improving the quality of education

in India’s Technological Colleges

To improve the quality of higher education in two decades, China has used  a determined push by an efficient central government.

Can India use the relative freedom to act in its large and distributed system of affiliated colleges to obtain the same result in one decade?

1.0 Higher Education in the Technological Field: Our country has today the world’s largest non-governmental higher technological education system. According to the data available in July 2016, Self-Financed Institutions/ Colleges (SFIs) enroll 89.3% of undergraduate students and about 72.2% of postgraduate students in India, while about 90% of such students in China study in government universities. 

While the SFI system has disadvantages of having been commercialized in a large measure, the system has the advantage of being nimble and flexible. So it may be amenable to change through a steady, firm and well-meaning leadership at universities and through supervision, with a sense of partnership and stake in their success, rather than through regulation, by national regulators.

Secondly the SFIs are supported by the society, including the parents and the government. The SFIs may, therefore, be able to  change their focus towards quality education, once our society is able to overcome its craving for obtaining certificates, without hard work and without any effective learning by the graduates. 

Thirdly the affiliating university at the State level and All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) at the national level, both have a mandate to ensure that high quality of education is offered at SFIs, even though it is true that most of the affiliating universities have reduced themselves to examination boards for higher education and that AICTE, till 2014, had not been able to focus on quality of education since it was overloaded with issuing permissions for new Colleges and new programs. However both the affiliating universities and AICTE have sufficient authority and both of them can easily marshal the intellectual resources for helping SFIs improve the quality of education.

Fourthly every SFI is a public Trust or Society, with higher education as its objective. The State governments are responsible for ensuring that the resources of public trusts and societies are used for the sole purpose of meeting their objectives, even though the States are not known to have used their authority against even the worst of transgressions by public trusts and societies during the last many decades.

Thus the nation has built assets for higher technological education all over the country, the huge system has an unusual capability to change fast, if required and the nation has the instruments, by way of agencies and laws, to be able to manage the largest system in the world in the interest of providing quality education and skills to the young. 

2.0 Learning and Adapting from Successful Examples: For improving the quality of higher education, in 1985, China established a Center for World Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The Center studied the successful models of the world and devised its own methods for improving the quality of higher education in China.

Large industries, controlled by the government of China were asked to work with the universities to help student start-ups market their products. Confidential Reports and progress of officers of the industries was made dependent upon the success of the start-ups, nurtured by these industries.

Chinese universities started studying each one of the 270 countries of the world and their languages intensively. This helped Chinese post-graduate students flock to good universities in the whole of the world, whereas the number of Indian students in non-English universities of the world is very small.

The dramatic improvement in quality of education in China is reflected in the QS 2015/16 rankings: China has 12 universities in the first 200 universities at ranks 25, 41,51,70,110,113,130 from mainland China and at ranks 28,30,51,57,116 for SAR of Hong Kong. (India had only two: IISC at 147 and IITD at 179.) 

LESSONS FOR INDIA: China started from a poor quality of university education in 1985 and within 20 years, it has been able to bring its universities on par with those in other countries. India has built huge assets of technological education and we can also improve our system within a decade, if our  society develops an active stake in offering quality education and in conducting credible research year-after-year, for achieving the objective . This can transform this largest system of higher education into the world’s best and the most cost-effective system in the shortest possible time.

"The Fourth Industrial Revolution .. creates a shortfall of newly required skills. Therefore, we are facing a global talent crisis."- Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum

3.0 Using the 4^th Industrial Revolution as a catalyst for Improving the quality of technological education in Colleges: The world is about to enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is expected to change the way the products are designed, manufactured and used. In January 2017, when the leaders of the world assembled at Davos for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, the unanimous view of Joe Biden (USA), Jack Ma (China), K V Kamath (India) and hundreds of important industrialists, political leaders and sociologists was that the Revolution will require millions of technologists, who were proficient in the new technologies to sustain it. The European Union (EU) Commission estimated that there could be a shortage of around 800,000 ICT specialists in the EU by 2020, even though the countries in EU have some of  the best science and technology universities and even though many of the new technologies are being developed in the laboratories and industries of EU.

Every industrial revolution has reduced drudgery of work so that new ways of living with more dignity have become available to a larger number of common people, as compared with what had become possible with the previous industrial revolution . The three  industrial revolutions have been able to provide a good quality of life to about two billion people. Therefore the 4^th Revolution should touch and improve the lives of a few billion more during the 21^st century.

OPPORTUNITY FOR INDIA TO SERVE THE WORLD: India was a marginal player in the 3rd Industrial Revolution and participated in only its software application component during the last 15 years of the twentieth century. This helped increase the productivity in businesses all over the world and it changed the life of millions of young families in India.

