EducationWorld July 18

NYIT enjoys an international reputation for offering career oriented programmes to over 10,000 students enrolled in its three campuses in New York and three overseas Founded in 1955, the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) enjoys a transnational reputation for providing career-oriented professional education to over 10,000 students enrolled in its three campuses in New York and three overseas (UAE, China and Canada). Accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and chartered by the Board of Regents of the State University of New York, NYIT offers undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programmes in more than 50 academic disciplines, including architecture and design; arts and sciences; education; engineering and computing sciences; health professions; business management, and medicine. The US News and World Report in its America’s Best Colleges Rankings 2017, ranks NYIT #32 among best regional universities (North). The institute’s school of engineering and computing sciences is ranked among America’s Top 70 computer science schools in The Financial Engineer Master of Computer Engineering Rankings 2018, while its business school is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Moreover, the institute ranks among the Top 25 percent of colleges based on salary potential of graduates as per the Payscale College Salary Report 2016-17. New York City. NYIT’s main campus is in Manhattan — the heart of the Big Apple and the most densely populated borough of New York City (NYC, pop. 8.6 million). The cultural, financial, media and entertainment capital of the world, NYC hosts the world’s two largest stock exchanges — New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ — and headquarters of several media and finance conglomerates. The Big Apple also boasts several globally famous landmarks — the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, and Ground Zero. Other popular attractions include the Staten Island Ferry, streets of SoHo (hosting fine art galleries and swish boutiques), Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Chinatown, Times Square, Central Park, Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art and the American Folk Art Museum.  The climate in NYC is continental with cold winters and warm summers. Temperatures fall to sub-zero in winter while summers are warm (14°C-26°C). June is the wettest month.  Campus facilities. NYIT has three campuses in NYC. While the Manhattan campus offers all major academic programmes, the institute’s largest campus is sited in Old Westbury on Long Island. The third campus is located in Central Islip, Long Island, where the institute’s Vocational Independence programmes are offered. Moreover, NYIT has established overseas campuses in China, the United Arab Emirates and Canada. The Manhattan campus on the intersection of Broadway and 61st Street, hosts five state-of-the-art buildings with classrooms, labs, Architecture FabLab, stock trading floor, administrative offices, a 262-seat auditorium, fine arts facility, book store, metro café and study spaces. The institute’s Manhattan library in the Edward Guiliano Global Center provides access to 70,000 ebooks, 200 online databases and over 50,000 online journals.  In sharp contrast, NYIT’s Old Westbury campus sprawls over 176 wooded acres hosting heritage buildings. Campus landmarks include the David…

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Why Indian graduates are unemployable India produces over 10 million graduates from 39,000 colleges every year. These are youth who have received 15 years of education in schools and colleges across the country. Therefore, they should be ready to quickly transform into productive employees of the millions of companies, firms and business enterprises in India. Instead a large number of them are unemployed, not because employment is not available, but because they are unemployable. Most of the young men and women who stream out of the country’s higher education institutions are equipped with theoretical learning. They have mugged up history, geography, physics and the sciences. But they know little about the world of work and lack the life skills and capability to get work done. Meanwhile even as young graduates are desperate for work commensurate with their qualifications, CEOs and HRD (human resource development) managers of India Inc constantly complain about shortages of adequately trained manpower. The shortage of work-ready youth is so acute that most companies and firms have invested massively in training fresh graduates of India’s colleges and universities. Indeed, India Inc arguably incurs the highest employee training costs worldwide, despite which it suffers low productivity. Economists say supply-demand mismatches are self-correcting and establish equilibrium. Why hasn’t this equilibrium been established in India?  All over the world — and in industrial Western countries in particular — academia and industry have strongly symbiotic relationships; they are joined at the hip. Industry works closely with academics in higher education institutions with the latter routinely commissioned to provide research and consultancy services to them. Such cooperation in turn provides academics information and knowledge of the needs, practices and solutions required by industry. Again, knowledge of industry needs and practices enables faculty to revise curriculums and pedagogies. Students get exposure to industry by working on live projects, and most course structures mandate that students work in industry. Unfortunately, excepting the IITs and a few progressive private engineering and technology colleges, most of India’s universities and colleges are operating in silos with negligible industry connect. Their curriculums have not been updated for decades (with some ‘premier’ engineering colleges still teaching Fortran 77 for computer programming 30 years after it has become obsolete). Their faculties have nil or limited industry experience or exposure, and are completely out of touch with industry’s manpower needs and goals.  Against this backdrop of almost total industry-academia disconnect, it’s important that academia and academics understand that they need to prepare students for jobs of the future — many of which don’t exist today — and teach them that they need to learn as well as unlearn. The IT industry boom of the 1990s took academia by surprise — none of the country’s higher learning institutions were preparing students for IT jobs, thus enabling NIIT, Aptech and other vocational institutes to cash in on the boom, leaving academia way behind. Ditto the BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) boom of the new millennium and the retail and digital media booms of…

