India has opened its campuses to foreign universities, a move many welcome as a way to expand educational choices. However, the ongoing crisis at Britain’s universities also serves as a warning to India.
When financial viability and immediate employment prospects become the main measures of academic value, disciplines with less direct commercial returns can become vulnerable, and India certainly needs safeguards before this pattern takes hold.
The University of Nottingham, for instance, reported an £83.5 million deficit in 2024-25 and proposed suspending recruitment to 42 courses in 2026-27, with a view to closure, and cutting 609 full-time-equivalent staff positions over three years. Modern languages and music are among the affected subjects.
What are Mickey Mouse courses?
‘Mickey Mouse courses’, or ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’, is a pejorative term for university modules or degree programmes that critics consider lacking in academic rigour, intellectual depth, or clear labour-market value.
Nottingham is not alone: the wider British sector faces similar pressures from rising costs, the declining real value of domestic tuition fees, and weaker international student recruitment.
Financial discipline is necessary, but decisions made under financial pressure can have lasting academic consequences.
Problem with ‘Mickey Mouse’ label
The term “Mickey Mouse courses”, used in British political debate, dismisses degrees with little direct employment value as less useful. This confuses the quality of individual programmes with the value of entire disciplines. Universities must review courses, improve teaching, and examine graduate outcomes, and no subject should be exempt from scrutiny.
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However, enrolment, starting salaries, and immediate job prospects cannot fully measure educational value. History, literature, philosophy, sociology, and political science develop analytical skills and help students understand institutions, societies, and public life.
In fact, technology makes this need more evident. Automated systems increasingly influence decisions about loans, welfare benefits, and recruitment. Engineers can build these systems, but assessing their effects on privacy, discrimination, and accountability also requires knowledge of law, ethics, politics, and human behaviour. In a country with 22 scheduled languages and substantial social and cultural diversity, these areas of knowledge are essential.
A policy environment that places increasing weight on employment outcomes, institutional rankings, and market demand could put humanities departments under tremendous pressure.
This is not an argument for retaining every humanities course regardless of quality or demand. Indian families have legitimate concerns about employment. The point is that the absence of an immediate commercial return should not, by itself, determine whether a programme continues.
What does this mean for India?
In August 2026, the Union government reported that the University Grants Commission (UGC) had issued 16 Letters of Intent to 15 foreign higher education institutions from Australia, Italy, the US and the UK. Their proposed programmes cover business, finance, software engineering, data science, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and other fields, including biomedical sciences.
No doubt, these subjects meet genuine educational and employment needs, and their expansion is not the problem. But will internationalisation broaden the range of education available, or concentrate provision in commercially attractive fields?
Competition from foreign campuses may intensify that pressure if families come to associate expensive international degrees primarily with professional qualifications.
The government’s assurances so far do not answer this. The National Education Policy-2020 promises multidisciplinary education, and official statements emphasise that campuses will match their parent institutions’ standards. That addresses quality, not breadth, and does not say what would happen if a campus later withdraws a programme.
Financial pressure makes concentration a real risk. Foreign universities are not immune to it, as Nottingham shows. Branch campuses must recover their costs from fees, so they have reason to favour programmes that attract enough paying students. India could then gain more institutions without gaining a wider range of educational opportunities.
Protecting academic diversity
The implications extend to Indian universities. The All India Survey on Higher Education 2023-24 identifies Arts as the country’s largest undergraduate stream, accounting for nearly one-third of enrolment.
A policy environment that places increasing weight on employment outcomes, institutional rankings, and market demand could put humanities departments under tremendous pressure. Competition from foreign campuses may intensify that pressure if families come to associate expensive international degrees primarily with professional qualifications.
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India cannot expect foreign institutions to maintain programmes that their business models cannot sustain. Protecting academic diversity is therefore a responsibility of public policy, not something that market competition will automatically deliver.
Transparency on courses, closures
So, what should India put in place? Five measures would help.
First, internationalisation should be judged by more than the number of campuses established or students enrolled. The UGC’s approval and monitoring framework should require transparent information on programmes, faculty strength, research commitments, and fees. Institutions should disclose significant changes in their provisions and explain the reasons. If a programme closes, students already enrolled must be able to complete their degrees without unreasonable additional costs or disruption.
Financial discipline is necessary, but decisions made under financial pressure can have lasting academic consequences.
Second, Indian universities need transparent procedures for closing courses. Decisions should consider academic quality, enrolment, financial viability, and public value. Academic bodies must have a meaningful role alongside financial administrators. Low enrolment may justify a review, but should not automatically lead to closure. Shared teaching and inter-university programmes could help sustain subjects that individual institutions struggle to support.
Public funding, interdisciplinary balance
Third, public funding must recognise the wider contribution of the humanities and social sciences. These disciplines serve intellectual and social needs that tuition revenue alone cannot adequately measure. Core grants could support essential teaching and research in these areas, subject to periodic academic review. The objective should not be to subsidise every programme indefinitely, but to balance financial sustainability with educational and public value.
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Fourth, interdisciplinary education should work in both directions. Engineering and computing students need ethics and social analysis; humanities students need digital tools and data literacy. This integration should strengthen disciplinary knowledge rather than reduce the humanities to a service for technology programmes.
Finally, universities must improve the quality and relevance of their humanities courses. Curricula should engage with contemporary issues, research opportunities should expand, and career guidance should explain the range of employment available to graduates.
Academic autonomy must be accompanied by accountability for educational quality. While universities cannot ignore budgets or employment concerns, financial viability is not the same as academic value. India can expand international education and support technological progress without narrowing the purpose of higher education. The policy challenge is to ensure that decisions about what students can study reflect educational and public needs as well as financial realities.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal)