The speakers felt that practical issues bothering higher education relate to admissions, faculty, institutional growth and investment, intellectual capital growth, an extremely inflexible government policy & regulatory system, plethora of admission tests and coaching class syndrome, multiple regulatory systems by both state and central governments, a visible lack of unified voice by the industry to represent its cause and confusion created by multiplicity of media rankings.

The forum easily has the chance to evolve itself as a clearing house of ideas on each of these serious concerns of the industry and also a credible spokesperson for the industry in any suitable forum, Indian or International. Institutionalizing the Forum as suggested at the conference is a good idea and it has its own course and life, but the task of ideation and assessment of existing challenges must go on. Highest priority should be accorded to promoting research into higher education itself with Quality as the baseline outcome. The possible ten research strings could be:

1. Cooperation between AICTE and UGC in growing the higher education industry
2. NBA & NAAC the common ground
3. Role and responsibility of University and its constituent institutions
4. Admission mess & the need for coaching institutions
5. Faculty adequacy and quality
6. Sharing of intellectual capital resource across the system
7. Backward, forward and lateral integration of higher education system to school, diploma, colleges, technical institutions, research bodies
8. Campus industry interact, the reality check
9. Alumni resource use
10. The real face of globalization of higher education industry

Let us begin with one example of how the string will move:
Topic X: The real face of globalization.

"Globalization may be new to industry but higher education always had a lot of global links from the start. Streamlining these into more useful channels to bring in quality and creating opportunities for lateral movement of the Indian faculty and students to learn from international campuses should be the focus of discussions. Research should focus on knowing first the extent of international cooperation and collaboration in the industry and how it has worked"

Join the string and add your views, ideas or comments. send your comments marking string number or brief two or three words description of the topic.