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Corporate intervention compulsion As India transforms into a developed nation and a $5 trillion economy during the next decade, the education system will require major overhaul. Currently, almost 40 million youth are enrolled in the country’s estimated 800 universities and 39,000 colleges. Moreover, 150 million school-leaving children sign up for some form of education or training for a vocation, including skilling certification and ITI diplomas.  Yet we have a paradoxical situation. On one side, we have millions of students streaming out of the education system and on the other, multiple surveys indicate they are incompetent and unemployable. In almost every domain ranging from artificial intelligence to analytics, VLSI-embedded systems, mechatronics, marketing or even carpentry to plumbing, the percentage of employable youth is a mere 6-25 percent. The India Skill Report 2018 of CII-People Strong says that over 90 percent of employers feel certified graduates don’t have sufficient skills. Indian industry has huge problems mobilising human resources ranging from competent managers to shop-floor employees.  The challenge is how to bridge this huge demand-supply gap at every point of the supply chain. All surveys from the decade-old Boston Consultancy Report India at 75 to Teamlease’s recent report to the Union human resource development ministry and several Niti Aayog reports, highlight that India’s manufacturing and services sectors will need between 1-2 million youth every month for the next two decades, if the economy is to attain double-digit growth.  India’s tragedy is that we have the world’s largest potentially productive working age population at a time when the working age (24-65) populations of most Western countries (and China) is ageing. But this advantage is likely to be dissipated because our education system has neither the capacity nor capability to educate or skill them adequately. We will soon have over 300 million youth seeking better quality education and skilling, whereas at best, the higher education system can accommodate 75 million.  Indeed so great is the shortage of acceptable quality higher education institutions in contemporary India that over 500,000 students enrol in high-cost universities abroad spending over $16 billion (over Rs.1 lakh crore) annually to acquire acceptable qualifications and training. Therefore, the big question is how do we ramp up our education system in terms of capacity and quality to skill this huge cohort of youth to equip and enable them to accelerate the idling engines of Indian industry and agriculture.  Quite obviously, neither the Central nor state governments which are running high fiscal and budgetary deficits can be expected to create the massive additional capacity required.  Therefore, encouraging corporate, private and philanthropic organisations and perhaps even foreign investment, including international universities with huge endowments to participate in higher education capacity building, has become a national imperative. Moreover, it needs to be acknowledged that in the adaptation and implementation of 21st century technologies such as big data, analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, new sustainable materials, IoT, large area and flexible electronics, prognostic healthcare, smart and sustainable habitats, robotics, mechatronics and preventive health, Indian industry is far…

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For those of us who graduated from schools of hard knocks — the undersigned survived eight years in a boys boarding school in which forced learning, cold showers, frequent caning and bloody face-offs behind the chapel, were normative — the liberal culture of new-age co-ed alternative schools seem like very heaven. Although routine corporal punishment is mercifully outdated, it has been replaced by the heavy academic burden that latter day children bear in the overwhelming majority of the countrys primary-secondary schools. Whereas in the old days, a first class pass (60 percent plus) and distinction (75 percent) in school-leaving board exams were celebrated as excellent, these days children who average less than 90 percent in the boards are labelled mediocre. The prime cause of the heavy academic load that latter day children have to bear on a daily basis is the bottleneck in higher education. The number of undergrad colleges, universities and vocational institutes dispensing acceptable quality tertiary education is too small to accommodate the 30 million school-leavers who stream out of the countrys 1.20 million government and 320,000 private schools every year. Therefore, competition for admission into the countrys Top 1,000 undergrad colleges offering quality higher education is intense. And to manage the annual stampede for admissions, premier colleges and universities are obliged to set the bar high and demand sky-high cut-off percentages in board examinations. The proverbial silver lining of the cloud of obsolete syllabuses and curriculums and mugging for exams that children in mainstream education have to suffer, is the rise of alternative schools promoted by progressive educationists who have little faith in the efficacy of highly-disciplined, rigorous Theory X schooling which has drained the joy of learning from school education. These new-age schools offer children the opportunity to learn at their own pace in liberal, unstructured environments, and in close communion with nature. And the body of evidence which suggests that children in alternative schools learn as well and develop better life skills than their peers in drill-and-skill mainstream schools, is growing. In this issues cover story, managing editor Summiya Yasmeen trains an illuminating spotlight on new-age alternative schools. Our special report feature reports the EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings 2018-19 Awards Nite (June 23), a sequel of the detailed league tables we published in May ranking the countrys Top 100 private universities, private engineering institutes, B-schools and multi-disciplinary arts, science and commerce colleges. On this occasion, we not only celebrated and feted top-ranked institutions, but also conducted a seminar featuring knowledgeable educationists and visionaries who presented brilliant keynote addresses. Abridged versions of these keynotes are included in this issue. Check them out. They are excellent and offer deep insights into the malaise and maladies of 21st century Indias flailing higher education system.