Over the next decade, 25% of the world’s new entrants on the jobs market will be Indian. We also have the world’s largest system of technological education in place.  If we can up-grade the quality of education in the system, our large work-force will be able to sustain the 4^th Industrial Revolution all over the world. This will multiply the GDP of the world many times, eliminate poverty and drudgery of life all over the world and make the world a much better place. And it will provide for India an opportunity for development, the like of which we could never get. 

3.1 Examples of the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Technological Colleges in India: The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by (i) the confluence of the physical and the digital world, (ii) man-made intelligent systems through wide use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) (iii) flexibility of systems through software empowerment so that every system can be modulated according to the needs of the individual application.

In every branch of engineering, the need for persons in new technologies is growing. Thus the July 2017 issue of IEEE Spectrum reports that jobs for Electrical Engineers (EE) are available in product development, design validation, commissioning design ideas, embedded systems engineering, control engineering, robotics, , the Internet of Things and data analytics. EEs are also required as members of interdisciplinary teams for  aerospace and rail transport, for  machine learning jobs in  retail, banking and  manufacturing, and for chemical process and energy.

3.11 PREPARING our students for the 4^th Industrial Revolution: The Colleges have to involve their students in design thinking process in inter-disciplinary teams and make them aware of new materials.

At Gujarat Technological University (GTU), in 2013-14, four subjects of Design Engineering were added at the four semesters of 2^nd and 3^rd year in every branch of engineering, in addition to the traditional subjects of branch-specific designs and the 2-semester Final Year project. Moreover at the GTU Workshops for Design for Faculty Members, professors from all the branches were brought together so that they could learn to work together.

Thus in CIVIL ENGINEERING, it was expected that the students would take up the usual designs of residential and office buildings, roads, bridges, ports, dams and canals, high-rise buildings and buildings in earth-quake prone areas of today.

It was also expected that some professors  will make special efforts for designs in deserts, Alaska-like terrain and other special areas. GTU’s Graduate School of Smart City Technologies had invited the affiliated Colleges to join as Research Partners for studying  the traditional  design of the city of Jodhpur, India and the modern design of the smart cities of Gift City, Ahmedabad, Masdar, UAE and Lusail in Qatar etc.

While the above design studies prepare the students to face the world after graduation, every year the world is expanding the frontiers of new technologies. Thus some of the news-items during 2016-17 have been as follows: (i) Some Canadian professors and research students are working on using 3D Printing for Affordable Housing for villages in Africa. (ii) Intelligent home of Bill Gates and the ‘spaceship’ design of the intelligent office at Apple Park, California have been completed. Some of our Colleges should be studying these new developments. 

During the next five years, it is expected that 100,000 intelligent homes and offices will be built. If India’s Civil Engineers can build a number of Consultancy Practices (CPs) for helping build Intelligent buildings, each of the CPs could become a part of matrix structures of Consultants, Builders and ‘Manufacturing Industries for new products for intelligent buildings’.

DIGITAL COLONIZATION:“Unless they want to plunge their people into poverty, they (most of the countries) will be forced to negotiate with whichever country supplies most of their A.I. software - China or the United States - to essentially become that country’s economic dependent.” – From ‘The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence’ in NYTimes, June 24, 2017 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman & CEO, Sinovation Ventures and President, AI Institute

Similarly in every branch of engineering, researchers are working on new and intelligent products.  Thus in cars, AI is being used along  with google maps and up-to-date information about traffic such that an autonomous, autopilot system, along with anti-collision feature can ferry passengers to their destination. Such systems  will work only when tens of sensors and cameras are connected to the mechanical systems of every car and when societal systems for reaching information about weather and traffic to the car can be established. Development, manufacturing and maintenance of such systems will involve a large number of competent persons.

It is time when our  students should start selecting projects for developing features of this type in their design projects. If our students, during their studies, work on projects of new technologies and if our Faculty Members lead them with interest, our Colleges and our society will be able to provide the large well-trained work-force for carrying forward the 4^th Industrial Revolution. 

4.0 The Conclusion: It was during the last decade of the twentieth century, when Indian IT industry started expanding at a fast rate. By 1991, India had already set up IISc (1909) and five  IITs (1956-1963) for offering high quality of technical education. We had also set up four IIMs (Calcutta and Ahmedabad in 1961, Bangalore in 1973 and Lucknow in 1984) for learning about modern business development. In 1988 the IT industry had set up NASSCOM as its representative organization. During the period of fast expansion, the work-force to sustain it was provided by Colleges, affiliated with State universities.

Similarly the requirements for the large work-force for the 4^th Industrial Revolution can only be met by India. If our Colleges are prepared for the new technologies, the 4th Revolution may be able to realize its full potential and improve the quality of life of mankind. Moreover during the next five years, as our Colleges start embracing new technologies, new and interesting employment opportunities will be created for young persons. 

Akshai Aggarwal