Quiet Crisis Growing Louder
In November 2006, the National Knowledge Commission brought attention to what it called a “quiet crisis” in India’s higher education. Six years later, it is quite obvious that there is nothing ‘quiet’ about the crisis.
Devesh Kapur (University of Pennsylvania), who has written extensively on India’s higher education, sees India’s university system in the middle of “a deep crisis.” Others have been more expressive. In the words of Philip G. Altbach (Boston College), and N. Jayaram (Tata Institute of Social Sciences), “Indian universities are enmeshed in a culture of mediocrity.” According to Anurag Behar (Azim Premji University), the state of India’s higher education is akin to “a wasteland pretending to be our higher education system.”
How ‘deep’ is the crisis in the university system? Is India’s higher education terrain really a ‘wasteland’?
Some Key Issues:
This highlights some key elements of India’s higher education crisis—the poor quality of education, the replication of the same old inefficiencies in new institutions without correcting them in already-existing institutions, the lack of qualified faculty, crumbling and crumbled infrastructure, over-regulation and poor regulation, the seemingly intense competition between public and private institutions over who can provide a poorer quality of education, the exit of motivated students from a career in academia and/or from India, high- and low-level corruption and others. Sadly, none of it is the kind of stuff that would turn on investigative journalists.
Many of us acknowledge privately, if not publicly, that this is a sector where necessary reforms are unlikely in the foreseeable future. The general consensus seems to be that a small number of all-too-few good-quality institutions will continue to exist but there is no expectation of a broader shift from the ‘culture of mediocrity’ to one of excellence. If this sounds pessimistic, it is because there is very little in India’s past record in higher education or in related areas—such as primary education and health—that is especially encouraging.
India and World Rankings
Speaking at the annual convocation of IIT-Kharagpur in September 2012, President Pranab Mukherjee expressed dismay “that not a single Indian university or institute of higher learning, including the premier IITs, figure on the list of 200 top-rated universities of the world.” Further, he asked: “Why are we, a ‘rising economic superpower’, not able to promote our standards to be rated, indisputably, among the top 10 or even top 50 or 100?”
The president was referring to the then-released QS World Rankings. A few weeks later, Times Higher Education came out with its list. Again, India’s universities were missing from the top.
Let us forget these rankings for the moment. One could argue that rankings do not tell the complete story. Several educationists and informed commentators do have serious issues with the methodology used to prepare these rankings. However, other questions prop up. Does a rejection of world rankings make our institutions good? How do we measure good, bad or middling quality of education?
A Skills Crisis
The simplest understanding of quality requires that we consider two basic tasks that higher education institutions are meant to perform— teaching and research. Other than people who can teach and/or research in various disciplines, both require some minimal infrastructure and funding depending on the disciplines in question. A properly functioning administration guided by a coherent and consistent set of rules and regulations is also necessary. In India, where the research and publications component is nearly absent, teaching acquires even greater importance.
It is quite clear that our institutions are not doing a good job of teaching. If they did, college degrees would have more value than they do and the country would not be facing a skills crisis. As Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Centre for Policy Research) observe, “competitive exams have virtually replaced performance at the university level as a passport to further education or jobs.” Employers know that the quality of education at most institutions is mediocre. Many of the respectable universities in the country hold separate exams to admit students to their graduate programmes.
Poor quality education is reflected in low employability rates. Most employers—notably N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys—have complained that graduates from even some of the elite institutions have to be re-trained at considerable expense.
Two broad conclusions can be reached. First, students are not being taught what they need to learn. In most colleges and universities, the course content is dated often by a couple of decades and quite disconnected to the job requirements of today. Second, whatever is taught is not taught well.
Where are the teachers?
The skills crisis is pervasive in the higher education sector as well. In a recent interview, Shyam Sunder (Yale School of Management) observed that: “Our best brains are selling soaps and getting into civil service...but we are not able to attract them to a sector that is most important to us—education—particularly higher education.” As a result, even the IITs and the IIMs are facing a shortage of qualified faculty. As higher education goes through further expansion, these shortages will mount. The obvious question is: How has a populous country like India, where education is highly valued, reached a point where it cannot find suitable faculty for even its most venerable institutions?
The poor supply of good-quality faculty has much to do with the status of the profession. One of the consequences of the steady decay in India’s higher education over the past several decades is the dramatic decline in the social status of those in the academic profession. For years, politicians, bureaucrats and common folks themselves have actively participated in running the profession to the ground. It is doubtful if any faculty at an Indian institution encourages their children to choose the same career, certainly not in India.
At least two consequences have followed from the downgrading of the academic profession to junk status. First, motivated students have rejected the option of a career in teaching and research. And second, students who are so inclined choose to head West or East.
India’s ambitious plans for higher education will go nowhere without qualified faculty. For the long-term, there needs to be a concerted effort at changing the way Indians think about the profession so that the current generation sees academics as a worthy profession. That has to be backed up by lifting the profession from its current junk status by rewarding the performance of individuals who deliver high-quality research and teaching.
What about research?
The research component in India’s higher education is a dark hole. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stated the obvious when he recently said that the country has “not been able to make an impact on a world scale commensurate with [its] large scientific manpower pool.” According to Thomson Reuters, only 3.5 per cent of the global research output in 2010 was from India. It is quite likely that the relatively small number of Indians based at American and British institutions have a higher research output.
The importance of research hardly needs to be emphasized and will be taken up another time. Briefly, we all know that high-quality research is intimately connected to innovation, productivity and economic and social development. The research output of a nation is also a key measure of a country’s status as an emerging great power.
Summing up
Kapur and Mehta believe that India’s public institutions “need radical reform on every single dimension imaginable.” The same is true for private institutions. However, for now, radical reform is simply out of the question. At best, all that students heading to college in the coming years can hope for is some kind of patchwork reforms that will marginally increase the number of credible higher education institutions without making any dent in the culture of mediocrity.
No comments:
Post a Comment