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Decades of neglect of primary-secondary education and continuous under-investment in the police-justice system have converted post-independence India into the quintessential soft state, resulting in a steady descent into anarchy. The most obvious manifestations of anarchy being let loose are lynch mobs proliferating countrywide, stringing up and murdering randomly selected strangers in local communities on suspicion of child kidnapping. On May 9, two suspects were lynched in Thiruvannamalai (Tamil Nadu) following a fake social media alert of child kidnappers. In the month of May, five citizens were publicly murdered on similar suspicions by irate mobs in peninsular India, including two transgenders in Hyderabad. A few days later, two visitors to Karnataka were beaten and bloodily dragged through the streets. Last year in the northern state of Jharkhand, seven innocents were lynched on similar unfounded suspicions.  These are just a few recent examples of irrational mob frenzy — rooted in deep general resentment against the iniquitous social order — which has become pervasive across the country. Combustible mobs materialise within minutes to belabour and often kill, citizens on the merest suspicion of caste, community slights and aspersions, and issues pertaining to cow slaughter, inter-caste/community love and marriage. Within the vast majority of the educationally short-changed citizenry unacquainted with digital technology, ignorant of the legal doctrine of presumption of innocence, there’s a widespread belief of safety and impunity in mobs. This combined with an accumulated disgust with police corruption and the law’s delay, has generated a vigilante justice epidemic. Curiously, India’s much vaunted intelligentsia whose members shine in international forums hasn’t been able to discern the root causes of the country’s steady slide into lawlessness and chaos. The plain truth is that prolonged under-investment in the law and order and justice machinery (contemporary India’s police-to-citizens ratio is a mere 138 to 100,000 and judges a paltry 1: 60,000) has destroyed public confidence in the criminal justice system. Digging deeper, it’s also obvious that continuous under-investment in education (which prompts respect for due process) is a causative factor for spreading lawlessness. In short, decades of failure of the intelligentsia to question runaway government establishment expenditure and protest the glaring inefficiency of the public sector-led model of economic development which has dissipated national savings at a furious rate, has starved Indian education, agriculture and the police-justice system of investment. A major share of the blame for spreading lynch mobs frenzy needs to be also laid at the doors of the country’s intelligentsia and academics, who have failed and neglected to suggest ways for government to mobilise and invest greater resources in education and the law, order and justice machinery. 

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On May 14, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government at the Centre completed four years in office. This is a good time to assess its performance and make a judgement of the extent to which it has redeemed its promise made in the run-up to General Election 2014 of radically reshaping the Indian economy. In particular, the extent to which the pre-election resolve of sab ka sath sabka vikas (unity and economic development for all) which enthused the electorate to vote the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi to power, has been fulfilled.  The popular belief is that BJP is an ideologically right of centre political party committed to private enterprise and free markets. However, during the past four years, its leadership has done little to justify this belief, and differentiate itself from the Congress party whose uniquely self-serving brand of neta-babu socialism has transformed high potential India of 1947 into one of the poorest and most iniquitous societies of the contemporary world. In its four years in office, the BJP/NDA government has done precious little to privatise even the worst performing PSEs (public sector enterprises) or cut government red tape which is discouraging foreign investment and indeed, prompting flight of capital and an exodus of entrepreneurs from the country.  Yet perhaps the most unkindest cut inflicted upon this country’s faltering national development effort by the BJP leadership is its signal failure to fulfil its manifesto promise of increasing the annual budgetary expenditure (Centre plus states) on education to 6 percent of GDP. On the contrary, the Central government’s budgeted outlay for education in 2018-19 — a mere 0.45 percent of GDP — has barely crossed the budgeted (but not spent) outlay of the Congress/UPA-II government for 2013-14. Moreover, the eminently rational new education policy (NEP) recommended by a high-powered committee chaired by the late T.S.R Subramanian in 2016, which inter alia recommended raising the national outlay for education to 6 percent of GDP “without further delay”, was transformed into an “input” for a new committee under space scientist K. Kasturirangan to draft a new NEP which is still in the making. Meanwhile, instead of reforming and repairing the country’s severely dysfunctional 1.20 million government schools, BJP governments in the states are rigorously implementing several deeply flawed, constitutionally questionable provisions of the RTE Act, 2009 while simultaneously imposing tuition fee ceilings on private schools, endangering the financial viability of these islands of excellence in K-12 education.  In sum, the great faith reposed by the electorate in the BJP and prime minister Narendra Modi has been belied. With a general election due next summer, the world’s most populous democracy which also hosts the largest child and youth population worldwide, faces an uncertain present and future. 

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I enjoyed reading your cover story ‘Life skills: new mantra of Indian education’ (EW June). It’s regrettable that the majority of parents in India are reluctant to spend time or money developing the life skills of their children, and are obsessed with academic grades. Recently, an IAS aspirant ended his life hours after he was denied entry into an examination hall because he arrived four minutes late. With all due respect to him, I believe it’s a failure of our education system that it didn’t teach him to face a minor setback in life. It’s high time all parents rethink the value of life skills education.  Shrishti Vasudev Bangalore   Congratulations to PFI You have done well to highlight the taboo subject of family planning (Special report, ‘Plowing a lonely furrow in family planning’, EW June). The disappearance of family planning from the public discourse is indeed a great betrayal of the national interest. Inaction on this issue has set us back by decades.  Clearly, a lot more needs to be done for population control, and quickly. I congratulate the Population Foundation of India for its determined propagation of this important issue. Preetha Mahesh Kochi   Generous compliment What impresses so many of your readers in England about EducationWorld is not only the quality of its content, its outstanding contribution to the improvement of education in India and its fearless and hard-hitting criticisms of governmental failings, but also how beautifully written it is. When I was a boy, we were told to read the editorials and feature articles of the then great Times, London if we wanted to learn to write really good English.  Sadly this is no longer true of Britain’s Times, but it is very true of India’s EW. Just to read your journal is a first-class education in English.  Prof. Peter Greenhalgh, MA, Ph D, Cambridge (UK)   Digital education lacuna Re the Education News (EW June) on the private schools textbooks racket in Bangalore. Although I appreciate Dr. Ravinarayan Chakrakodi’s suggestion that teachers should rely on the Internet instead of textbooks, it’s important to bear in mind that teachers in this part of the world are not equipped and/or trained to use digital resources. The great temptation to encourage and value copycat answers is because of poorly qualified and ill-trained teachers.  Moreover, most teachers resist all improvements suggested by expert committees. Many of our K-12 education problems will automatically reduce if we recruit highly qualified teachers on Central pay scales. Dr. B.S. Sudhindra OSD/Director (Retd.) IGNOU Bangalore   Unchecked rackets I am a regular reader of EducationWorld and fully agree with the author’s views expressed in the education news from Karnataka (‘Well-oiled racket’, EW June). The textbooks racket is not restricted to metro cities, but is rampant even in small towns and villages. Here, notebooks and textbooks are sold for almost double or even higher prices by private textbook vendors favoured by school managements. Why aren’t regulatory authorities punishing these vendors and school managements? R.H. Prakash …

