A short but inspiring interview with Ashish Dhawan, one of the founders of Ashoka University and the founder of Central Square Foundation (CSF), which is working to transform the school education system in India. Previously, Ashish was a co-founder of ChrysCapital, one of India’s leading private equity funds. He discusses his career in education and philanthropy and shares his outlook for India. Some of my paraphrased notes from the conversation are included below (as always, these are for my personal reference only and any mistakes in transcription are my own).

On the idea for Ashoka University: it was a lifelong dream for him. He grew up in Calcutta and was lucky he got into college in the US. He went to Yale undergrad. That’s when he realized how different the higher education system in the US was. Higher education in India was for a long time following the British system, which tends to put people in a straightjacket. It resulted in a very narrow education where you didn’t really have a broad worldview. When he got to college in the US, the approach was so interdisciplinary and so much about developing a love for learning and making you be able to think for yourself, write well, communicate well etc. That was really what was missing in Indian higher education and that was one of the big reasons they decided to start Ashoka. 

On giving up his private equity career at the age of 43: ever since he was young, he had this idea in his head that he would have more than one career. His maternal grandfather, apart from being in business, had a great love for education and even started a bunch of schools on the side. He also read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography when he was young and he had multiple careers. Gandhiji was similar – he was a lawyer, barrister and then went in to public service afterwards. When he was 30, he was very clear he wanted to do something entrepreneurial and that somewhere in his mid-40s he would switch into something that was more service-oriented, although he wasn’t sure what exactly it was going to be. He was lucky that he did reasonably well in his investing career and had made enough money, so in a way it was a no-brainer to switch. What was daunting was that he wasn’t sure he was going to be successful in his second career. He didn’t know if he was suited for something outside of investing. But that was one of the reasons he didn’t want to have a plan B. When he left ChrysCapital, he gave up his equity in the firm, got off every board etc. He took the plunge full-time and went all in so he could give it his best and make it work. There has been no looking back since.

On the experience of building Ashoka: his life’s work is about building institutions. That includes his work with ChrysCapital in the investing world. He is very proud that he has been gone but the institution continues. They have been around for a long time now, just raised their 9th fund, and they don’t need him. He feels that should be the mantra of everything at the end of the day. Whatever he builds, he should eventually be redundant. In terms of Ashoka, higher education is its own beast. Firstly, it’s not profit making, so people tend to be much more mission oriented. Second, academics is at the core, so you have to work with and respect the faculty. Academia works on its own rhythm. You can’t press the same buttons, it is not just about money and so you need to adjust your own thinking a bit. Also, unlike business where you can start something in a very scrappy manner and build something of quality later, in a university, whatever you do, you have to do it in a world-class manner from day 1. Next, the corporate world is much more hierarchical, you have one structure of the board and the CEO etc. There are many more structures and stakeholders in a university. Through his work with CSF, he has had to learn a number of new things, including how to work with government. The government spends 7 lakh crores on education, they are the main actor. If you don’t work with them, you can’t have large scale impact and whatever you do is not sustainable. There is also a lot of figuring out what actually works in education and what is suited for the Indian context. It took a lot of learning and humility. Working with people at non-profits who are motivated very differently from people in the corporate world, so you have to learn to respect them, to partner with them. Those were all new skill sets he had to develop over time. 

On breaking down the task and achieving tangible outcomes: if you look at building a whole university, it can be a very daunting task. A university doesn’t get built in 5 years, it is a 25-30 year project before you can say it is stabilized and you have built something of quality. So they broke it up into chunks. Even with the campus, they started with just the first phase of 300k sq ft. Today, they have 1.5m sq ft and another 650k sq ft under construction, so when complete, it will be ~7x of when they started in 2014. They initially started with a program that was off-campus on a rented site. The pilot was a non-degree program, they did that well and then started with the undergrad program. Initially, they started with humanities and social sciences. They slowly grew in size, expanded into the sciences and built a truly interdisciplinary university. Now they cover over 20 disciplines. The thing they have consciously left out is the professional degrees (engineering, medicine, law) because there are a number of institutions in India already focus on those. Ashoka is now a place of excellence in teaching and research. They are already a great teaching university. For many students in high school, Ashoka is often their number one pick. They now have students applying from 40 countries outside of India and they have students on campus from more than 25 different countries. On the research side, science infrastructure takes longer to build. They have come a long way in the last 10 years, but it will take another 10-15 years to achieve excellence in the sciences. They have a small PhD program but to build a top notch program at scale there is still a lot of ground to cover.

