ET Now GBS 2024: Higher education helps bring people together, fosters peaceful disruption

The role of higher education in fostering development and disruption is acknowledged, but less well so is its role in bringing people together and fostering peaceful development and disruption, NYU Stern School of Business dean Raghu Sundaram said.

Talking about the two countries he knows best, India and the US, Sundaram said higher education is in many ways the cornerstone and the foundation of prosperity in both nations.

The US has what is acknowledged as the greatest university system in the world, he said. "The growth and contribution of universities to India's rise is also completely obvious," he said. "The arrival of India as a major player in IT, in pharma, and in so many other areas would have been impossible without a robust university system that identifies and develops the required talent."


Half of all Indian students overseas are in North America. Indians constitute the single largest group of foreign students studying in the US and nearly a quarter of all students in that country. They account for a third of foreign students in Canada. While many return home with valuable connections and networks, others stay and become contributors to the local economies and societies of North America, said Sundaram.

Pointing out just how many current and past CEOs of iconic American corporations are of Indian origin, as are many leaders in academia, medicine and politics, less commonly noted is that almost all of them went to the US first as students. "It was higher education that brought the talent to the US and then developed the talent," he said.

As higher education grows in importance, it will continue to form the bedrock of such relationships and continue to foster deep people-to-people links across civil society.

Colleges differ from corporations in that higher education institutions have tended to stay rooted where they began, even as the world has shrunk on account of globalisation

"It's difficult to think of any iconic corporate name without almost automatically thinking of the very large number of places across the world where they operate," he said. "Yet almost all the famous names in higher education have remained single-campus entities, with not much of a discernible global footprint beyond their original campus. Very few universities have been exceptions to this rule in the West-NYU has been a pioneer in this," he said, referring to its campuses outside the US.

This, said Sundaram, is where Indian universities are going to lead the world. "Indian universities have become the most entrepreneurial and adventurous of all educational institutes in the word," he said.