Guide to Best colleges | An overview - Keep learning structured

M Rajivlochan

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has begun. It is transforming the world around us in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. It, too, like its three predecessors, is based on formal and structured knowledge. To be on top of this industrial revolution, a college degree is needed.

The abilities to succeed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution can’t be had merely through hard work, native intelligence or by watching an ustaad work. There is this myth that college education is irrelevant to success. The myth has been around for at least three centuries. Its latest version features Bill Gates, a college dropout. Do notice, that he did go to college and, one of the best at that. Moreover, he drew upon that brief experience for creating goods that college grads found useful. In contrast, there is the case of the Thiel Fellows. Each fellow, under 23 years of age, was given seed money — a total of $100,000 over two years — to pursue business opportunities in preference to a college education. Each succeeded in their respective business. Yet, after their fellowship they chose to enroll for a college education to get the formal and structured learning that can only happen in a college.

Also, do not forget that 200 years ago, it was the absence of formal and structured learning that brought the vibrant Indian economy down as soon as it came in contact with the First Industrial Revolution. The First Industrial Revolution was rooted in the scientific temper that Europe had nurtured for almost 300 years then. At that time, till the 18th century, India was the monopoly supplier of saltpeter to the world, the substance needed to power military shells. India was also one of the major suppliers of zinc in the world. Indian technologists, as early as fourth century BC, had mastered the art of extracting zinc from its ore while the rest of the world struggled to find a way to stop the smelted zinc from evaporating. A study of the famed wootz steel of India was an important component of European researches that led to what we now know as steel. As late as 1795, the British were still trying to figure out how Indians made such high-quality steel. English journals like the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London would carry articles with titles like, “Experiments and Observations to Investigate the Nature of a Kind of Steel, Manufactured at Bombay, and There Called Wootz: With Remarks on the Properties and Composition of the Different States of Iron”. Within 50 years, European researchers and experimenters, thanks to scientific research, had created superior ways of making steel. In the same time in the absence of formal and structured learning, Indians had lost all their prior skills and knowledge. In the absence of a sturdy system of learning and knowledge transmission, today we do not even know how our ancestors produced wootz for over 1,000 years. 

Need for a robust college culture

The Industrial Revolution was based on scientific methods and systematic learning. These are meta-skills, skills on the basis of which other skills can be developed. The college is the site for acquiring such meta-skills. Whether it is the sciences or the social sciences and humanities, grounding in the scientific method is essential for any further growth. It involves systematising learning and transmission of knowledge and constant testing of ideas and beliefs against reality. 

Even the IT boom of the 1990s, that happened by chance and benefitted by escaping the baleful eye of a lethargic government, was based on filling up the IT bodyshops with college graduates. As it turned out, in the absence of a robust culture of college education and research, the majority of the Indian IT industry continues to provide services of a lower order to international markets. Data entry, call centers, medical transcription, writing basic code; all these account for the bulk of the business processes outsourced to India. 

Also, domestic markets account for a miniscule share of revenues of Indian IT companies. This indicates that most Indian businesses are still living in a pre-IT age. This is very different from the growth of say, the American IT sector, which is primarily driven by internal demand. 

Need to establish Industry connect

Each year about 85 lakh students graduate in India. Over half of them join the workforce every year. For these students to be part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, what is needed is for the colleges to offer them programmes that are in tune with workplace requirements and that teach them to think. 

Learning of this sort requires a stylised environment away from the daily routine of life. This is why colleges are needed. But learning and the scientific temper also require frequent reality testing of ideas. That connection with real life could be established by simultaneously working on real life problems; by working on research projects; by doing internships. 

Undergraduate research programmes produce better and higher order learning when students have the opportunity to work on real world problems. Greater mobility and exchange between teaching faculty and industry would also improve the quality of learning.

Currently, it is this connection of colleges with the workplace that is almost non-existent in India. It is weak to the extent that colleges do not even systematically record placement data. Most colleges do not even have a placement cell. Some of this is changing in response to colleges competing with peers in the NIRF rankings. But, as yet there is almost no effort to consciously make graduates employable by providing them with higher order learning. 

When the Confederation of Indian Industry hired Wheebox to survey one lakh students in 2018, it discovered the dramatic absence of learning among college graduates. The survey tested students on their domain knowledge, communication skills, logical ability and aptitude only to discover that degree programmes that connected with industry, did much better. This meant that passable skills were available with only some 19 per cent of Arts students (those who constitute over 50 per cent of India's undergraduates). In contrast, programmes like BPharma and BTech, which insist upon internships, had about 50 per cent students who were competent enough.

Policy policing, a spoilsport

Adding to the problem is the policy-policing to which colleges are subject to by the government. Most colleges can float only government-approved programmes that need to be transacted in only government-approved ways. That hems in most college managements and teachers, disabling them from responding to the rapidly changing requirements of society and industry. Some private colleges do make efforts to stay in tune with the latest opportunities in the marketplace. They tend to convert all such demands into specialised courses that command higher fees in the marketplace. But these students are mere drops in the ocean. A few thousand students learning superior-order skills are not sufficient to make the nation's economy grow by leaps and bounds. 

The ability to learn how to learn, in other words meta-learning, is needed in programmes across the board. For that to happen, future-oriented skills like data science, cyber security, machine learning need to be melded into the courses taught to students in the basic Arts, Science and Commerce programmes. Currently, a very large number of students do not even know the basics of word processing and find it impossible to use spreadsheets. A specialised course in Artificial Intelligence or Data Science makes no sense for everyone. Ignorance of its basics for all makes even less sense. We should remember that artificial intelligence and data handling are merely tools and not an end.

A case for autonomy

Fortunately, for the quality of teaching and learning to improve radically, the most important changes needed are non-monetary in nature. They don't require pumping of more money. But they do require a complete overthrow of the current pattern of governing higher education. It is when college teachers have the freedom to decide what they wish to teach, the freedom to interact more with business and industry that they have a much greater stake in the system. The numbers of autonomous colleges have certainly increased by leaps and bounds but they are yet to reach critical mass sufficient to make a difference. Of the 40,000-odd colleges in the country, less than 1,000 are autonomous.

The Modi government has gone out of its way to encourage college autonomy thereby removing the shackles imposed upon good colleges by the UGC and the affiliating universities. Such autonomy makes the college and teachers directly responsible for taking higher education forward, improving the skills of students, thereby making them more employable. 

Government colleges that constitute 22 per cent of total college strength, are stymied by what can best be called the DPI-Syndrome wherein a bureaucrat uses antiquated rules and regulations of the colonial era to whip the faculty into submission. We need a policy that does away with the Director Public Instruction, and DPI analogues, and allows teachers to teach. 

Instead the policy makers have created a weird Skill India programme that goes to the other end of the spectrum which insists on industry experience and specific skills in lieu of structured learning of generic subjects. The simple thing to understand is that in higher education, there are no short cuts. Moreover, investments in higher education are the equivalent of sunk costs. Profits don't happen immediately and, neither are they always tangible. Till now India was rich — insofar as it was — by default. The trick lies in being rich by design. College education is the essential basis for that.

The writer is Member, State Higher Education Council and Professor, Panjab University, Chandigarh