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Our fictional republics of learning

THE Patel agitation in Gujarat once again underlines the importance that the Indian public gives to degree-based education. Just before this, we had we had the episode of the IIT Roorkee expelling 72 students for poor performance.

Our fictional republics of learning

The spread and quality of higher education in India continues to be very limited.



M Rajivlochan

THE Patel agitation in Gujarat once again underlines the importance that the Indian public gives to degree-based education. Just before this, we had we had the episode of the IIT Roorkee expelling 72 students for poor performance. In that instance, many had blamed the teachers for the students’ performance rather than the students themselves. This desperation to obtain a degree is entirely unmatched with the ability of the degree to provide for jobs. In the case of government jobs, the mismatch is so intense that a widespread belief continues to go around that government jobs are available only through paying a hefty bribe to the selectors. The fact is that most degree-holders can’t even get non-government jobs. This, when employers outside of the government routinely complain that those who come to them for jobs are simply clueless and without any skills. ‘Unemployable’is a new word that had to be coined to describe the graduates of Indian universities. Some students who had acquired degrees through suspect universities happened to seek admission to departments in Panjab University (PU). They explained that they did not care for learning anything here; all that they wanted was to show to immigration authorities in countries like Canada that they were students at the PU. 

Experts say that the problems with higher education in India centre around the absence of accountability, lack of quality control and a considerable failure to live up to the expectations of India. However, a quick historical investigation reveals that these are not new problems. They have been in existence in India since the very first time when formal higher education of the western kind came to India a century and a half ago. For over 150 years, the government has taken upon itself the responsibility of imparting post-school education. No one could enter the field of higher education without requisite permits and certifications and these were difficult to obtain. Yet, the fact was that regulation, permission and certifications by the government were quite a mess. Even when India had a very small higher education sector, with less than 10 ‘private’ institutions till about a decade ago, things were pretty bad as far as education was concerned. As recently as 2005, there were only about 360 universities in India. Even these institutions were not much to talk about. These barely produced graduates, were highly rift by politics and did almost no research worth the name. The frequent reviews of higher education, averaging one per decade and a half, pointed out the persistence of the problems and suggested virtually the same solutions. The one big change came in the 1970s when the faculty began to get remuneration on a par with the best in government. Not that paying more made any difference. The spread and quality of higher education in India continued to be very limited. 

About a decade ago the government began to permit private bodies to invest in universities. The number of universities quickly increased, doubling the total number of universities to some 700 at present. In the meanwhile, realizing the need for an external body to ensure quality in universities the government had already set up the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). It took a while for the NAAC to take off. Its working, though, brought about a significant difference. By the simple device of making things transparent, the NAAC forced universities and colleges of India to improve their working. The competition between the better universities to remain better than the next is something that has pushed many a good university to work hard towards improving internal governance and produce tangible results. The ones given lower ranks have been under pressure to improve. 

 At the same time, the demand for degree-level education was such that a number of fake universities also got set up. There are over 700 universities in operation currently, with a student strength of 25 lakh plus. In addition, there are 21 that are listed by the UGC as fake. Of these, five are in Delhi, nine in UP and one each in Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Few, as these are, the presence of such institutions focuses light on the interface between society and higher education. 

The simple fact in this regard is that it is only the government, through the UGC, that has been single-handedly trying to improve the working of universities. There is absolutely no pressure from society at large on universities to improve things. If anything, the pressure from parents and students is to give a ‘degree’ to the student, irrespective of the quality of work that the student may have put in. This pressure from students then becomes the driving force for below-par institutions to function. 

There seem be two unfounded, beliefs that remain prevalent among parents willing to shell out money to send their children to institutions of extraordinary low quality: One, that there is a direct correlation between earning capacity, social standing and the acquisition of a degree; two, that there is no correlation between a degree and any corresponding skills. The result is that a number of fly-by-night operators set up shop in the hope of dishing out degrees to anyone so desirous in return of a mutually agreed upon sum. 

As with any other product being sold in the market, these operators are able to earn profits only when there is a body of customers: those hoping to acquire a degree and have little hesitation in seeking out dubious institutions that would provide it for a mutually agreed upon fees. In a recent case, in a university set up in Meghalaya in 2009, it was left to the Meghalaya Governor, in his capacity as visitor of the university, to notice that something funny was going on with this university producing hundreds of PhD researches, even though it had just a handful of faculty members and almost no research facilities. The UGC responded by faulting the university on technicalities like transcending its geographical boundaries and instructed it to stop ‘off-campus learning’. On the fiction of learning that the university seemed to foster, the UGC maintained a studied silence. Little wonder that businesses in India find most graduates from Indian universities unemployable. If even in the arts subjects most of the degree-holders find it difficult to write simple essays in any language, one is left with a lot of wonderment about how things might be in subjects that require a little more specialised training. That, in turn, forces us to say, “Forget ‘fake’ universities and just answer this: Is it that the degrees the universities give out in India are fake for actually not equipping their holders with requisite skills and knowledge?”

— The writer is a Professor of Contemporary Indian History, Panjab University, Chandigarh 

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