As an increasing number of international universities pursue transnational education opportunities in India, one prominent institution making its presence felt is Rutgers University.
Rutgers, one of the oldest universities in the US, founded a decade before American independence, now hosts over 70,000 students and 5,000 faculty.
With its rising profile as a leading research university in New Jersey, Rutgers’ chief academic officer, Prabhas Moghe, believes the time is right to deepen the institution’s student exchange, mobility, and research ties with India.
“Our global goals are fourfold. Number one is to internationalise our education more. That includes study abroad. We have a small presence in India right now which I want to grow. We have lots of students going to Europe and other places, but not so much to India. Number two is to draw upon students from many different parts of the world, particularly from India,” Moghe tells The PIE News.
Rutgers also wants to strengthen its partnerships with Indian institutions, as well as welcoming students from the country to the US, he says.
If we partner with universities in India, we can help strengthen their research infrastructure… Together, we can produce more and solve problems more effectively
Prabhas Moghe, Rutgers University
While Rutgers recently signed an MoU with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, focusing on partnerships in areas like AI, sustainability, and biomedical sciences, Moghe says the goal is to collaborate with like-minded institutions to help address the challenges facing Indian universities.
“American research universities often excel at identifying big societal problems, grand challenges, and then doing the work to address them. Students get involved in that research and are transformed by it. They become change agents,” Moghe continues.
“If we partner with universities in India, we can help strengthen their research infrastructure. That benefits both students and institutions. Together, we can produce more and solve problems more effectively.”
In recent months, it hasn’t just been UK and Australian universities eyeing India for branch campuses – US institutions are joining in too, with the Illinois Institute of Technology becoming the latest to explore a potential Mumbai campus.
The announcement follows a period of concern for American universities due to recent Trump-led education policies, but also comes on the heels of a meeting between the US President and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where both leaders expressed support for US branch campuses in India, joint academic initiatives, and smoother student mobility between the two nations.
While Rutgers doesn’t foresee the presence of a branch campus in India, the institute is focusing on other collaborative opportunities in cross-disciplinary programmes.
“India doesn’t yet have many world-class research universities, though it’s clear there’s a plan to invest. But research is expensive, it doesn’t pay for itself. So collaboration becomes even more important,” explains Moghe.
Though Rutgers University currently has a wide range of partnerships with Indian universities, Moghe believes preparing Indian PhD students for their academic journey would be a key focus for the institute in the near future.
“One idea is to expose the student from India to a US lab early on, so that they’re more competitive when applying for PhD programs down the line,” he says.
“And to see if that experience also helps satisfy the National Education Policy’s requirement that every student should have some form of high-impact educational experience.”
The Big Ten Academic Alliance, which includes Rutgers, collaborates on challenges such as traumatic brain injury and cancer – even exploring shared library resources to make research more accessible and affordable. Rutgers aims to support similar university consortia in India that address country-specific challenges.
“We’ve been looking at examples across sectors such as health tech, tuberculosis, environmental systems, even underwater observation. Many of these models involve both universities and industries working together,” says Moghe.
“That’s the model I think could be a really powerful-university-industry consortium. We’re building our own innovation hub in New Jersey. There are companies co-located with us. We patent our research and foster start-ups. Institutions here in India have similar innovations, so we can collaborate across borders.”
“This is what a true transnational education partnership looks like. It’s not always about building campuses or programs, because ideas and know-how transfer is so much more powerful in my view,” he adds.
With a strong emphasis on AI at Rutgers, which Moghe says helps the institute address digital and social inequalities and advance prevention science, he also believes that understanding AI’s disruptive impact is crucial.
“Sometimes professors actually encourage students to use AI and then explain what they’ve learned and what was deficient in it. So students are kind of using it, not just professing to use it but actually learning through it, without being penalised for using AI,” says Moghe.
“Using AI is like building on the collective intelligence of the community. The question is whether it will have disruptive effects on industries.”
With Rutgers, among many other US universities, now seeing Indian STEM students shift towards Information science, AI, and machine learning, the Trump administration’s recent policies targeting international students are being seen as a threat to the country’s reputation as one of the topmost study destinations in the world.
Since Donald Trump’s return to office, a wave of policies, including the revocation of student visa interviews, the restriction of international student enrolments, a threat to end OPT, and the slashing of federal grants to top universities, has disrupted what was once a stable sector.
Interest from postgraduate international students in the US has dropped sharply, declining by over 40% between January and March 2025, according to new research.
But academics like Moghe remain hopeful that they can overcome any challenges the future may bring.
“I remain cautiously hopeful that we will be collectively resilient. Even with everything else going on, there’s still a great deal of important work to do, especially when it comes to our academic mission,” he says.
“We have to find support for the kind of work we care about. It’s really important to continue doing the work that matters to us, and that means exploring different sources of funding: philanthropy, people who care about the cause. Why not that?”
