Posted by Editor on January 18, 2012 under All Posts | 
A good education is seen as a stepping stone to a higher standard of living. However, many young people take up a job before they can complete their education. So, what is the option?
Distance education!
Just look at the data from Mumbai University’s Institute of Distance and Open Learning. Total enrollments have gone up to 72,666 in 2010-11 from 58,967 in 2006. Majority of those enrolling for these courses are between the age of 18 & 25 years.
This increase clearly shows that distance education is gaining popularity. These students could be the ones who have a job and want a degree to progress in their career or those who want to pursue a specific degree.
Distance education can never be a substitute for a full-time degree course in a college campus. However, it can provide a useful purpose of enhancing skills and improving job prospects.
With a large young population in India, distance education is likely to gain more popularity in the years to come.
Posted by Editor on January 3, 2012 under All Posts |
I recently came across some interesting historical trivia.
India has one of the oldest engineering colleges in the world. Roorkee College was started in 1847 and was soon renamed Thomson College, after its visionary founder. In 2001, it has morphed into Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.
Roorkee College was established to train civil engineers, when the term “civil engineers” was used to distinguish it from institutions for training military engineers.
Roorkee College was set up by the British administration as a response to the growing need for non-military engineers in India.
With such a strong legacy and history, I hope to see IIT, Roorkee in the top 200 Universities in the world.
Posted by Editor on November 11, 2011 under All Posts |
The latest QS World University Rankings 2011/12 have been released. This ranking is taken as the global standard for ranking unversities.
QS World Rankings considers over 2000 universities, evaluates over 700 universities in the world and ranks the top 400. The six key indicators which are considered for ranking are:
1. Academic reputation
2. Employer reputation
3. Citations per faculty
4. Faculty Student ratio
5. Proportion of International Students
6. Proportion of International Faculty
The top three universities are — University of Cambridge, Harvard University and MIT.
So, where do Indian universities figure in this list?
There are no Indian universities in the top 200. IIT Mumbai, which was ranked 187 last year is now ranked at 225.
In the Asian list, there are 11 Indian Universities, compared to 40 of China. Japan leads the pack with 57 universities.
These rankings lead to an interesting question — when will India have Universities of global scale and class?
Posted by Editor on September 30, 2011 under All Posts |
Well, if you are a parent in school in the State of Maharashtra (Mumbai being its capital), you will certainly have a say in the fees fixed by the school.
A new legislation — called Maharashtra Educational Institutions (Regulation of Collection of Fee) Act, 2011 has now provided that fees of private unaided schools should also be determined by the following process.
Fee to be charged by a school will be referred to a Parent-Teachers Association. If there is a 15% difference in the fee recommended by the school management and PTA, it will b referred to Divisional Fee Regulatory Committee who will adjudicate on the matter. Chairperson of the PTA will be the school principal and it will have one teacher and one parent from each class.
This Act gives detailed guidelines on composition of the PTA — one member should be from the Backward community and 50 % of the members should be women — and on the implementation of the various provisions of the Act.
Whilst the law may sound altruistic and with good intentions, it will add another control to schools. With each new control, the liberty available to schools to operate and focus on academic issues gets curtailed. Rather than increasing legislation on schools, the government should look at liberalising the existing laws.
Posted by Editor on September 23, 2011 under All Posts |
There is a common complaint that most students who take formal education in India are not employable. To make them employable, either the student has to take up additional courses or the employer needs to impart additional training.
So, why can’t India have a good apprenticeships schemes which can help improve skills?
Only 0.2 per cent of the population has undergone any form of apprenticeships — that means that a meagre 240,000 people out of the population of 1.2 bn have done an apprenticeship.
Compare these statistics to some of the developed countries — in Singapore it is 60 per cent, in Germany, 75 per cent and in Australia 66 per cent.
Till such time that the percentage of apprenticeship remains abysmally low, India will continue to battle with poor skilled entry level worrkforce
Posted by Editor on September 20, 2011 under All Posts |
Just a couple of years back, there was a big shortage of engineering seats in Maharashtra. However, in the current year , there is a surplus of more than 18,000 seats.
The total number of seats in the State are 127,159 with 336 institutes and the total number of students in the final merit list is 108,385, leaving a yawning gap between supply and demand of 18,000 seats. Realising this problem, AICTE relaxed the class 12 eligibility criteria for all technical courses from 50% to 45% for general category students and 40% for reserved category adding 15,000 engineering aspirants. Despite that, there is a surplus of 18,000 seats.
