Uni-buzz: Even Indian universities can boost local economies in student zones

livemint.com:

₹50 lakh annual fee and spend another ₹20 lakh on living expenses. The total money coming from these students into Boston from BU alone comes to about ₹490 crore. Northeastern University, in the same city with similar fee, has around 2,000 Indian students who bring about ₹1,500 crore annually to Boston.

For a city of 650,000, this implies that Indian students from these two universities alone are stuffing ₹30,000 into every Bostonian pocket, in a manner of speaking. And these are just two of the 44 institutions of higher education in this city with a sizeable Indian student community. If one sums up the city’s total international student population, its universities will look like the spinal cord of its urban growth.

For an estimated 465,000 Indian students pursuing their higher education in the US, the country collects almost $19.24 billion annually from us (by way of comparison, Himachal Pradesh’s state GDP last year was about $23 billion). No wonder that after covid (when foreign students couldn’t go), many American universities removed the requirement of a four-year undergraduate degree for qualification to their Masters’ programmes. What economic needs do universities fulfil in modern societies? Prominent scholarly responses to this question focus on employment opportunities for graduates, learning that may lead to innovation, startups by graduates and so on.

In that way, universities provide an impressive range of positive externalities, benefitting third parties that get to enjoy the fruits of a more educated society. While all this is indeed true, the prevailing discourse eclipses another crucial factor: universities and colleges serve as growth engines for local economies. The benefits of knowledge spillovers