The Hindu Business Line : The professional college fiasco

This column referred some weeks ago to the notion of the Gross National Happiness index. Advocated by the wise and thoughtful in the West, it has all along been a matter of state policy in the kingdom of Bhutan. However, if someone had been able to measure this index for India over the past few weeks, one might well have found a precipitous fall. And all because of the strange ways of our higher educational system, which makes an absurd drama of the process of finding plac es in professional colleges for the children of those who can afford to think of such luxuries.

Confusion confounded

It is a mad race, which grows more and more hopeless for most candidates, every year. The number of seats in the coveted colleges remains far short of the demand and there are cut-off points and caste-based quotas, besides the management quotas reserved for the promoters of the private colleges. In the midst of all this, our ill-informed political leadership is doing everything possible to make the process free of any merit-based competition, by ensuring that the common entrance examinations are disbanded. To add to the confusion, the different streams of higher secondary education are treated on a par, on the basis of the final examination aggregate scores, although the teaching and the syllabi are by no means comparable.

Meanwhile, leaders of industry, academia as well as political heavy weights love to talk of India’s “pool of scientific and technical resources” and the English language proficiency as pillars of strength for the country. Not a word is mentioned about what actually obtains as regards the quality of teaching the facilities or the calibre of those who gain admission to the professional colleges that are supposed to feed into this so-called pool. The fact that the whole system — teaching, examination, scoring and selection process — is the very antithesis of what this great advantage is meant to be, is forgotten. We could not have found a method that was more destructive of quality and merit if we had deliberately set out to do so. Parents of school-leaving children go through an agonising month. On the one hand, they are hoping to find some match between the aspirations of their wards, the facilities for education that are on offer and the location of the chosen or allotted college. On the other hand, for all but a fortunate few, it is also a matter of their ability to buy the seat in the appropriate stream, sometimes using up decades’ worth of savings.

Falling standards

We are already seeing a palpable deterioration in the quality of the practitioners of medicine, not to mention their ethical or professional standards. The situation is not much better in the engineering disciplines. A friend who heads a post-graduate management school in Mumbai tells me that engineering graduates applying for MBA seats are often stumped by simple problems in arithmetic involving percentages and time and distance; and their understanding of concepts is extremely poor. No wonder then that the top ICT companies which recruit these same graduates by the thousands are unable to fulfil their quota of candidates who pass the minimum standards — and therefore have to run further mini-colleges within their own campuses. This makes a laughing stock of all our tall claims about competitive advantage of Indian industry against worldwide competition, especially the Chinese, who are making a determined effort to close the language and education gap. Is anyone aware that we are playing with fire here?

S. RAMACHANDER