The Status of Higher Education in India
Since ancient times,
education has held great value in the Indian culture. Ancient universities in
India were globally renowned centers of learning. The earliest of the
universities was Takshshila, which attained great fame as a university in the
7th century B.C. Institutions such as this had a fairly comprehensive syllabus
spanning over subjects, including the study of holy scriptures, grammar,
astronomy, medicine, logic and philosophy, among others. Currently though, the
education scenario in India isn’t exactly world-class. The system is plagued
with various problems that are holding it back from achieving the greatness it
once held. But how do we bring about a change in a country like India which is
so adamant against adapting to such changes? If we look closely, the solutions
lie in the problems themselves.
1.
Creating
a research culture: India
spends only about 0.7% of GDP on research. Consequently, a great concern is the
low research output of Indian universities. Statistics show that the combined
research output of 39 federally funded Indian universities, as measured in
journal publications between 1990 and 2014, was less than that of either
Cambridge or Stanford University alone — a weakness that points to the fact
that many education institutions are run like businesses and place little
emphasis on research. Even in our labs, a lot of the instrumentation isn’t in
working condition. This might also contribute to dimming the interest of
students wanting to pursue research.
2.
Introduction
of flexibility of courses: Students should be able to take courses of their choice,
instead of being forced to take a limited number of subjects. They should have
the flexibility of learning at their own pace or undergo additional courses.
There should be room to adopt an interdisciplinary approach and let students
explore all their possibilities because no course is too insignificant and
knowledge of anything never goes wasted.
3.
Personal
rapport between students and teachers: While conducting classes in big universities, we often
don’t find the level of personal interaction that teachers share with students
the way it is in schools. Students sometimes don’t even know the names of the
professors teaching them and teachers don’t take the effort to interact more
with their students either. This definitely affects the learning environment in
colleges. Students aren’t all that comfortable in such an environment where the
professors don’t come across as approachable. Instead of clarifying their
doubts with professors in person, they become dependent on Google and YouTube
videos to fulfill their academic queries.
4.
Dimming
quality of institutes: Inadequate
funding and infrastructure, absenteeism among faculty members, high
student-to-teacher ratios, academic corruption- such issues raise doubts about
the relevance of the overburdened Indian education system. Many academic
institutions are opening up like mushrooms and are of lackluster quality,
diluting the quality of education and making a degree from a reputable foreign
university seem more valuable. India has seen a surge in the outflow of
international students from India due to this very reason. The number of Indian
students enrolled in degree programs abroad has grown almost five-fold since
1998. And the brightest of these students who go abroad to pursue higher
education end up taking comfortable and high-paying jobs abroad, instead of
returning to India and getting into the rat race of finding a suitable job
amidst increasing unemployment rates. Eventually, they end up contributing to
the process more commonly known as “brain drain”.
5.
Dominance
of rote-learning culture: The process familiarly known as “ratafication” is quite
commonly observed among college students. The current higher education system
in India rewards students for blindly copying assignments and lab files,
because in fact, trivial matters like these are given more importance than
whether you’re actually taking back anything from performing your lab
experiments. Instead of imparting skills, we’re made to follow a mind-numbing
routine of attending classes to maintain 75% attendance while sleeping with our
eyes open in these classes while the teacher rants on, in a hurry to complete
the syllabus. This is why 80% engineering graduates turn out to be
unemployable, not even unemployed, because companies obviously don’t need these
graduates to be wrapping their documents in brown paper. A solution to this
rote-learning problem is the practice of daily quizzes at the beginning of
every lecture, lasting for not more than ten minutes. True, they consume part
of the class time but the pros to the teacher and the taught outweigh the cons.
Also, introduction of open book examination would be a good idea as it would
inculcate a routine of applying the theoretical knowledge we receive from books
to solve realistic situations.
These are just a
handful of problems that we face in our higher education sector. Clearly, here
is a need to implement an innovative and transformational approach from primary
to higher education level to make the Indian higher educational system more
relevant and competitive globally.
-From a student stuck in the midst of the higher education
scenario in India
