Now That Information Is Free, What’s a College Campus For?

Noumeer Mohammad, Sanjay Gulat

There is a strange contradiction unfolding in global education. As technology makes learning cheaper and increasingly detached from place, conventional wisdom says the physical university campus is becoming redundant. Knowledge is a few clicks away, and students can absorb a lecture, a course, or an entire degree’s worth of information from the comfort of their homes.

India is doing almost the opposite. It is building more universities, expanding campuses, and increasingly attracting some of the world’s leading institutions to establish a physical presence within its borders. The Universities of Southampton, Liverpool, Bristol, and York, in the U.K., alongside the University of New South Wales, in Australia, are among those setting up campuses in India, a market that already serves more than 43 million higher education students, with enrollment growing significantly over the past decade.

This is not simply a response to population scale, though scale is part of the story. India is projected to add hundreds of millions of urban residents by 2050, and its young population will continue to drive demand for education and opportunity. The more interesting story is not how many campuses India is building, but what those campuses are being built for. As the market evolves, there is a growing need for strategic business and health-centric training disciplines in the country, through high-performing universities and centers of excellence. 

For centuries, universities were organized around the delivery of knowledge. Classrooms, lecture halls, labs, and libraries existed because information was scarce and had to be physically delivered to those who wanted it. Today, the internet and AI have inverted that scarcity. Information is abundant, immediate, and increasingly personalized. A student no longer needs a room, a building, or even a campus to access what a professor knows.