerings (IPOs), but also asked if the higher education system was ready to deliver the graduates needed to continue its economic progress.
The article in Forbes noted that ‘Over the past decade, the sector has witnessed a huge increase in institutions—from 600 universities in 2012 to nearly 1,150 today.’ And India has an ambition to grow its higher education system, becoming an international study destination. The Indian government is encouraging institutions to take up to 25% more students than they are allocated, reserving these extra places purely for international students.
Yet India’s ambition comes at a time of ever-growing competition in the international higher education marketplace. Traditional destinations such as Australia and the UK, despite negative coverage of visa issues, continue to attract large numbers of international students, but going forward, competition for India may come from closer to home.
Historically, Singapore has been a hub for international universities with institutions such as INSEAD making a notable success of its presence in the city-state. Australian, and universities from other countries have set up in Vietnam recently, while others have headed to Indonesia. Competition is growing across South East Asia for domestic and international students.
India itself has had some success in attracting international campuses with Wollongong, Illinois and Southampton among those announcing plans to have a physical presence in the country. However, growing competition is now coming from a location just to the West of India.
A flight from Mumbai to Dubai costs around £100, and either in Dubai or nearby some of the world’s leading institutions are setting up campuses – INSEAD again, HEC Paris, NYU Stern and others. Few of these will be betting on domestic students to fill their classrooms. The youth populations of the UAE, Saudia Arabia and much of the Gulf region are a significant part of domestic numbers, but small in total and in the UAE alone, over 75% of the population are expatriates.
If India is to become an international study destination, it needs to make its brand story clear. India’s economy is booming, the cost of study is low and the quality of education in the top institutions is excellent, confirmed in a host of international rankings. Yet the question remains, what will a student get that they don’t get elsewhere?
The upcoming Chartered ABS India-UK Business School Dialogue will address this very question and many others in mid-September. I’m delighted that CarringtonCrisp is sponsoring the event and I will be chairing the session on executive education.