The cycle of un-education

There are over a thousand universities in India, and close to 18,000 colleges, but the popular imagination of higher education has always centred on a couple of hundred names. The IITs and IIMs, the Regional Engineering Colleges, some medical colleges, and the historically prestigious colleges affiliated to British-era universities, typically in major cities. These days, another category of institutions is joining the ranks -- well-endowed private universities founded by business titans and often focused on humanities and arts. But these too are not more than a couple of dozen.

A very large number of students attend some other college. When we consider the future of higher education, this is one thing we should keep in mind. The best institutions are important, of course. But the great majority of Indian college students go to other places that offer much less, and are hardly known.

The second thing to keep in mind is the need. If 50-80 million people aspire to pursue higher education at any given time, then we’ll need many more institutions. Every development metric for India must be understood relative to the size of the population that seeks such progress. We are nowhere close to being able to meet that demand.

The third thing to keep in mind is that the majority of students go to college to ‘get a degree’. One would expect this, considering that so many students attend institutions that are barely known outside their taluks. What these students are pursuing is a piece of paper that -- in their eyes, at least -- makes them eligible for some post-education goal that often has nothing to do with the learning itself. Some job, the marriage market, local esteem, keeping up with others, staying at home, etc., were and still are very important considerations.

Consequently, students pursue the path that they think is easiest to get to that piece of paper. Three year programmes in arts, sciences and commerce colleges far outnumber the rest. This is the fourth thing to keep in mind. Any re-imagination of higher education has to touch this section in a way that does not dismiss the goals they have in mind, but takes those at face value. Who are we to devalue the desire to find a better spouse or put one’s collar up?

There is a fifth issue, which completes the cycle. The majority of colleges in every discipline provide nothing more than the pretense of social or economic mobility to most of their students. In the end, young men and women find that their education didn’t get them any closer to what they sought by pursuing it. The millions who now seek jobs despite holding the coveted Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees are visible proof of this. To make matters worse, their families have each spent a fortune -- compared to their limited means -- on this.

This is the cycle of un-education that we need to unwind. It’s been this way for some time now, but so far the political and academic establishments have not called much attention to it, possibly because their own positions are privileged.

How did that come about? Post-Independence, the Union government created most of the sought-after institutions, and began to regulate the private ones created both before and after 1947. Partly, the government took the view that it must do what the nascent private sector could not, but it was also partly true that it was opposed to private participation.

However, by the 1980s, it was clear that the government couldn’t go on creating colleges itself, and private ones would be necessary to meet the rising demand and expectations. Even then, the door was opened only slightly; private colleges invariably needed to be affiliated to a degree-granting government university, and one’s official academic record bore the stamp of that entity rather than the college one attended. And everything the college did was to stay in lock-step with what the sarkar deemed fit.

This arrangement cast the promoters of the new institutions as allies of the government, and the consequences were both predictable and disastrous. Every public purpose was shelved, and monetising the certificates of graduation became the goal. A slew of institutions came up, with hardly any checks on what they delivered. India has the world’s largest gap between certification and learning, and much of that has been by design.

All of this has left the cycle of un-education more or less in place. There aren’t enough colleges, and most students attend run-of-the-mill institutions studying as little as necessary to get a dead-end certificate. There are colleges that are exceptions, of course, but this is the larger reality.

(This is the first of a three-part series on the past, present and future of higher education)