India’s youth is caught at the dual crossroads of entry and exit, thanks to the admissions bazaar and the degree-granting carnival. At the point of entry, millions of students are trained to become humanoids by an expansive and expensive coaching class industry that commercialises its bottom-line and diminishes the learning lifeline to pattern recognition and multiple choice question optimisation. At the point of exit, many higher education institutions—expected to supervise, skill and scale these minds—fall below the learning outcome maximisation benchmark. A rampant and explosive growth has created a bloated coaching class industry and higher education enrolment chasing popular programmes in a manner that defies logic and reasoning. This “entry-exit problem” is not merely a systemic inefficiency; it is a structural distortion that catalyses towards cataclysmic consequences due to digital delusion.
The mutation of noble pursuit of knowledge into a commercial transactional marketplace, delusionary divergence creating a pedagogical disconnect and stereotyped scaffolds that regiment student creativity have created vulnerabilities in this crucial career defining learning lifecycle. Barring the exceptional islands of excellence and progressives, the chaotic professional college admission, the mindless celebration of online education that marginalises cerebration and the massification of popular degree programmes have made this three-in-one combo a prescription for demographical impoverishment. To address the growing complexities in each of this requires visionary action plans and institutional autonomous vehicles, both of them found in abundance in the New Education Policy. Would like to present a sample for each of the three problems.
In many of my previous articles, I have highlighted the pacing march of monstruous money over mindless merit. Armed with this double-barrelled ammunition, the coaching class industry has rapidly evolved from a supportive learning space into parallel education system. Coaching-class city hubs like Kota, Hyderabad, Chennai and many more have become hyper-competitive terrains where students as young as 13 are initiated into regimented routines of problem-solving drills, mock tests, and algorithmic thinking. Result: Success is engineered by force and not discovered at ease. Many arrive intellectually fatigued and creatively undernourished and has a concatenation effect on learning outcomes in higher education. One of the many possible solutions to address this mania is to provide answers to these questions. Why do private universities need to conduct their own entrance exams? Why should entrance exam scores alone be a predictor of merit when there is a huge socio-economic academic ‘gini’? Why can’t states decide on the ratio of entrance and Class XII scores for admissions to professional colleges? I have already provided answers to these before.
Leaving aside the questions to address the first limb, the second limb is another pedagogical time-bomb. The scaffolding of higher education institutions (HEIs) to provide degrees to exit campus and not enter life is another hugely widening gap. One of the biggest challenges confronting HEIs is the lack of qualified faculty. The present generous (questionable) norms of UGC and AICTE allowing 40 per cent online courses for a degree programme is at best a good substitute for a bad teacher. These substitutes are short-term steroids and not sustainable solutions and the need to build capacity amongst teaching faculty is tellingly visible. The recent effort of the Ministry of Education declaring NITTTRs and NCERT as Deemed Universities, Mission GURU-SETU and the newly reimagined Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya Teacher Training Programme must all come together in providing a platform to promote excellence in higher education teaching profession that needs to regain its lost glory. I only hope NITTTRs don’t join the bandwagon of certain deemed universities and offer various engineering programmes (thanks to AICTE’s current unsolicited generosity) but focus on capacity building of teachers in technical education.
The third limb’s extended organ is an industry partner which cannot afford to be vestigial but functional. The UGC’s recent Apprenticeship Embedded Degree Programme (AEDP), the National Credit Framework (NCrF), NCVET’s schemes are readily available policy prescriptions for industry to internalise in partnership with many HEIs to generate a pool of skilled workforce. On the contrary, industry is building commercial models of courseware and competing with HEIs for a share in the revenue pie!
These three samples are just an appetiser to NEP’s grand menu which will be cooked by the much awaited VBSA Bill. Be that as it may, unless we shift from an exam ranking economy to a neuro-cognitive schooling ecology, from a degree granting shop floor to a career making talent factory and from a surfacial to a deeply ingrained industry partnership, India’s demographic dividend will remain an uncashed blank cheque. In short: Redeem the demographic dividend blank cheque.
vaidhya@sastra.edu