This surplus will, inevitably, lead to closure of some institutes and eventually, only the good quality institutes will survive !
Posted by Editor on September 5, 2011 under All Posts |
Now that the dust on college admissions is settling down, what will 2011 be remembered for?
Two things — 100 per cent cut-off required in SRCC in Delhi for non-commerce students and an overall dramatic increase in the cut-offs by most colleges.
If a student got 80 per cent marks in Class XII, he could only hope to get admission into a mediocre college. High percentages of 90% and above seem quite common. Hence, most good colleges have dramatically increased the cut-off percentage.
Indeed, these high cut-offs are unfair to students who have done well and got a good percentage (80% plus) but are unable to get admission in a good college. Ultimately, there is some element of luck involved in getting marks above 90 percentage.
The only way that this high cut-off can come down is by dramatically improving the number of good quality education in undergraduate colleges. The mad rush for a few colleges is because students don’t really feel that the rest provide them a good quality education.
Till that happens, “cut-off” will be dreaded word for those seeking admissions in colleges and we will continue to see an era of high cut-offs.
Posted by Editor on August 30, 2011 under All Posts |
Less than 10 per cent of Indians in the age group of 15-29 have received formal vocational training. This compares poorly with South Korea where more than 90 per cent of the workforce is skilled. In fact, in most developed countries, this percentage is more than 60 per cent.
The Labour Ministry has set up ITIs (Industrial Training Institutes) to address this problem. In 2010, there were 8,642 ITIs in India, with the highest number in Karnataka — 1,318. More than 60 per cent of the ITIs are in the private sector.
In recent years, there has been a genuine attempt by CII and other associations to “adopt” some of the government run ITIs and convert them to a PPP model with private sector participation. It has worked well in some States and hopefully, the ripple effect will increase.
However, in the long run, we require more  ITIs to become efficient hubs of training and also increase access of students to these institutes.
Posted by Editor on August 5, 2011 under All Posts |
Look at the macro view and it all looks so good:
* India has 300 million students and 6.5 million teachers
* Enrollment in primary classes is touching 100 per cent
* Literacy rate has gone up to around 75 percent
However, if you dig dipper, some disturbing facts emerge:
*  Scheduled castes and scheduled tribes account for around 25 per cent of the population and although enrollment in primary classes  has improved, drop- out ratio is still high. For dalits, it is 53% and for tribals, 63%
* There are 17.6 million illiterate women in the country compared to 9.7  million men, in the age category of 7 years  and above
*  In the age category of 5-29 years, 57% of the males were enrolled in  educational institutions, against 48% for females
* Â In rural areas, over 51% of the poorest are illiterate, whilst 23 % of the richest are illiterate
There are many more such statistics. All of them point out to a huge gender and caste divide, rural-urban divide and rich-poor divide.
In its haste to create capacity and increase enrollment, quality of education has clearly suffered.
Posted by Editor on July 29, 2011 under All Posts |
Out of the total population of 1.2 billion in India, 220 million children go to school. Out of this 220 million, only 13 million reach college and the balance drop out between class 1 to 12. The rate of drop-outs starts accelerating after class 8.
India’s GER (Gross Enrolment Ratio – the number of children between the ages of 18 and 24 who go to college) is 12.4 per cent. The GER in developed countries is between 50 per cent to 70 per cent. India’s GER is woefully inadequate.
Kapil Sibal, India’s HRD Minister, has stated that the government’s objective is to increase this GER from 12.4 per cent to 30 per cent by 2020. This means that the number of children going to colleges and universities will increase from 13 million to 45 million.
Today, India has 800 universities and 26000 colleges for 13 million students. To cater to the increased number of 45 million, India will need another 200 universities and 50,000 colleges.
How will India add such a huge number in the next 9 years? And the more important question is: How will a student get good quality education?
It is impossible for the government to add so much capacity. Clearly, the government will need to allow and encourage good private organisations to set up colleges and universities. If Foreign Universities are also allowed to set up their campus in India, it will further add to the capacity.
However, the moot point still remains – will the student get good quality education? And the collateral question – where will India get so many good quality, experienced teachers?
