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The University Grants Commission’s recent warning against impermissible EdTech–university arrangements has drawn attention to a problem that is usually discussed only in relation to online education. The problem, however, is much larger. It is increasingly visible in regular campus-based programmes as well.
Across the country, recognised universities are entering into arrangements with private education companies that promise to do almost everything required to launch and operate a degree programme. The company identifies a marketable field, recruits the students, designs and updates the curriculum, supplies the teaching resources, deploys faculty, manages industry relationships and supports placements. The university provides the campus, its statutory recognition, formal examinations and, finally, the degree. The fees are divided between the two.
To the university promoter, this can appear to be an efficient expansion model. A fashionable programme can be launched without spending years building academic leadership, recruiting faculty, creating laboratories, developing curriculum or establishing employer relationships. The private company brings a ready-made product and a student-acquisition system. The university supplies the one thing the company cannot legally supply on its own: a recognised degree. What is described as an educational partnership can therefore become a transaction in regulatory legitimacy.
The Model
In the online domain the model is straightforward. A university obtains regulatory approval to offer programmes in online or distance mode. Commercial education operators then approach it with a proposition: they will design the curriculum, produce the content, build and run the technology platform, acquire students through aggressive digital marketing, deliver the teaching, and manage much of the student experience. In return the university lends its name and the formal authority to award the degree, while taking a share of the revenue. The university’s actual academic labour is reduced to formal compliance and the ceremonial act of certification.
A parallel model exists in campus-based education. Private operators enter revenue-sharing or service agreements with universities. The external partner typically assumes responsibility for student acquisition and marketing, curriculum design and continuous updating, deployment of teaching staff or mentors, industry linkages, and placement support. The university retains the physical campus and amenities, conducts the formal end-semester examinations, handles regulatory filings with central or state authorities, and issues the degree. The commercial partner does the educational work; the university collects rent in the form of a revenue share and lends its regulatory legitimacy.
In both cases the division of labour is the same. The entity that designs what is taught, who teaches it, and how students are recruited and placed is not the university. The entity that awards the degree and holds the formal approvals is. The university has effectively outsourced the substance of education while retaining only the shell.
The problem is not industry collaboration
Universities should work closely with industry. They should use external experts, technology companies, professional bodies, employers and specialist organisations. The problem begins when the partner substitutes for the university. The distinction is not difficult to understand. In a genuine collaboration, the university identifies the academic purpose of the programme, owns the curriculum, appoints and supervises the core faculty, controls teaching and assessment, maintains student records, determines progression and remains capable of delivering the programme independently.
In an outsourced model, the commercial partner controls most of the programme’s visible and substantive life. Its brand attracts the students. Its counsellors conduct the admission conversation. Its entrance test may determine access. Its curriculum is presented as the programme’s central differentiator. Its instructors or mentors teach the students. Its platform manages learning. Its industry network is used to promise internships and employment.
The university becomes visible mainly when statutory authority is required: admission, examination, marksheet and degree. That is not ordinary collaboration. It is academic substitution.
The university as a shopping mall
The shopping-mall comparison is more than a rhetorical proposition. The university owns the real estate and holds the operating licence. Different education brands occupy different parts of the campus. One company may run a computer science programme. Another may offer animation and gaming. A third may operate courses in logistics, aviation or management. Each brings its own programme identity, marketing system, teaching personnel and placement narrative.
The university provides classrooms, shared facilities, examinations and the regulatory counter from which the degree is issued. The student is attracted by the tenant but receives a qualification from the landlord.
Over time, many universities have become a collection of unrelated branded outlets. Students studying in different programmes may share a campus but not an academic community. They may receive degrees carrying the same institutional name while experiencing entirely different systems of teaching, faculty supervision, assessment and student support.
A genuine university is not merely a physical container for programmes. It is an academic institution with its own faculty, intellectual commitments, standards of evidence, systems of judgement and responsibility for the formation of its students. It should possess a coherent understanding of what it teaches, why it teaches it and what a graduate of the institution should know and be able to do.
