Strong Castle on a weak Foundation

Higher Educational expansion and Gross Enrollment ratio (GER) seems to be the obsession of our Educational policy planners. The target as per eleventh plan is, establishment of 1500 universities and GER of 15% by 2015. In our quest for quantity, the government allowed the participation the private players. The private sector on the other hand saturated the market with high margin technical courses without out any foresight to its sustainability and long term demand.

Quality became an issue when supply surpassed the demand. Over a period of time the consciousness of a quality degree than an ordinary degree increased, the fittest survived and others perished.  The quality metric is an ever increasing one, the aspirations of the Indian student has reached a global level. The demand for International quality degree still remains high.  

The legendary IITs and NITs are still retain the top slots with regards to quality; with only 30,000 seats on offer, many are moving towards the less competitive American SAT than JEE.

The IITs and other central Institutes and Universities, in spite of their enormous state funding, academic freedom and political non interference, fail miserably when it comes to international ratings. Our best institutions do not appear in the Top-200 list of international Universities. Only three IITs appear in the top 400 list of the international ratings of Times Higher Education, and only IISc Bangalore, appears in top 500 list of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.  

Why our premier institutes don’t figure in the top international ratings? Do we produce only quality technical graduates not quality research at our IITs? Are our IITs a bit overrated? Rather than improving our Universities over the quality metrics set by the rating agencies, the HRD ministry is all set to lobby with the rating agencies out of embarrassment.

Lobbing may be illegal in India; we don’t know whether it a mere consultation or a rank fixing exercises.If rank can be fixed or influenced, why should someone trust these ranks?

On one hand we want our higher educational institutes to be of international standards, we run away from international assessments, which internationally grades peers (15yrs) from different countries in basic skills like reading, maths and science. After our utter poor performance in 2009, India has consistently remained out of Programme for International students Assessment (PISA) conducted by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). PISA conducts a two our test for fifteen year olds and grades counties based on the students performance, India secured the second last rank in a list of 74 countries in 2009.

The priorities of the Government is misplaced, a knowledge economy can never be created with weak school foundation, mediocre research and nil innovation.   Its hypocrisy, you can never have a strong castle on a weak foundation.