A few Takshashila alumni and friends Kunal Singh, Varun Goel & Aravind Ilamaran have started a new opinion-analysis portal called Policy Wonks.

I write about how there’s an oversupply of PhDs and research talent in the US and elsewhere, but not enough of them have come knocking on India’s doors just yet:

American academia has been in trouble for the better part of the past decade. Till the advent of MOOCs, productivity has not changed much in higher education for about a century. As a result, university education has seen a high amount of inflation. To keep costs low, universities started supplying ever higher number of PhD students – who can be cheap research and teaching labour as RAs and TAs respectively. Thanks to this oversupply, you have hundreds of talented people applying for each tenure-track position in the sciences, for example. As Ajit Balakrishnan points out in Business Standard, this has led to the creation of a lot of “adjunct” temporary faculty positions in a space considered to be dominated by tenure.

…

Unfortunately, India has been poorly positioned to take advantage in this acute oversupply of talented PhDs and post doctoral researchers. This is especially surprising given that a significant number of them are Indian or of Indian origin. With the salient exception of a few people and a few Indian institutions, most researchers prefer to eke out a modest living on uncertain terms rather than come back and work in Indian academia.

We witnessed a smaller version of something similar happening when NASA started getting budget cuts in the last two decades, thereby being forced to lay off good aerospace talent – again with a lot of them being of Indian origin. India’s space agency ISRO benefited little by maintaining an insular hiring policy. Quite unfortunate for an organisation whose second director – Dr UR Rao – was wooed back to India by a visionary Vikram Sarabhai well before India had a dedicated space agency.

[Read the full piece over at Policy Wonks]