Higher Education

An Overview on Higher Education

The crisis in higher education is endemic. Higher education requires to be greatly expanded - currently only about 7% of the relevant age group is engaged in studies in institutions of higher studies. The necessary rate of expansion would only be possible with adequate public funding and regulation. In particular, the need to go beyond the elite and to provide access to a wider section of the country's population, means that such expansion cannot be expected from, or left to, private agencies. Yet public funding is being withdrawn from existing institutions and the pressure is on facilitating the entry of private players both local and foreign.

The impetus for the present strategy owes much to the World Bank report brought out in 1994. The report argues that developing countries do not require to invest funds in higher education as primary and secondary education should be their priority. Higher education is termed a `private good' allowing the student-consumer to command a better market value for her skills. Hence it is claimed that governments are justified in leaving development of this sector in commercial, or private, hands as students will be paying for benefits that only they enjoy. This approach fails to appreciate the social necessity of a system of adequate, quality higher education. The capacity for critical, independent thought is both intellectually and democratically significant for a dynamic, independent and modern nation. Further the claim that elementary and secondary education have first priority is short-sighted: where would the trained personnel required for the success of universalised school education come from if not from the system of higher education? The present strategy of utilising the services of poorly paid, inadequately trained para-teachers engaged in multi-grade teaching (also a WB strategy for school education) clearly is no solution and exposes the WB approach which is aimed at creating `alternate' streams instead of a strong national system of quality education envisaged during the freedom struggle and promoted by policy makers in the first three decades or so after independence.

The WB perspective also dovetails smoothly with the perspective underlying the WTO-enforced General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) which converts knowledge into a tradeable commodity. The increasingly competitive sphere of a globalized system of higher education is dominated by the industrialized developed countries. Norms, values, language, concerns and scientific innovations at this center crowd out other ideas and research practices. These countries not only have the dominant institutions but are also home to the multinational corporations that are becoming so powerful in the new global knowledge system based on `marketing intellectual products'.

Higher education institutions in developing countries have a special role to play in the strengthening of civil society and national development. If subjected to the WTO strictures, they would be unable to perform this function and the perception that universities serve a broad public good would be accordingly weakened. In a world clearly divided into `centers' and `peripheries', with pronounced inequalities, questions of self-reliance and or sovereignty itself would obviously be adversely affected.



During the period of last two decades a lot of changes have occurred in the Indian system of education in line with the policies prescribed by the World Bank. For example, the country has witnessed a phenomenal increase in the number of technical education institutions. A great deal of this growth has come from the establishment of private, aided as well as self-financing institutions, particularly in engineering, computer application and business management disciplines. Today nearly one crore young people are enrolled in higher educational institutions, of whom about one-fifth are estimated to have been enrolled in technical education. The virtual explosion in the number of technical institutions, fuelled by speculative rather than real demand and exploited by self-financing enterprises, has resulted in technical education expanding beyond sustainable levels. If the systems of planning and regulation are unable to shape the supply and demand in the coming period, such imbalances are very likely to be extended to the other fields too.

Adverse consequences of this mushrooming growth are already visible in the form of supply of poor quality of education by the newly opened higher education institutions (HEIs). In spite of the phenomenal growth vacant seats continue to also exist in many institutions. Vacant seats range from 5 percent to 25 percent depending on the branch, discipline, region and institution. While the faculty to student ratio is generally poor in most of the institutions, it is particularly bad in many of the newly created institutions because of poor infrastructure and serious shortage of adequately qualified teachers, resulting in these institutions churning out poorly educated graduates, who remain unemployed for a considerable period of time.

The employers as well as the educationists are already expressing serious concerns in regard to quality of the graduates coming out of these newly opened institutions of higher and technical education. Barring some exceptions, there is scant regard for maintenance of standards. What is indeed a matter of shock to learn that even those markets that are readymade and where the employers are readily able to hire the talent produced from the sector of higher and technical education the country has failed to create the institutions that are capable to give quality instruction to the manpower. The sector of information technology is one such area where India has witnessed a boom in the education market; however the institutions that were set up during the nineties have failed in providing quality education.

A vast majority of these HEIs have been set up with the aim of imparting only graduate technical education. None of these institutions have any plans to create facilities for research and post graduate education. In the fields of business management, hotel management, architecture, pharmacy and so on the number of Ph.Ds is practically negligible. A serious consequence of an imbalance in the production of sufficient numbers of post-graduates and Ph.Ds. in engineering is the extreme shortage of quality teachers at various levels.



The decade of nineties has been a period of public disinvestment in higher education. The extent of decline in public expenditure on education comes out clearly when we examine the trends in per student expenditure. Decline in per student expenditures means decline in real resources per student on average, seriously affecting the quality of education. As there were steep cuts in budget allocations for libraries, laboratories, scholarships, faculty improvement programmes, etc., it is not difficult to see that there would have been serious adverse effects felt by the higher education institutions. During the decade of nineties the rising cost of higher education is again largely a result of the choice made in favour of the policies of privatisation and commercialisation by the policymakers.

The access to higher education is increasingly becoming a function of paying capacity of the student. Eighty percent of the available engineering seats are in the private sector institutions. The private sector institutions provide over sixty percent of the management seats and over forty percent of the medical seats. The character of private sector institutions is very much commercial in nature and unlike the not-for-profit public sector institutions. But even in the public sector institutions the trend is towards commercialisation. Self-financing courses are on the increase and are affecting the access to higher education in the public sector institutions itself. Even some of the ‘best’ universities-central and state-have chosen to introduce self financing courses even in disciplines such as Economics, Political Science, Social Work, Anthropology, Botany, Zoology, Human genetics Hindi, etc., that are otherwise and / or ought to be provided as normal courses in different universities, charging often fees much higher than the costs, exploiting the ‘excess demand’ phenomenon in higher education.

The practice of increased cost recovery is now very well institutionalized in the case of even the not-for-profit institutions of higher and technical education. The cost recovery rates vary today in their case in the range of twenty five percent to fifty percent. The cost recovery rates are high and have surpassed in some universities the trends of even many developed and developing countries. There exist still very striking differences by economic groups of population in the adult population with respect to their access to higher education. Evidence exists that the trends of privatisation, commercialisation, reduction in financial support to the needy students, increased cost recovery by the public sector educational institutions, cost of specialised coaching for clearing the entrance tests, paid seats, capitation fees, etc., are visibly coming in the way of students who come from the backgrounds of socially and educationally backward class households and the economically deprived sections.

Further, the costs of entry into higher education are becoming higher for the students of these sections due to the factor of increased risk arising on account of the growing uncertainty regarding the work opportunities that the system of education and economy is able to presently generate. After the acquisition of the graduation or post graduation whether the outturns would be able to improve their earnings is an important factor in the decision on whether or not to join a particular course or college for the students of socially and educationally backward classes and economically deprived sections. This has impacted on the students’ choices and in turn the utilisation of capacity created for the faculties of science and humanities in many institutions.


For further communication, please contact:

Sh. Ambarish Rai
Convenor
People's Campaign for Common School System (PCCSS)
E-mail: commonschoolsystem@yahoo.co.in, amb1857@yahoo.com