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What ails our education sector? There could be various factors, but the new villain in the piece is the teacher – the narrative being built is that we have poor faculty, both in terms of quality and by way of quantity. Therefore, let’s bring in the same solution we have tried for bureaucracy – lateral entry of successful people from Industry. The University Grants Commission has announced that universities and colleges will now be allowed to hire “Professors of Practice”. These new professors need not have formal academic qualifications. They should instead, have done exemplary work in their professions. These professionals should have worked for more than 15 years at a senior level. They will be eligible for a maximum term of three years, that can be extended for one more year. These eminent practitioner professors will either be honorary, funded by industry, or by the educational institutions themselves. The UGC has asked for views and suggestions on this initiative likely to be rolled out next month
The idea indeed is a big one, after all we do need an interface between academics and industry and our students should be job ready when they graduate. However, this is a serious move and needs a lot of attention before it is rolled out. Are we repeating the mistake we made when eminent and distinguished people from industry entered laterally into the higher echelons of our civil service to make improvements in public administration?
Let us see what it is that we are grappling with when we discuss higher education in India. Is it the lack of demand? We have less than 30 million of our 300 million youth aged 15 to 29 in college. Is it the lack of supply? We have 1,000 universities, while China has nearly 3,000 and the US tops the list with 4,000 degree-awarding institutions. Some would say that the problem is the poor level of public funding – India spends a little over 3% of its GDP on education and only 0.40% on higher education. Or is it simply the need for industry experts in education and giving our youth job oriented skills?
This debate on the quality of higher education has been raging ever since we are reminded about our university rankings. A nation cannot aim to be an international knowledge hub (Vishwa Guru) without having any of its institutions in the top 100 or even the top 200 global ranks. The CEOWorld ranks the top 20 countries by way of education systems and India does not find a place in it even as Slovenia (16) and UAE (20) figure on the list. In the Times Higher Education ranks, China has two universities in the top 20 and six in the top hundred, whereas India’s best, the IISc, only figures in the 300-350 bracket.
On top of that is another huge problem staring at us. The numbers of the educated unemployed have grown exponentially and are today at an unprecedented high. The unemployment rate among the educated unemployed is at least three times the national average, says a report by the Azim Premji University. The 55 million unemployed in the country include an alarming number of nine million who hold at least a graduate degree. It is also important to note that these are pre-Covid numbers of 2018-19 and must have only gone up significantly.
Much of our new thinking rests on an almost impossible hope from industry leaders that they will solve all our problems. Even in our institutions of higher learning.
It is therefore almost logical that the University Grants Commission now recommends Professors of Eminence, who will bring in experiential learning and entrepreneurship who will come from industry, civil service, engineering technology and the like. This does reflect the populist stand against educational institutions in general and is strengthened by the abysmal standards that most of our universities and colleges are suffering from. The Harvard versus Hard Work argument has gained resonance and is at the root of how we look at learning and intellectual growth.
The quality of teaching is indeed poor, there is a huge disconnect between the pedagogy used and contemporary requirements of the job market. Attendance in class is awful and student-teacher interaction is a myth. The quality and quantity of research produced is poor, to say the least. Good teaching only follows good research, and if there is none, the lecture is usually an empty one, especially in modern times when information is all available on YouTube. It was more than 10 years ago that Jairam Ramesh, then Minister for Environment had candidly pronounced that our best institutions, the IITs and IIMs, suffer from poor teachers who do poor research. He added however, that these institutions are successful only because they get high quality students.
This is the context against which the new initiative by the University Grants Commission must be evaluated. Professors are valuable human resources, and it takes decades of consistent research and engagement with a discipline that produces an eminent academic. Current hiring practices and corrupt promotion committees may push undeserving candidates to high levels of incompetence in our universities. But that is not an argument for not hiring distinguished people as teachers who will articulate learning objectives, design courses, build evaluation methods and give seminal ideas that bring innovation and change. Teaching, like any other profession, requires enormous amounts of training and aptitude, an ability to build theory, generalise it and put it in context.
What distinguished non-academics do, and do very well, is to validate theory, and sometimes contest it and help change the fundamentals themselves. People from various sectors, across the world, have contributed significantly to college and university education by giving vivid examples of success. They have often nudged theory towards a technological orientation, helped students connect to the real world and given academics new questions to answer. They are the practitioners and the doers, while teachers profess and explain. It is a rare person who can do both equally well.
Therefore, it is understandable that the goal of education has shifted from being knowledge oriented to being rooted in skills, in the hope that the latter may magically produce jobs. The emphasis now shifts to the vocational and not on enlightenment, reflecting much of the shift of political ideology on quick solutions than on transformation and evolution.
(The writer is Professor of
Economics at MCRHRDI of the
Govt of Telangana and teaches Public Policy at ISB and TISS)