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Preschool education for children in the 0-6 age group, hitherto the exclusive domain of unregulated private edupreneurs, may soon experience government regulation. The Delhi-based National Council of Educational Research & Training (NCERT), the country’s largest school textbooks publisher and K-12 education think tank of the Union ministry of human resource development (HRD), is ready with guidelines and a curriculum for early childhood care and education (ECCE). A drafting committee constituted last year under the chairmanship of acclaimed early education expert, Prof. Venita Kaul, professor emeritus at Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD) and founder-director of Centre for Early Childhood Education at AUD, has completed two drafts and submitted them to the HRD ministry.  The guidelines prescribe minimal infrastructure, qualifications and salaries for preschool teachers and support staff, admission processes and records and registers to be maintained, and the role of parents and the community. The ECCE curriculum framework has been designed for two years of preschool before class I. Although, not a few ECCE educationists believe that professionally administered ECCE can’t start too soon, the NCERT expert group has recommended a two-year preschool period for children in the 3-6 age group.   The curriculum framework prescribes three major ECCE goals — children must maintain good health and well-being; they should become good communicators and learn to connect with their immediate environment. It also suggests preschool design basics to ensure child safety and create healthy learning environments.  The initiative to constitute the Kaul committee comes in the wake of the Central government clubbing ECCE, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (primary education), Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (secondary education) and teacher education and subsuming them under a newly formed integrated scheme of Samagra Shiksha (holistic education) which was announced in the Union budget presented on February 1. The Kaul committee was constituted following numerous complaints of negligence, exploitation and reckless management of private preschools which aren’t subject to government regulation.  Way back in 2007, the Delhi high court while hearing a writ petition on nursery admissions constituted a committee under CBSE chairman Ashok Ganguly, which in its report recommended admin guidelines and a curriculum framework for preschools. Moreover, several child activists have for some time been demanding the downward extension of the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory (RTE) Act, 2009 which makes it mandatory for the State to provide (or provide for) free and compulsory education to all children in the 6-14 age group, to ECCE. NCERT’s guidelines and draft curriculum have been welcomed by early childhood educationists. Swati Popat Vats, president of the Early Childhood Association of India, says the NCERT guidelines and curriculum could be a defining moment for ECCE in India. “If they become applicable countrywide, children in all 29 states and seven Union territories will receive standardised pre-primary education. However, we have also recommended that the age at which children should be admitted into preschools be clearly stated. Nevertheless the NCERT guidelines are valuable and I hope they will standardise and strengthen ECCE in India,” says Popat Vats. Prof. Kaul…

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It’s an unwritten rule of Indian politics that in the final year before general and state elections, leaders of all political parties experience an acute need to do justice to the country’s scheduled castes, tribes and other backward castes and classes. With the legislative assembly election scheduled to be called within the next 14 months in Maharashtra, on June 22, the BJP/Shiv Sena government felt obliged to impose a ten-day moratorium on first-year degree college admissions across the state to clear the decks to re-introduce reservations for SC, ST and OBC students in minority-run arts, science and commerce colleges.  On October 12 last year, the Bombay high court struck down a 16-year-old Mumbai University (MU) order which obliged private colleges promoted by religious and linguistic minorities, to reserve seats for SC, ST and OBC students. The moratorium on admissions announcement was made after the college admission process had begun, and has derailed the academic calendars of 2,800 minority colleges in the state besides adversely affecting 1.5 million students who have begun the process of applying for first-year college admissions.   Minority colleges are permitted to reserve upto 50 percent seats for students drawn from the promoters’ religious or linguistic community. Until October 2017, the break-up of 100 admission seats in minority colleges typically entailed setting aside 15 seats for the management quota. Of the remaining 85 seats, 43 were reserved for students from the religious/linguistic communities of the promoters of the institute, leaving 21 seats for general merit students and 21 for OBC, ST and SC category students.  However, the October 12 Bombay high court ruling, which became operational in the new 2018-19 academic year exempted minority institutions from reservations other than for management, merit students of the promoters’ religious/linguistic community. Adjudicating a writ petition filed by St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and the Maharashtra Association of Minority Educational Institutions which challenged the constitutional validity of a circular dated May 30, 2001 of Mumbai University, a two-judge high court bench held that “the quota within quota” mandated by the state government is “unconstitutional”. “Almost 3,000 of the 4,000 undergrad colleges in the state are minority-run institutions and if they are allowed to de-reserve the few seats they have been allotting to students from the backward classes, it will be a big setback for social justice,” says Aniket Ovhal, a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), BJP’s ideological mentor. Surprisingly, neither the student unions nor the Maharashtra government realised the impact of the Bombay high court’s judgement until the media highlighted the exclusion of SC, ST and OBC students when minority colleges released their first merit list on June 18. Addressing the media, the state’s education minister Vinod Tawde said the government has readied a special leave petition (SLP) against the Bombay high court order to be filed in the Supreme Court. “We will wait for the outcome of our SLP. Until then the admission process for first-year degree courses has been…

