HIGHER EDUCATION - Offering Excellent Education to the young in India

TRANSFORMING THE HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM IN INDIA 1.0   Introduction : In 2018, enrolment in Higher Education (HE) in India surpassed that in China, thus making India’s HE system the largest in the world. T he enrolment in schools in India is much larger than that in China. India’s GER is less than 30% as compared with about 50% of China. Therefore, unlike in China, the sector of HE will continue to expand during the next decade. The products of our HE system are managing IBM, Microsoft, Google and many other reputed companies. Graduates from our HE system are doing creditable work at many reputed companies of India like ISRO and L&T. The higher education system in India consists of the following: 1.1. Central Govt Institutions: Government of India (GOI) has established many great institutions including 16 IITs and 13 IIMs. In 2017, MHRD decided to establish 20 world class research universities. In addition, other departments of GOI also have reputed ...

UNDER-EMPLOYMENT and UNEMPLOYMENT of graduates from Technological Colleges If our graduates are under-employed or unemployed, there can be only two reasons: (i) Our Technological Colleges and universities are turning out in-adequately trained graduates: If our students and professors decide to work hard to see that every one of the graduates is well-equipped with knowledge and skills, this problem can start getting solved within two years. (ii) There are some fields in which our enterprises are able to meet the needs of our nation completely and the enterprises do not need any expansion: This is unlikely to be true since if we want to offer a good quality of life to our citizens, the needs should be so large in every field that the nation may have to   work hard for a few decades before we reach a stage of saturation.    India’s share in the markets of the world is of the order of 2%. The markets of the world are dominated by China even for pr...

Business Studies & Ease of Doing Business A great learning exercise and immersion study area for MBA students Technological education is required to prepare the students for both design and implementation of products. Tech education in India is said to be theoretical in that a graduate from a technological university may not be able to use his skills to develop a new product. Many experiments of collaboration with industries and businesses in India are being made for the purpose with the hope that a better quality of education can be offered to the young. For example in Business Studies, at GTU, immersion studies was included in every subject in 2014 and the students were required to bring their work, at the end of every semester, for an intensive scrutiny. In 2014, at least two MBA Colleges, affiliated with GTU,  were asked to study each of the topics for ranking on Ease of Doing Business by World Bank and by WEF. Some of the papers by the Professors from the...

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...