Nidhi Reddy
India’s higher education expansion is running into a constraint that cannot be solved by building more campuses alone. We have more than 43 million students in higher education, a student-faculty ratio of around 27:1 and an estimated shortfall of roughly 600,000 faculty positions. As private institutions expand and foreign universities enter India, competition for high-quality educators will only intensify.
The question is no longer simply whether India can hire enough faculty. On any realistic timeline, it cannot. The more urgent question is whether scarce teaching excellence can be designed to reach many more students than it does today.
This is the other faculty problem. It is not only a problem of numbers. It is a problem of deployment.
We know faculty matter. The Gallup-Purdue Index, one of the largest studies of college graduates ever conducted, surveyed more than 30,000 graduates and examined how college experiences shaped later engagement at work and wellbeing. What mattered most was not institutional rank or choice of major. It was whether students had a professor who made them excited about learning, someone who cared about them as a person and a mentor who encouraged their goals. Graduates who had all three were more than twice as likely to be engaged at work and nearly three times as likely to be thriving in life.
In other words, the defining memory of university is rarely the building, brochure or ranking. It is often one person.
I know this from my own life. The question I have carried longest from a classroom is also the shortest: why. I first heard it from Dr Henry Moon, one of the world’s leading business school educators, at the Indian School of Business more than twenty years ago. He asked it after every answer, argument and assumption, until the question became a discipline of thought. I have not sat in that classroom in two decades. I still hear it.
The real policy question is how many Indian students will encounter such a teacher.
For too long, the faculty crisis has been framed as a capacity problem. That is not wrong, but it is incomplete. India cannot train and appoint 600,000 outstanding faculty members quickly enough to meet demand. Nor can it assume that every excellent practitioner, researcher or leader will enter the system through a conventional full-time academic track. The more useful question is how existing expertise can be structured to reach students.
India has begun to experiment. The BITS School of Management introduced a block teaching format, among the first of its kind in India. The idea was direct: design the academic calendar around what strong faculty can meaningfully give, rather than forcing learning into the inherited rhythm of the semester. Colorado College in the United States has run a version of this model since 1970.
Other institutions have gone further. Some global models now operate across multiple campuses without permanent teaching faculty in the conventional sense. Not because experts are unnecessary, but because their role has been reimagined. When experts are freed from routine delivery and assessment and positioned instead as designers of learning, one person’s knowledge can reach hundreds of students rather than only the thirty in a room.
Olin College of Engineering offers a less extreme but equally intentional example. Faculty serve as project advisors embedded in year-long, real-world industry challenges rather than as traditional lecturers. The Design Factory model, replicated across universities in nearly 30 countries, formalises a similar logic. It separates the domain expert who guides a specific project from the full-time educator who holds the student relationship, continuity and assessment architecture.
India is unusually well placed to build such a model. There are senior engineers who have spent forty years solving infrastructure problems, former chief marketing officers who built major Indian brands, retired civil servants who understand public systems, surgeons who know healthcare from decades of practice and defence officers who understand leadership under pressure.
These are not outliers. India has thousands of such professionals retiring every year from industry, government, the armed forces, medicine, law, technology and public service. Many can teach. Most never find a serious pathway into higher education.
This is where “Wisdom Faculty” becomes important: retired practitioners and working senior professionals who may not be able to commit to a full semester but can commit deeply to two weeks, a studio, a practicum, a capstone or an applied module. This is not about diluting academic standards. It is about using different kinds of expertise for different kinds of learning.
The precedent exists. Germany expects significant industry experience before appointment in several applied higher education contexts. Singapore Management University has built a substantial practice-track faculty model where a PhD is not the only route to academic contribution. AACSB, the global business school accreditor, permits accredited schools to include industry practitioners as a significant share of their faculty base. India’s UGC opened an important door with its 2023 Professor of Practice notification, but the intake remains capped and the deeper structural floor has not shifted.
Indian higher education needs task-shifting, not as a compromise but as strategy. We should ask not only whether an institution has enough qualified people in the right seats, but whether it has the right mix of academic faculty, practice faculty, mentors, learning designers and industry experts for what it promises to teach.
India’s faculty framework still mistakes credentials for capability and headcount for impact. It has too little to say about whether any of those 43 million students will encounter what the Gallup study found to matter most: not a ranking, not a building, but one person who made them excited about learning.
Someone who cared. Someone who asked why. Someone whose name they still say out loud, twenty years later.
Nidhi Reddy is the Founding Senior Partner of Jetri, an education consulting and strategic implementation firm