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Since under her leadership, the unfancied Trinamool Congress (TMC) party famously routed the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front government, which ruled West Bengal uninterruptedly for 34 years (1977-2011), in the historic assembly election of 2011, chief minister Mamata Banerjee has come a long way. But, even though TMC was re-elected in 2016, and Banerjee has established herself as a national leader after modestly reviving industry and agriculture growth in West Bengal, she hasn’t succeeded in redeeming her promise to radically reform the state’s education system and restore West Bengal’s top-ranked schools, colleges and universities — ruined by the mass infiltration of under-qualified CPM cadres into higher education institutions — to their pre-communist era glory. Instead, during the past seven years of TMC rule, there’s been frequent campus violence and student protests over petty issues, mass copying, and scandals over school and college admission procedures. Therefore, not a few independent academics contend that Banerjee’s inept management of several political issues has made the messy education situation she inherited from the Communists, worse.   For instance, the TMC government’s out-of-the-blue announcement on May 16 last year (2017) making Bengali a compulsory subject in classes I-X of all 92,000 government and over 8,000 private schools — regardless of exam board affiliation — aroused the ire of the already disgruntled Nepali-speaking Gorkha majority in the hill areas of the state where the writ of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), a political party which dominates the semi-autonomous Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, runs large. The imposition of Bengali as a compulsory language for all schools prompted GJM to call a general strike which lasted a record 105 days and shut down all 48 schools in the hills, disrupting the studies of thousands of children from across India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, and Bhutan enrolled in legacy boarding schools of the hills.  “More than 35 percent of students left the boarding schools of the hills districts during the prolonged Gorkhaland statehood agitation of 2013, never to return and it took almost five years to stabilise the situation. The second agitation last year which shut down the hill schools for 105 days further damaged the image of our schools,” says Robindra Subba, promoter-director of the Himali Boarding School, Kurseong (HBS, estb.1978), and ranked West Bengal’s #1 co-ed boarding school in the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2017-18. Clearly, exasperated by repeated strikes, bandhs and civil unrest in the Darjeeling district, on May 25, HBS inaugurated its second campus in Siliguri (pop. 513,264), a town 35 km from Kurseong. “HBS, Siliguri, will offer the tried-and-tested education typical of the Darjeeling hills. We want Siliguri to experience it,” says Subba putting a brave face on the situation. In higher education as well, TMC’s record of the past seven years is unimpressive. Calcutta and Jadavpur universities have been poorly rated under the parameter of ‘regional diversity’ i.e, capability to attract students from outside the state or other countries, in the Union HRD ministry’s National Institutional Rankings Framework (NIRF) published in April. Calcutta…

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Government regulation of tuition fees has become a major headache for private schools and higher education institutions in the southern seaboard state of Tamil Nadu (pop. 72 million). Complaints to the effect that they are spending more time and money in courts of law than in administering their education institutions, are becoming louder.   On June 8, the Madras high court passed an interim order capping the tuition fee levied by the state’s eight deemed-to-be (private) universities for the five-year undergraduate MBBS degree programme at Rs.13 lakh per year. The court directed a UGC committee headed by R.C. Deka of the Delhi-based All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to finalise the maximum fees payable by MBBS students of deemed universities by October 31. While passing the interlocutory order, the court noted that prima-facie the tuition fees of Rs.25-35 lakh per annum prescribed by the eight deemed-to-be universities are “far too high” and directed them to accept Rs.13 lakh at the time of admission to be adjusted later according to the verdict of the Deka committee.  The writ petition was filed last year following complaints from parents and students that deemed universities in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry had substantially increased their MBBS programme tuition fees after the Supreme Court mandated NEET as the sole entrance exam for admission into all medical colleges countrywide on April 11, 2016, effectively ending the practice of college/varsity managements levying sky-high capitation fees for admissions under the management quota. Since NEET scores in order of merit became the sole criterion for admission into the country’s 476 government and private medical colleges/universities, deemed university managements factored in fees they would have received under the management quota into the common tuition fee payable by all students. In this connection, it’s pertinent to note that other deemed-to-be universities across the country have also increased their MBBS tuition fees which currently range from Rs.22-26 lakh per annum.  “The overheads of running a multi-specialty university hospital such as ours are very high. We have 1,600 beds and treat nearly 4,000 out-patients free-of-charge every day. We also run rural health centres where 200-300 patients are treated free-of-charge. These social welfare measures cannot be cancelled to subsidise students. Moreover, we pay our faculty very well and offer students excellent infrastructure and other facilities. All this has been carefully factored into our common tuition fee of Rs.22 lakh per year,” says Dr. S. Anandan, dean of the Sri Ramachandra Medical College & Research Institute, Chennai (SRMCRI). Parents of students who failed to secure admission into Tamil Nadu’s 22 government medical colleges which prescribe rock-bottom tuition fees of Rs.11,500 per annum, are outraged by the huge fee differential between government and private medical colleges. This prompted the writ petition and the June 8 interim order of the Madras high court. But private medical institutions have a strong case because costs of providing contemporary medical education are high worldwide. For instance annual tuition fees in US public medical colleges range between $20,770-35,000 (Rs.14-24 lakh) and…