On bringing many philanthropists together to work on Ashoka: it was a nation building project. They want the country to be in a much different place in 25 years and felt that India needs at least a few world-class universities. If you look at the top 200 universities in the world, India is not really represented in the top 100-150. So there is a need for a new genre of institutions in India and, if this is a nation building project, you are building a different type of university from which hopefully a 100 flowers will bloom. It therefore has to engage many other people. If you look at the best universities in the world, they are all non-profit because they are research universities. There is a public spirit to them. And none of them have a single family that dominates, rather they have multiple stakeholders. So they thought that the right governance model was to bring many people together and then you have this collective energy working together to build the university.

On trends in the Indian education system: India has the largest school system in the world. Between class 1-12 there are 250m+ students. The country has made remarkable progress in terms of improving universal access to education. Almost every child now goes to primary school and even all the way up to secondary school. The dropout rates are much lower. In secondary school, there is an 80% enrollment rate in total and in higher education a 27% gross enrollment ratio. In terms of quality, however, while there are islands of excellence, at a mass level we haven’t been able to deliver quality. Those in the top 20-25% of the socioeconomic spectrum generally get access to a good education but, as you come to the bottom half, there is a lot room for improvement. Learning starts to break down quite early. As per the World Bank, at age 10, ~55% of children can’t read third grade text. The government knows this and they have started a program called NIPUN Bharat, which is focused on foundational literacy and numeracy. At CSF, they are very excited because it has been pushed to mission mode and for the next 5 years, the resources are available, the political salience is there and you can see a real change starting to happen on the ground. 

On the Indian growth story: he is very bullish. It is never a linear journey, there are always bumps along the road. But India has the demographics, is very well positioned geopolitically, and the country has a good talent base as well. We have come out of a credit cycle, companies have low levels of leverage, banks have cleaned up their balance sheets and there are great demographics. This is not true around the world. Social norms have also changed, women now are more empowered than before and you are seeing a greater participation rate in the workforce. And then there is a proactive government, both at the center, but also at the state level. Chief minsters now want their states to develop, there is a certain competitiveness between states. 6 states have set a trillion dollar GDP target, he likes that level of ambition as it didn’t exist before. The government also wants to facilitate business, to stimulate and support private enterprise, and that bodes well for the coming years. 

How does India compare vs. other countries in terms of creating opportunities for employment: what has gone well is that India has managed to massify higher education. If you look today, India has 41m students in higher education, second only to China. And if you look at the GER 20 years ago, it was a fraction of where we are today. What has been missing is skilling, because in many schools we didn’t prioritize (and some cases looked down on) vocational education. The other part is that India needs to focus more on creating labor-intensive growth. There is a golden opportunity because China currently dominates all the labor-intensive manufactured exports. Geopolitically, things are now moving to India, the cost structure is better, infrastructure and ease of doing business has improved etc. The next 10 years are crucial because India can create many more jobs than it has before.

On more people choosing to pursue careers in social entrepreneurship: we have to sell young people that these are the most complex and exciting problems to work on. If one can help improve school education over the next 15-20 years, what a contribution one has made to the planet. It is the same thing with climate change or energy transition, whether you do it through the private sector or the development sector. India has a lot of complex problems and, historically, young people get attracted to working on complex problems. Historically, the pay wasn’t good but it is getting better. The whole startup ecosystem has also changed dramatically in the last decade. It has unleashed a tremendous amount of positive energy. People are working on some very hard problems that interface with the real world. His only grouse is that there was probably too much capital readily available and so a lot of people wasted a lot of money and perhaps learned some bad habits. But more discipline has come in now, and people have to build the right business models before they think about scaling rapidly.

His outlook: with low interest rates, things were almost unreal for too long. Now we are just going back to a more normal world. The West has its own set of difficulties where they are very indebted and if they have high interest rates for a long period of time, they won’t be able to sustain it. They will try to repress rates over time in the West. The problem they have, however, is they have managed to borrow very easily because the dollar has been the global currency and Asia, which has been the big saver, has been willing to send its savings westward. That tide is going to turn, as the center of gravity shifts towards Asia. Now he thinks there will be a period of stagnation in the West, while you have the rise of the rest. If you look over the course of history, from 0-1750 AD, per capita income was not that different across the world. It was only after the Industrial Revolution that the West took off and the rest got left behind. Now the rest is catching up. He thinks the next 50 years is the era of the convergence. And India is very much at the center of that convergence.