Focus should be on quality of education

Future of higher education will be grim without reforms, participants at a workshop were told.

  The warning was sounded by NR Shetty, former vice-chancellor of Bangalore University, at a one-day national workshop on ‘Trends in higher education: Problems and prospects’ held at National College on Thursday.

 Fifteen bills including Private Universities Act and Foreign Education Providers’ Bill are pending in parliament, he said.
 Focus should be on quality of education. Even the IITs are not in the top 200 educational institutions. Research should be included in teaching and learning methods even at the undergraduate level.  Reforms should be brought in first at the national level and then at the state level.
Autonomous colleges should be set up wherein continuous internal evaluation is given more importance than the end-semester examination.

Pointing at the recommendation made by the National Knowledge Commission on disbanding the affiliation system, Shetty said even technological universities like VTU had several colleges affiliated to it.

Although the principal secretary for higher education H Siddaiah welcomed the University Grants Commission’s proposal for Sarva Ucha Sikhshana (education for all), he expressed his concern over the quality of higher education.

“The IIMs and IITs cater to the aspirations of a microscopic minority. The Government of India has been trying to increase this number,” he said.

With almost 160,000 students going abroad for higher studies, Siddaiah felt that this trend should be reversed.
“There is an absolute need to catch up with them. We should get students from foreign countries to come here for their studies,” he said. 

On the role of private players in the field, he felt that most of the courses offered were market-driven and not holistic.
 Private players are showing more interest in professional courses in engineering and medicine, he said.