BHUBANESWAR: The state government opened more colleges in the 2020-21 academic session but the move did not help bring students to the classrooms. Not only has the overall enrolment in the state’s higher education come down but also the general colleges have taken a beating during the Covid-19 pandemic despite the Higher Education department improving its college density score.
College density - the number of colleges per lakh eligible population (age group of 18 to 23 years) - in Odisha is 26 at present against 24 in 2019-20, revealed the All India Survey of Higher Education Institutes released recently by the Ministry of Education. This, however, is still less than the country’s average of 31. The number of universities has gone up to 36 from 32.
As per the report, there are a total of 1,206 colleges in the state and an average of 573 students got admitted to each college during the session. In the preceding academic sessions since 2016-17, though, around 680 students took admission to each college every year. Also, there still exists a huge gap between the number of private and government colleges in the state.
There are only 53 government degree colleges and a majority of them run only under-graduate level programmes. And only five per cent (around 60) of the total institutes run post-graduate level programmes.
While loss of livelihoods during the pandemic is being cited as the biggest reason behind students dropping out, educationist Pritish Acharya said the state has adequate number of government and government-aided colleges but the need of the hour is to improve the quality of teaching and learning and introduce skilling subjects so as to retain students at higher education level.
“Our primary focus now is on improving the seat strength, opening new institutions and courses. The work has already started and we hope the enrolment will improve by the next session,” said Higher Education Minister Rohit Pujari.
Interestingly, even as the overall GER has gone down this time (20.7), the enrolment of SC (20 in 2020-21 and 18.8 in 2019-20) and ST (13.5 in 2020-21 from 12.8 in 2019-20) students has gone up compared to the previous academic session.