Come June, every year, thousands of anxious and nervous students scramble to seek admissions in well-known colleges in Delhi in desired subjects. Some are lucky; they get what they wanted and feel on cloud nine. But the majority are left disappointed, frustrated, angry and bitter. Parents feel equally miserable.
Times have changed: now even 95 per cent marks don’t guarantee admission in the prestigious colleges of Delhi University; some principals boast about how they have rejected even those who scored 100 per cent! Is all this done in the name of maintaining the highest standard of education? What could be a greater stupidity?
A university which doesn’t figure in the list of 150 top universities in the world (four Chinese universities figure in top 50 universities) wants to maintain its standards by rejecting students obtaining less than 95 per cent marks. Let one of the universities first rise to the top 95 before showing off misplaced vanity of maintaining high standards of education.
To some, it’s just a simple phenomenon of demand and supply. If a college has 50 seats and is flooded with 2,000 applications, it can afford to reject even those who scored 100 per cent marks; there are just no seats available. Who is to blame? Isn’t it an artificially created shortage? Or result of decades-long neglect? What prevented the government from setting up more universities in the last 60 years? If China has over 2,500 universities, going by the population, ought India not have around 1,500 universities? What about the universities themselves? Since independence, how many seats have they added? Does it compare well with the explosion in students’ population? In terms of total number of seats available, many universities, IITs and colleges have shown very modest expansion.
Their false sense of pride in their standards is playing havoc with the youth. We never get tired of claiming demographic dividend which many countries don’t have. But if we keep on adding millions of rejected, dejected, demoralised students filled with self-doubt and faced with an uncertain and unhappy future without prospects of gainful employment, we are sitting on a minefield ready to explode. There is only a very thin dividing line between demographic dividend and demographic disaster.
Some old myths need to be broken. There is no empirical study to suggest that those who scored 98-100 per cent marks have a higher potential to be better administrators/academics/lawyer/diplomats/ writers/politicians/media personalities/successful business entrepreneurs than those who don’t. Kushwant Singh, Natwar Singh, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Salman Khurshid, Shashi Tharoor, Swapnan Dasgupta, Amitav Ghosh, Upmanyu Chatterjee, Shekhar Kapoor, Dilip Cherian, to name just a few, might not have scored 100 per cent marks, but have risen to great heights in their respective fields. So why to create a whole generation of young and bright students developing inferiority complex just because they didn’t score 98-100 per cent marks?
There ought to be some more scientific, rational and fair system of evaluation of an individual’s real potential than the marks in the exams.
Legendary dean of Kellogg School of Management in the US, Dr Donald Jacobs, publicly stated that he had told the HRD minister of India, more than once, that with the present infrastructure and faculty strength, each Indian IIT could take four times more students than they currently do. But the IITs weren’t willing to buy his argument; according to him, they said: “We can’t lower our standards.”
Some bold steps can ameliorate the situation:
a: It is high time the Supreme Court takes suo moto cognisance of the cut-off chaos and debars universities from awarding such high percentages. The individuals mentioned earlier weren’t dumb-witted; they were some of the brightest but they never scored the kind of percentages many do today. What is the reason? Universities today don’t follow the same parameters as the current system of marking facilitates high scores.
b: The government must undertake setting up modern universities with modern teaching tools, flexible course stressing studies which develop an individual’s character, integrity, moral and ethical fibre, and sharpens all-round intellectual capability: analytical and assimilating ability, imaginative and innovative thinking, social awareness, discipline and a sense of service to the nation. Students should turn out as holistically developed, responsible, focused, socially aware citizens.
All students need not flock university courses; there should be a number of vocational training institutes in each state which should impart vocational training keeping in mind the industries in the state and their requirements. This will generate employment opportunities and meet the industry’s need for technically trained personnel. American community college system is worth a serious consideration.
c: As the chairman of the National Knowledge Commission, Dr Sam Pitroda used to point out that the time for the conventional universities with classrooms, blackboards and professors has passed. When complete courses from some of the most prestigious universities like the MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Wharton running into thousands of pages are just a click away and are totally free, why not embrace and promote this teaching method to help millions of Indian students? MOOCs (Massive Open Online courses) could offer solution to extreme shortages of places in conventional universities.
d: Again, the Supreme Court should debar the universities from insisting on percentage marks as the basis of admission. Most of the American and British universities follow the grade system and still command worldwide prestige for high standard and occupy high positions on the list of top universities. For example, for admission in Cambridge University, UK, an applicant should have A grade in three subjects. At London School of Economics, one needs B grade in three subjects to get in. At Kellogg, there is a threshold of the minimum marks in GMAT for admission but no maximum cut-off. In a particular year, anyone scoring 650 marks out of 800 in GMAT might get admission at Kellogg. In other words, he/she will not be denied admission just because some others might have scored 700 or 750 marks. Their results show that this practice has not affected their academic standards adversely. So why should it happen otherwise in India?
e: Allocation of funds for education in India has gone up over the years but is still relatively low. If the future of the nation supposedly depends on the youth, we must allocate higher funds for imparting quality education both at primary and university level. In China, in 1998, President Jiang Zemin laid great emphasis on creating world-class universities as it was considered crucial for national economic and social development strategies. We ought to assign much higher priority to education in India.
f: Prevailing conditions of primary education in rural India are dismal; thousands of schools don’t even have basic facilities; teachers don’t turn up and children from poor families drop out by the age of 10. Right to Education will remain a well-intentioned and significant step in the right direction but won’t produce the kind of impact it must because of half-hearted implementation. Even after the Supreme Court’s judgment asking all private schools to set aside 25 per cent seats for the children from the financially-disadvantaged families, there is extreme reluctance to fall in line. So while thousands of students don’t get admission in degree courses on account of cut-off marks, hundreds of thousands don’t get even a decent primary education to begin with.
Can a country tipped to become the third largest economy in the world in 20 years afford it?
The author is a former diplomat