Education Research and Emergence of Higher Education as a Field of Study in India

Abstract

The expansion and massification of the higher education made the sector a large and complex organization requiring professional expertise and specialized knowledge for managing it. This resulted in many countries in the emergence of higher education as a separate field of study producing new knowledge and developing academic study programmes leading to award of degrees in higher education. Although India has the second largest higher education system in the world, research and study programmes on higher education are not very common. The education departments of universities in India offer a large number of study programmes in education which are essentially oriented to prepare students to teach at post-primary levels of education. The university departments rarely address issues related to higher education in their teaching and research programmes. Research on higher education is carried out mostly by social science departments in the universities and research institutions. In the absence of study programmes and research on higher education, the paper argues that higher education has not yet emerged as a separate field of study in India.