Higher Education
Higher education
The importance of higher education is well-established in Indian society. However, conflicts still arise between those who want more private funding in higher education and those who don’t. And our regulatory frameworks have created colleges and universities that struggle to impart education well, even as the demand for higher education has become unprecedented.
November 29th, 2008 at 11:12 am
I think the problem of higher education in India is acutely low spend by government, lack of things that hinder the inventor from benefiting from his invention like patent rights, link btw entrepreneur and inventor.
July 8th, 2009 at 1:04 am
It is possible to rapidly expand the infrastructure for higher education in India while still providing affordable education to all. And this can be done without asking for any additional financial resources from the Government. What is needed is innovative thinking. One such idea is outlined below.
Three components are needed to achieve this goal (a) Complete freedom and low cost of entry for private as well as public educational institutions (b) Financial sustenance using the concept of Gurudakshina — a simple, fair and transparent education tax allocation system (c) Participatory governance of the educational institutions.
Freedom with an enabling environment spurs growth. Many examples in the Indian history are witness to this fact. The most striking examples are the telecommunication and the information technology revolution in India. In the field of education we are witnessing rapid (and alarming) growth in the IIT-JEE coaching institutes which are completely unregulated, private schools and colleges (including deemed universities) which were “poorly regulated”. Government should liberally allow (and enable) private players to setup schools, colleges, universities and vocational training institutes.
There are two main concerns against complete freedom and private participation in the education sector: (i) How to ensure that the quality of education is good (ii) How to ensure that the education is equally accessible to all the sections of the society, including the poorest of the poor.
Both these concerns can be addressed using the proposed concept of Gurudakshina. Under this scheme, the (private as well as public) educational institutes are required to provide completely free education (including free boarding and lodging). Their costs are to be recovered using an education tax called “Gurudakshina”. The graduates need to pay a fixed fraction of their incomes (for a certain predetermined number of years) directly to the institute that provided them the education. It is easy to see that, under this scheme, the only way an educational institution can thrive is by ensuring that its graduates are employed and the alumni enjoy a prosperous career. For this, they will need to impart skills that will be needed by the society in the future.
A concern that arises from the concept of Gurudakshina is that the institutions will solely focus on lucrative subjects such as engineering or MBA and ignore disciplines such as arts and sciences. It may be argued that since the cost of entry will be low, large number seats will be available (very quickly) for lucrative disciplines leading to an oversupply of skilled manpower and lowering of wages and thereby reducing the incomes of their educational institutions. The “lucrative” disciplines will no longer be lucrative. This will lead to a balance between the demand and supply of the skills. The competition will ensure that only the institutes providing the best education will be financially viable. The institutions providing sub-standard education will get lower incomes since their graduates will not find good employment.
A more valid concern is that the education imparted at these institutions may excessively focus on monetary aspects and the education imparted is not holistic. This problem can be handled if the primary goal of the institute is not to earn profit for a specific group of investors and the control and management of these institutions is in the hands of society and eminent scholars. For public institutions, Government can evolve a participatory structure of governance where the board members of the institutes are drawn from its eminent faculty members, distinguished alumni, outstanding students and other eminent academics in India. These institutions can then strive to provide a holistic education environment (as envisaged by the Yashpal committee report). The private institutions may be allowed to make profits for the fist few years of their operations (say first 15 years), after which they may be required to handover the management control to a structure similar to that of the public institutions. All the educational institutions may be brought under right to information (RTI) act to ensure that the public can act as a watchdog.
Finally, it may not be a good idea to force any public or private institute into such a model. The Government may offer complete freedom to public and private institutions in return for providing Gurudakshina option in a non-discriminatory manner to all its students.
Visit http://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~rahul/Gurudakshina/ for a short presentation. A more detailed report is available at: http://projectgurudakshina.wordpress.com/. Please write your comments in the blog.