Our discussions about tertiary education this week have been revolving around juicy snippets published in Indian newspapers. What is worrying is that these salacious tidbits are increasingly framing the debate, thus detracting us from real issues.

In an article entitled “Fraud Campus broke rules in both Mauritius and India”, our colleagues from India suggest that the EIILM campus in Mauritius is illegal, that the degrees are not awarded by the Indian university and that “even institutes that have been set up off-shore campuses legally are not allowed to give an Indian degree”. If this is the case, then India must be unique in the world. In every other country we know where universities have set up campuses abroad, the mother university not only awards degrees but the students studying in its offshore campuses can also choose to graduate on the main campus or even swap and study there for part of their course if they so wish.

In fact, in Mauritius, there is no private tertiary education institution which is allowed to award its qualifications. The parent universities are the only awarding bodies. In the case of the EIILM, the degree certificates we have seen were indeed awarded by Sikkim University and signed by its vice-chancellor. Now, if these qualifications are not accepted in India, that must be an Indian problem. They are accepted in the rest of the world and a number of students we have contacted have been able to secure places for postgraduate courses in the UK and France. Maybe India has better regulations than Europe!

The role of the University Grants Commission (UGC) in India and how much power it has in regulating universities there and abroad, is not clear. Out of the 145 private universities in India, by December 2012, only 53 were actually checked by the UGC. Astoundingly, out of these 53, only five – yes, five – were found by the UGC to be ‘in order’. Never mind the fact that even postgraduate programmes from UK universities setting up shop in India have faced the same problems of non-recognition.

Now, hear us out here: we have not gone to the extent of saying that Sikkim University has a good reputation in India – far from it – or that it is dispensing good quality courses. What we are saying is that that should be the debate. For that to happen, we need to move away from politicking and half-truths and open a debate about the universities we should be allowed to tap to set up campuses in Mauritius. We are not likely to live up to the ambition of becoming a quality knowledge hub if we do not have stringent rules – as they do in countries like Malaysia and Singapore – to control the quality of education we give our local students and the regional ones we are hoping to attract. Our focus, therefore, should be on all the tertiary education institutions which are mushrooming on our island and how to regulate them.

Cheap politics damage our reputation, that of our own students and detract us from what we consider the real issues: whether we should set standards when it comes to the universities setting up campuses on our shores or we should be allowed to scrape the barrel. Instead of cheap politics and bad press, that is the only debate that we should be interested in. What are the odds on that?

weekly@lasentinelle.mu