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The JD(S)-Congress coalition government of Karnataka (pop. 68 million), cobbled together after much parleying and deliberation following an inconclusive election in May, intends to “streamline private schools” during its tenure. As a first step, the new government is reportedly set to deny NOCs (no objection certificates) to private school promoters for three years. The objective: to stem the swelling exodus of children from free-of-charge government to private schools.  The education ministry’s department of primary and secondary education has 2,429 pending applications from private edupreneurs, charitable trusts and societies to promote new schools or upgrade existing schools with the largest number of applications (575) from Bangalore, the state’s admin capital. And even as admission into the state’s 14,048 private schools has become a nightmarish experience for citizens because of a huge demand-supply imbalance, 261 government primaries and 57 higher primaries in the state have registered zero incremental admissions for the current academic year (2018-19). According to the latest (2017-18) DISE (District Information System Education) data, there are 43,712 government elementary (classes I-VIII) schools in Karnataka as against 14,048 private elementaries. However, student enrolment is almost equivalent — 3.86 million in government and 3.51 million in private schools.  Indeed, government schools have been steadily losing students over the years as parents have become aware of the importance of measurable learning outcomes, supportive infrastructure and above all, English language teaching-learning. Between 2010-2016 the number of students in government elementaries declined by 600,000 even as aggregate enrolment in private schools increased by 700,000. With the number of students in 2,959 government elementaries falling to less than ten, the previous Congress government proposed to shut them down. However, strong protests from several influential educationists (including V.P. Niranjanaradhya of the National Law School University) and Kannada language champions who argue that the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, mandates a government school within 1 km walking distance of every village and urban habitat, stalled the proposal. The new coalition government is reportedly set to “merge” a larger number of 3,540 unviable government elementaries. But this proposal is likely to meet a similar fate. Inevitably, the moratorium on new private schools proposal has incensed private schools’ associations in the state. “After the Supreme Court’s verdict in the T.M.A. Pai Foundation Case (2002), all citizens have a fundamental right to enter the ‘occupation’ of education provision. Therefore, if the new JD (S)-Congress government imposes a blanket ban on greenfield private schools, we will go to court which is sure to strike it down as unconstitutional. Moreover, the government cannot deny permission to new private schools as it has already collected application forms following its own advertisements calling for new private schools and has collected processing fees of Rs.7,000-100,000 from applicants,” says D. Shashi Kumar, general secretary of the Karnataka Associated Managements of English Medium Schools (KAMS), which has a membership of 1,400 schools statewide.  Although the establishment and Kannada language champions, who are opposed to English language teaching in government primaries for reasons…

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“The 21st century illiterates are not those who can’t read and write; they are those who can’t learn, unlearn and re-learn. Things change so fast by the time you master something, you have to relearn again.” Byju Raveendran, founder of Byju’s The Learning App (Outlook, June 4)     “It is utterly myopic to hold that students should not take part in politics and singularly focus on their studies. It simply amounts to killing democracy… Student politics enable the strengthening of social bonds, forging of new friendships, fostering of communal harmony, and also helps administrations to be just and effective. Without it, students would be reduced to an inert feed to corporate mills, incapable of reacting to the problems of the day or in the IITs’ case technology zombies.”  Anand Teltumbde, civil rights activist of the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai (Economic & Political Weekly, June 9)   “When over 18.6 million adults remain unemployed in India today, what is the reason India still employs over 10 million children?” Kailash Satyarthi, Nobel Prize winner, in ‘Stop enslavement of our children’ (Times of India, June 12)   “Mafia in the education sector runs deeper than that in the coal mining industry. In the coal sector, the mining is underground, mafia is over ground. In education, all the mafias are underground. You got to mine them out and take them on. It has sieved into every aspect of education, unfortunately, over the years.” Anil Swarup, recently retired education secretary of the Union HRD ministry, in an interview to CNBC TV 18 (June 22)    “Both Hitler and Mrs. Indira Gandhi never abrogated the Constitution. They used a republican Constitution to transform democracy into dictatorship…”  Arun Jaitley, Union minister/BJP leader, in an online blog titled ‘The Tyranny of Emergency’ (June 25)

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CHANDIGARH, June 2. Girl students enrolled in government secondary and higher secondary schools statewide will be offered sanitary napkins at a subsidised price of Re.1 from August. Women from BPL (below poverty line) households will also be covered under the scheme, says a state government communiqué. This decision was taken by Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar after a meeting with senior officials of the school education and health ministries. A recent government survey revealed that only 28 percent of adolescents use sanitary napkins, and 40 percent of women use rough cloth during menstruation, making them vulnerable to disease.    Bihar Anti-harassment drive PATNA, June 14. Bihar governor Satya Pal Mallik invited girl students in public higher education institutions across the state to report all incidents of teasing, molestation and other types of sexual harassment “directly to Raj Bhavan”, where officers have been deputed to help victims get justice. The ex officio chancellor of all public universities in the state, Mallik made the announcement at a conference organised by student unions of Bihar. “It is our dharma to ensure our women live with honour. Women students studying at universities can directly report incidents of sexual harassment to Raj Bhavan (the governor’s official residence) before filing a report at a police station,” said Mallik. Also addressing the conference, deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi said the state government is committed to raising the quality of higher education in the state and has appointed a separate commission to manage and monitor faculty recruitments. Moreover, teaching staff are now being paid salaries on time and the academic sessions have been regularised, said Modi.     Delhi Doctorate qualifications focus NEW DELHI, June 13. From the academic year 2021-22, a Ph D will become a mandatory qualification for assistant professors of universities while a Masters and National Eligibility Test (NET) qualification or Ph D will continue to be the eligibility criteria for professorial appointments in colleges, Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar said in an official circular dated June 13. Announcing new regulations of the University Grants Commission, Javadekar said academic performance indicators (API) which make research work compulsory for college teachers, has been scrapped to enable teachers to focus on teaching. “The effort is to improve quality of higher education and attract and retain the best talent in the country. All incentives of earlier regulations have been retained except API for college teachers,” he says. Indian students awarded Ph Ds by global Top 500 universities will also become eligible for university appointments, added Javadekar.    Punjab  Improvement audit initiative CHANDIGARH, June 20. The state government is set to introduce an academic audit of undergrad colleges from 2019-20. According to an official communique, this decision was taken at a meeting with principals of government colleges chaired by Razia Sultana, Punjab’s minister for higher education.   “To streamline higher education in Punjab, all government colleges will shift to online admission and attendance processes from the next academic year. Moreover, every college will be required to submit a monthly progress…

