JOIN USHigher education presents dismal picture
The landscape of Indian higher education depicts a dismal picture which is a matter of great concern for both academic planners and students. Higher education in the country is promoted through several stakeholders namely central universities, state universities, deemed universities and private universities with uneven standards of education.
The challenge of higher education is to create knowledge to move forward from known work to new opportunity and fresh thinking which is not the case in the country.
As a result, the country’s higher education system suffers from several weaknesses such as proliferation of substandard institutions, failure to maintain an academic calendar, outdated curricula, disparities in the quality of education and lack of adequate support for research. What is worse, a large gap between the standards in our country and those in other advanced countries is widening rapidly.
The standard of graduate degrees in the country still remains weak. The courses offered by many universities have remained archaic and irrelevant to contemporary as well as emerging economic, social, scientific and technical needs.
The Indian higher education system with 757 universities and 38,056 affiliated colleges has over 20 million students and is one of the largest in the world. When India gained independence in 1947, there were only 20 universities and 500 colleges with 1,00,000 students. By 2011, this figure increased to 611 universities and university-level institutions besides 31,324 colleges. Over the last 70 years, higher education has grown phenomenally in the country.
The University Education Commission (1948-49) felt the inadequacy of the higher education system, particularly in terms of quality and standards. The Kothari Commission (1964-66) noted that “the situation in higher education was unsatisfactory and even alarming in some ways that the average standards have been falling and rapid expansion has resulted in lowering quality”.
The country’s gross enrolment ratio (GER) in higher education has improved to 23.6% in 2014-15 from 21.5% in 2012-13. Overall, the enrolment in higher education was 33.3 million in 2014-15 compared to 30.1 million in 2012-13, according to a survey on higher education released by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD).
The survey was initiated in 2011 to prepare a database on higher education. The GER is calculated for the 18-23 years age group and is about total enrolment as a percentage of the eligible population.
While these figures may appear to be impressive, in reality the problem is that Indian higher education gives importance to quantity and not quality education in terms of student enrolment. The fact that every year an increasing number of Indian students travel abroad to pursue higher education at foreign universities only proves the lack of quality in India.
Higher education should be relevant to society through its ability to solve problems. Otherwise, the social sciences will remain just teaching subjects. Only when these teaching subjects are combined with research will higher education become more meaningful.
For instance, political scientists should be able to suggest solutions to improve the political system, economists have to critique economic policies and help formulate alternative policies. Similarly, historians need to inform people about the past and more importantly, put it in proper perspective.
In the realm of the natural sciences like biology, zoology, and botany, teachers of these academic disciplines have to study the flora and fauna around them and accordingly advise/inform policy makers on how best to use them or ensure their survival in future.
Benefiting society
For higher education to connect to society and provide solutions, research is the only route to do so. The role of a university is to contribute to the community and not exist alone in isolation. A university needs to apply its knowledge to benefit society.
It becomes the responsibility of a university to undertake research in social problems because no other organisation or entity in the government or private sector is oriented or tasked to do so.
Today, a major challenge for higher education is to attract bright people to teaching career. Apart from the need for high salaries to draw good candidates to teaching, which would be obvious, an effective selection process is equally important.
The selection process should identify only candidates who choose to become teachers and weed out others who do so because of compulsion. Clearly, higher education is not confined to teaching alone and has to go along with research.
In the academic discourse on higher education, the objective is for students to develop a new understanding with abstract levels of thinking, reasoning analysis and synthesis which foster new ideas to bring changes at two levels, individually and collectively. The very soul of higher education is not to work as an information shop, but evolve intellectual life of a nation through pursuit of knowledge.
(The writer is a PhD scholar with School of Education, Christ University, Bengaluru)