The separation is now openly visible
A company (name withheld) on its website proudly states that its programmes are delivered with partner universities and that the degree is awarded by the partner university rather than by it. It also states that it runs the programme, curriculum, mentor system and work-integrated structure across the partner campuses.
Another one (name withheld) states that it is a brand owned by a private limited company and is not itself a UGC-regulated higher educational institution. It says that degrees are awarded by partner universities, while also promoting its own admission process, industry-aligned curriculum, hands-on technology training and advanced training certification. One more such company describes its programmes as operating through partner-university campuses, with the degree coming from the enrolled university while they provide additional career-focused training, technical learning and structured placement support.
The prohibition already exists
The UGC’s published regulatory position states that no central, state, private or deemed university may offer its programmes through a franchising arrangement with a private coaching institution. Importantly, the provision says that this is prohibited even for courses conducted through distance mode. The formulation is significant because it does not describe franchising as a problem confined only to online or distance education. It states a general principle and then makes clear that the prohibition applies even where distance mode is involved.
The regulations also define a franchise broadly. It includes formally or informally allowing another person or organisation to offer a programme, or any related activity, on behalf of or in the name of the recognised higher educational institution. The legal concern is therefore not limited to a contract carrying the title franchise agreement.
A university cannot delegate its essential character
The Supreme Court’s reasoning in Prof. Yashpal v. State of Chhattisgarh is relevant to this issue. The Court treated the idea of a university as encompassing teaching, quality of education, curriculum, examination, evaluation and research. A university is not simply a legally created body possessing the power to issue degrees. It must have the academic substance that gives meaning to that power.
This is why curriculum, faculty, teaching, assessment and student progression cannot be treated in the same way as catering, transportation, security or building maintenance. A university may outsource incidental services. It cannot outsource the responsibilities that make it a university.
When an external company controls the curriculum, selects or deploys the teachers, delivers the teaching, manages assessment and determines the student’s learning experience, the university has transferred much more than operational work. It has transferred the academic substance underlying its degree.
A university exists to generate, curate and transmit knowledge under its own academic authority. When curriculum, teaching staff and significant portions of the educational process are handed to an external commercial entity whose primary obligation is to its investors, that authority is emptied of content.
The convenience for university promoters is obvious. Building genuine academic capacity—recruiting and retaining qualified faculty, developing coherent programmes, maintaining rigorous internal quality systems, fostering research is expensive, slow and difficult. Leasing the brand, the classrooms and the degree-granting power is faster and more predictable. The institution becomes a landlord. The partner becomes the actual educator. Students pay premium fees for what is marketed as a university education, yet the academic process is largely controlled by a commercial operator whose incentives prioritise volume of enrolments and short-term placement optics over depth of learning.
The quality consequences follow directly from the incentive structure. When the party responsible for curriculum and teaching is rewarded primarily for filling seats and generating placement numbers, academic standards become secondary. Teaching staff are often not permanent employees of the university; they lack institutional embedding, research culture and long-term academic accountability.
Curriculum is shaped by marketability rather than by disciplinary coherence or intellectual formation. Placement claims, which form the centrepiece of marketing, are difficult for students or regulators to verify independently and can evaporate when economic conditions change. Students are left holding a credential whose practical standing depends on the continued stability of a commercial arrangement they do not control.
It corrodes the meaning of a university degree itself. The longer this model expands, the more the private higher education sector risks becoming a network of degree mills operating under legitimate regulatory cover.
Education becomes training for the first job
The private operator usually enters with a persuasive criticism of conventional higher education. University curricula are outdated. Faculty members lack industry exposure. Students are not job-ready. Technology changes faster than university systems can respond. There is often considerable truth in this criticism. But an accurate diagnosis does not automatically make every cure educationally sound.
The language of employability can be used to narrow the purpose of a degree. A computer science programme can become a sequence of currently popular software tools. A management programme can become placement preparation, presentations and corporate simulations. A design programme can become training in commercial software.
