HIGHER EDUCATION - Offering Excellent Education to the young in India

A Message for the Educationists at Universities: Are we  ready to accept the Challenge? How our society copes with the Fourth Industrial Revolution will depend on the response of our educational institutions — #PresidentKovind At Davos, in Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2017, there was a unanimous view that the world is going to face a grave shortage of technologically competent young persons as the world moves ahead into the 4 th  Industrial Revolution. Over the past two centuries, during the three industrial revolutions, automation reduced human drudgery, increased employment-to-population ratio and  every revolution led to a life of dignity and comfort for a larger part of the human society, in spite of setbacks in many parts of the world due to colonialism. After every one of the three revolutions played out, it was found that the levels of education and technical skill of the countries, which participated actively in the Rev...

Our Universities, Our Leaders and Foreign Universities Recently the media in India has reported about two events at ‘ University of California, Berkeley’ and at the ‘ Center for International Security Studies, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University’. At these events, the Vice-President of Congress party spoke to a group of students and Faculty Members about the political issues in India . “720 years back, the ‘President’ of the world’s largest university, which attracted scholars from far and wide, was informed by his assistant that many horsemen were riding towards the university. The President waived his assistant off by saying that every horseman knew that he had to respect the university and that he should enter the university on foot, after tying the horse at the gate of the university. Within a few hours, there was a slaughter of more than 10,000 scholars and 3,000 Faculty Members by the 500 horsemen, led by Bakhtiar Khilji,...

DESIGNING A NEW STRUCTURE for  Affiliating-type Universities 1.0  A Brief History of Higher Education in India: Before the end of the thirteenth century, India had universities like Takshshila, Nalanda and Vallabhi, which attracted scholars both from the Indian sub-continent and from the rest of the world. In addition, in every major city, there were Acharya-centric institutions, which may be called residential colleges, by today’s terminology. If a student was accepted, the education at the universities and the colleges was offered free of cost. The expenses of the universities and the colleges were paid by the society through allocation of revenue from certain villages for these institutions. By the end of the 13 th century, all the universities were destroyed, when the kings in the areas of the university were defeated by the invaders from the north-western part of India. During the period from the 14 th century to the beginning of the 19 th century, the Col...

Using change Agents for offering high quality education at Affiliating-type Universities   ‘Scientific prowess is a sine qua non for global power. While emerging powers have to be …… net consumers of knowledge; global powers, on the other hand, have to be at the leading edge of science and technology and inevitably become net producers of knowledge.’ - - Devesh Kapur , D irector of the Centre for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania in “ Can India's higher education be saved from the rule of babus ?” 1.0   Higher Education in India and the world: India has established the world’s largest system of higher education under the Self-Financed Institution (SFI) model. But the quality of education offered in a large majority of these institutions is at best at mediocre levels. The number of students in higher education in China and India may be of the same order during 2016-17. However the enrolment in schools in India is much larg...

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. A ccording to the data available in July 2016, S elf-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-mea...