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MUMBAI, June 21. Texas Instruments (TI) announced its next edition of the DST-TI India Innovation Challenge Design Contest (IICDC) open for registration from June 20 until August 31, 2018. A dedicated TI-IICDC page was launched on the MyGov portal. Students can register for the contest at https://innovate.mygov.in/india-innovation-challenge-design-contest-2018/. The Union department of science and technology (DST) and Texas Instruments will extend support to qualifying teams from a fund of Rs.8.2 crore. “With the launch of DST-TI IICDC, we plugged a huge gap that existed in the ecosystem for Indian engineering students to venture into entrepreneurship with the right support structure. Our attempt is to create an immersive ecosystem for innovation that challenges students every step of the way,” says Sanjay Srivastava, director of the TI India University Programme.  IIM-Bangalore’s N.S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) will incubate the projects of the winning teams and support them in launching their ventures.    Samsung’s Smart classes NEW DELHI, June 7. Samsung India announced that it has added 200 new Samsung Smart classes to Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya schools in Tamil Nadu, and Delhi Police Public Schools. With these additions, Samsung Smart classes now number 652 in the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, 28 in government schools in Tamil Nadu and three in Delhi Police Public Schools, taking the total number of Samsung Smart classes in India to 683. “The Samsung Smart classes initiative has helped over 2.5 lakh children across the country to become digitally literate. This initiative is closely tied with India’s development agenda, and implemented in partnership with government departments to ensure wider reach and impact upon underprivileged children,” said H.C. Hong, president and CEO, Samsung Southwest Asia, speaking on the occasion.  Added Prakash Javadekar, Union HRD minister: “We are happy that Samsung is making a valuable contribution to our effort to move from blackboard to digital learning in government schools.”    Kangaroo Kids silver jubilee MUMBAI, June 27. Kangaroo Kids Education Ltd (KKEL), founded by early childhood educator Lina Ashar in 1993, celebrated its silver (25th) anniversary at The Lalit, Mumbai, on June 23. The event was attended by 35 franchisees from across the country.   Speaking on the occasion, Lina Ashar recounted how the KKEL franchise has bloomed and expanded from a single-room preschool to over 100 preschools and schools across India, Maldives, Dubai and the Middle East. “It has truly been a roller coaster journey and we’re all very proud of having accomplished so much and reached so far, with many more milestones to cover and move beyond,” said Ashar. “We have begun to integrate technology in our schools on a larger scale with the Skippytech preschool app and the Billabox learning management system for our grade I-VIII children, so they can enhance their capabilities and learn at their own pace,” added K.V.S. Seshasai, CEO of KKEL.     Ranco Energy’s new university MUMBAI, June 11. The Mumbai-based Ranco Energy & Projects Pvt. Ltd is setting up a one-of-its-type skills and vocational university at Almora, Uttarakhand to provide specialised learning, skills and continued education…

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In May Prof. James Tooley and I were at a conference in Rome organised by the University of Notre Dame, the well-known American Catholic university in association with the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences of the Vatican. One of the main speakers at this conference was Fr. Jose Paul, secretary of the Agartala (Tripura)-based Holy Cross Educational Foundation (estb.1952) which runs 15 schools and colleges with an aggregate enrolment of 20,100 students mentored by 858 teachers, in North-east India. In his address, Fr. Paul movingly and straight-forwardly highlighted the economic neglect of the seven sister states of North-east India, viz, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura, Sikkim, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh. In recent years, the economic neglect of these out-of-sight-out-of-mind states with an aggregate population of 45 million has been exacerbated by insecurities about religious persecution and ethnic discrimination.  In three of these states, the majority of the population is Christian. In Nagaland, 87.9 percent of the population is Christian, in Mizoram 87.2 percent and Meghalaya 74.6 percent. In two other states, a substantial minority of the population is Christian; in Manipur over two-fifths (41.3 percent) while in Arunachal Pradesh nearly one-third (30.3 percent) follows the tenets and practices of (mainly Protestant) Christianity. These percentages are much higher than those states of India which are popularly perceived as being strongly Christian such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Christianisation — in part through provision of free-of-charge or subsidised K-12 education by various Protestant sects — was encouraged by the British, to the extent that the entire budget for schooling was handed over to the church in the area which is latter day Meghalaya with similar arrangements made in the Lushai Hills, now Mizoram. Strong missionary societies led by evangelical clergymen-educationists were active in the North-east in pre-independence India. However, it’s pertinent to note that conversions to Christianity accelerated after independence, prompting unfounded suspicions that the Church has inspired sub-nationalism and insurgency movements in the North-east. There are other unique challenges confronting the seven sister states. The region boasts over 220 languages, with an equal number of ethnic communities which has splintered the population. Although many of these ethnic groups are part of larger communities, they don’t easily fit within state borders, and territorial claims and counter-claims have led to clashes inter se and with the Centre. With insurgency and secessionist movements mushrooming in the region, way back in 1958 the Union government enacted the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which is highly unpopular throughout the region, because it’s perceived to be “soft on insurgents, but very hard on the public”.  Although some people believe the Act has been successful in moving the people in the north-east to become “loyal to mother India”, low investment in industry, high unemployment and lack of upward mobility have forced a large number of youth into drug abuse and substance addiction. According to authoritative sources, around a third of youth in some states of the North-east are using banned substances such as heroin, opium and cannabis. As a…

