There has been a rapid growth of Higher Education (HE) institutions in India over the last decade, triggered mainly by the expansion of Indian IT industry in the late nineties. Onset of the new millennium also witnessed mushrooming of BPO’s and call centers requiring large number of educated workforce. Simultaneous liberalization by the government to open higher education for private sector resulted in an Education Revolution in the country, primarily in the better developed states. Entrepreneurs with academic background initiated the process of establishing professional institutions, mainly for engineering education. This was a boon to all the wannabe engineers who were not able to pursue the coveted course due to the paucity of seats in government run colleges. There was an exodus of students from different parts of the country towards these institutions. This also provided an opportunity for teachers stuck in the hierarchical structure of government colleges to move base and satisfy both academic and esteem needs. To a great extent, these initial groups of colleges, thus set up, were successful in attracting both talented students and teachers and administrators to run quality set-ups. This demand was not easily to be missed by entrepreneurs. This set in motion the trend of higher education institutions mushrooming across the country, churning out graduates akin to a assembly line rolling out cars, sans the strict quality measures followed by the industry. A natural suction process was triggered by the industry which wanted big numbers leading to a loose intake filtration process by institutions and industry. This resulted in the birth of a culture of mediocrity sans research and innovation that was perceived as a benchmark of minimal performance and was adopted by 2 most of the newly established HE institutions. Lack of an intellectually enriching environment, motivation and job security ensured that talented individuals remained out of the reach of these new HE institutions. With talent crunch on one hand, there was an evident cultural mismatch at the leadership level. As lateral generic movement in the industry was not possible due to the rapid expansion, the apex level positions of Director and Deans were filled by drawing educationists from the government sector who were either retired or nearing retirement (55-60 years age group). Over the years, the new inductees at the bottom of the pyramid got so used to this culture that any attempt by an exceptional leadership to break this conundrum of mediocrity was resisted strongly to make the leadership retreat into a shell of inaction. In due course of time, a clear segregation and differentiation in the knowledge, skills and ability of outgoing students from these HE institutions and the students from fewer older established institutions like the IIT’s and NIT’s and select few private institutions was discernible. Thus it resulted in a very conspicuous and obvious trend where industry picked masses for the bottom of the pyramid from these HE institutions and chose the older established premium institutions for inducting at middle level for a quicker movement to domain specific leadership positions. However, as industry’s requirement started coming down, with the fluctuations in the economic scenario, and availability of core minimum numbers within the industry, the demand supply equation started becoming adverse for these institutions resulting in under placement and the cycle soon had its impact on the inflow of admissions. The institutions now started feeling the need of a paradigm shift to meet industry’s requirements and increase their placement ratio to attract better and larger input numbers. Operating with wafer thin margins resulted in near zero budgets for quality improvements in teaching learning structure. Falling admissions and a more diverse group of new entrants with diverse cultural and cognitive quotient lead to a further fall of quality standards across all internal structures and a higher rejection by industry to take in incompatible, student pass outs. The Indian HE sector today is at crossroads where, it has to decide on continuing with the established benchmarks of mediocrity and leadership inaction for quality improvement or introduce change at all levels and break out of this mould. The big question faced by most of the HE institutions is, how to change?
