BENGALURU: In the rush to compete with other universities, private universities are showing indiscipline in terms of evaluation, which is affecting the number of students in government colleges, said Dr MC Sudhakar, Higher Education Minister on Friday.
He added it’s a case of ‘big fish eating small fish.’ The Minister spoke about the challenges in the current education system and highlighted that there is a crunch of faculty not only in government colleges but also in private colleges.
Sudhakar was speaking at the national conference organised by COMED-K CARE and Education Promotion Society for India (EPSI) on the theme ‘Making Indian Higher Education Globally Competitive,’ in the city on Friday. He highlighted the need for private universities to maintain their standard and not dilute them.
“Research in universities is not up to the mark. The craze for establishing universities is only to confer degrees. The whole concept of universities is being diluted. We have been receiving complaints from many universities about the type of evaluations. They are compromising on the standard of education and examinations, to compete with other private players. We need to set high standards of evaluations.”
Sudhakar suggested that private universities should have a common platform for conducting exams and avoid individual testing that just wants to claim that the university has a good pass percentage.
The Minister also spoke about the need to upgrade government engineering colleges. Be it infrastructure or faculty, the colleges should focus largely on these areas, he added. The department officials have been instructed about the same. Integrating internship opportunities for students in the curriculum to make the students industry-ready. Skill is the order of the day, Sudhakar concluded.
Speaking on the implementation of the State Education Policy he said the expert committee had made several visits to schools and colleges. “The previous government made the National Education Policy without any vision. We won’t do that, instead, we will approach it with foresight,” the minister said.