The student may acquire immediate workplace utility while missing the deeper foundations required to understand the field, question existing practice and adapt when current tools become obsolete.
A university degree should prepare a student for more than the first job. It should develop knowledge, analytical ability, communication, research, ethical judgement and the capacity to learn throughout a long working life. Industry participation should enrich these foundations. It should not replace them.
Faculty without a university
A university is built through its faculty. Faculty members do more than deliver prescribed content. They interpret the discipline, develop courses, debate curricular choices, mentor students, undertake scholarship, evaluate learning and preserve institutional memory.
Where faculty are recruited, deployed and supervised by the private operator, their relationship with the university becomes uncertain. They may teach students registered with the university but remain accountable primarily to the commercial company that selected them, assigns their work and evaluates their performance.
Faculty then become programme resources rather than members of an academic community. This affects more than employment status. It changes the place from which academic judgement is exercised. A teacher who is expected to follow centrally supplied content and deliver a contractually specified student experience may have little authority to question the curriculum, modify the course or enforce academic standards that could conflict with student-retention targets. The university’s name remains on the degree, but the academic community that should stand behind it has been replaced by a delivery system.
The examination becomes a compliance ritual
Universities sometimes defend these arrangements by pointing out that their academic bodies approve the programme and that the university conducts the examinations. That defence rests on a narrow view of education.
Assessment is not merely an end-semester paper. Serious education requires continuous feedback, assignments, projects, laboratories, presentations, fieldwork, portfolios, mentoring and the development of judgement over time. If the private operator controls teaching and continuous assessment while the university conducts only a formal final examination, curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation may no longer form part of a coherent academic design.
The examination then becomes a regulatory ritual. It confirms that the university has performed the act necessary to issue the degree. It does not necessarily establish that the university controlled or understood the education that preceded it.
A degree is the university’s warranty that the student has completed a programme whose standards the university can explain and defend. The warranty becomes hollow when the university has little direct control over how those standards were produced.
This is abdication, not innovation
Indian universities need to become more responsive. They need stronger industry relationships, more current curricula, better technology, serious internships and improved employment outcomes. But innovation should increase the university’s capacity. It should not make university capacity unnecessary.
A legitimate partnership leaves the institution stronger. University faculty learn from industry. Curricula improve. New teaching practices are absorbed. Employer relationships become part of the institution. The university becomes capable of sustaining and further developing the programme.
An outsourced model leaves the university dependent. The programme, faculty, employer network, technology and student-acquisition machinery remain with the commercial operator. When the partner leaves, the capability leaves with it.
That is not academic renewal. It is institutional abdication presented in the language of innovation. The private company cannot be blamed merely for offering a commercial solution. It is doing what a commercial organisation is expected to do: identifying demand, creating a product and seeking growth. The greater responsibility lies with the university.
A university receives degree-awarding power because it is expected to exercise academic judgement and accept public responsibility. When it commercially allows another organisation to design, market, staff and deliver the programme while retaining only the formal acts of examination and certification, it abandons the purpose for which that authority was granted.
A university cannot rent out the meaning of its degree
The real regulatory challenge is not to prohibit industry participation. It is to distinguish collaboration from substitution. That distinction must be based on functional control. Who controls the students, curriculum, faculty, teaching, assessment and programme? Who stands behind the academic promises? Who can continue the education independently?
Where the answer is predominantly the private company, the arrangement should not be accepted. The company is effectively operating a degree programme under the regulatory shelter of the university.
The university is not merely renting out classroom space. It is licensing access to its degree-awarding authority. A university may rent space to a café, bookstore or bank without losing its identity. But when it rents out its curriculum, faculty, teaching and relationship with students, it is no longer merely sharing its campus.
Students deserve better. They deserve institutions that actually educate them rather than rent out the right to certify them. The current model is not innovation. It is the privatisation of the university’s academic soul while retaining the public appearance of regulation. It must be confronted with the full force of the powers already available to the University Grants Commission and the state governments. Anything less will allow the conversion of higher education into a real-estate business to continue under the respectable cover of university titles.