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Jesus in Asia, R.S. Sugirtharajah, Harvard University Press; Rs.1,652, Pages 320 Jesus in Asia is a significant contribution from an Asian perspective to Christology, the author being a professor of biblical hermeneutics at the University of Birmingham (UK). It comes as a corrective intervention in the cultural adaptation and appropriation of Jesus of Nazareth by western academic theologians. The genius of the West to freeboot on the treasures of Asia was aided and abetted by the advantages of colonialism. This peaked with the arbitrary and ahistorical identification of Christianity with Europe, of which Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) is a prime example. Ernest Troeltsch (The Christian Faith, 1925) writing around the same period, dogmatically held that Christianity could not be understood, except through the prism of European culture.  Against this backdrop, Sugirtharajah’s well-researched book is a timely intervention in liberating Jesus from the narrow prison of European cultural ethnocentrism as well as cautioning us, by implication, against getting swayed by the partisan and polarising advocacies of our times. The principal value of this book, especially in the prevailing ambience of mounting religious fanaticism and intolerance in India, is that it argues, albeit impliedly, against religious insularity and self-marginalisation. Tracing various illuminating, even at times fanciful, traditions of domesticating Jesus of history within diverse Asian contexts — principally Chinese (dating back to the seventh century) — the author makes a persuasive case for taking partisan religious advocacies and theories with a pinch of salt. This note of caution is reminiscent of Will Durant’s warning that truth remains beleaguered particularly in the spheres of religion and history, where it counts most. The flavour imparted to a scriptural or spiritual tradition in any given context reflects the angularities of the period rather than the essence of the tradition in question.  A single instance, given right at the outset, would suffice to illustrate the point. Jerome Xavier’s book, The Mirror of Holiness (1602), written with the explicit purpose of impressing Emperor Akbar, makes him willfully compromise not only the authenticity of his portrayal of Jesus but even falsify his own identity. Jerome, a nephew of Francis Xavier of Goa, pretends to be enjoying ‘intimacy’ with Jesus that he thought would put him on a par with the early disciples.  This was done to have the right measure of spiritual authority with Akbar. Of particular importance is for us to note that Akbar’s openness to insights from diverse spiritual traditions was the bedrock of his commitment to good governance. He not only tolerated non-Islamic traditions, but actively sought enrichment from them. Akbar’s model of good governance shines brilliantly against a background of gloom and doom stemming from the current fiction of good governance spiced with communal polarisation and intolerance.  An issue that nearly all Asian portrayals and understandings of Jesus share in common is the tension between the unique and the universal. The uniqueness of the historical Jesus cannot be overemphasised without undermining his universality. The Gospels associate Jesus with universality, not ethnic, cultural…

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I am indeed their brother: loving & serving Allah’s poor, Fr. Bob McCahill, Gujarat Sahitya Prakash; Rs.150, pages 158 This is one of the most inspiring books I’ve read and it’s about a truly inspiring person: a US-born Catholic priest who has spent over 40 years tending to the indigent and sick in Bangladesh, where he continues to live, at the age of 81. As recounted in this readable autobiography, Bob McCahill’s dreams as a child changed over the years. At one time he wanted to become a cartoonist, at another stage a pilot and still later an archaeologist. But at the age of 19, on October 31, 1956, he became divinely inspired, and at age 26 was ordained as a priest of the Maryknoll Mission Society of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America. After serving in the Philippines for some years, he crossed the Indian ocean to continue his ministry in Bangladesh.  Since 1976, Fr. Bob has been writing a common letter to his friends in the US and other countries always dated October 31, the day he received divine inspiration and lifelong motivation to do what he regarded as God’s will. This book is a collection of 42 of the October 31 letters he wrote between 1976-2017. The missives poignantly describe how inspired by Jesus Christ, Fr. Bob opted to lead a life of compassion and service to the marginalised and destitute among the Muslims of Bangladesh, whom he regards as “persons of faith, worthy of Christian respect and praise”. During his dedicated ministry of over 40 years in Bangladesh, shifting from one small town to another and venturing deep into the countryside on his bicycle, Fr. Bob has lived among the poor, embracing a life of austere simplicity. His letters detail how he is on a continuous mission to make himself useful to the people he meets, befriending them, sharing their joys and sorrows and looking to bring a smile to their faces, while helping them access public medical services, in particular. In his correspondence Fr. Bob provides useful insights that can help us elevate our own lives more meaningfully. Merely preaching the virtues of one’s faith is one thing, but living and practising them is quite another. Moreover one can’t grow spiritually without love and empathy for the poor and distressed. His spartan lifestyle and voluntary poverty, emulating that of the people among whom he lives, is another great life lesson. I Am Indeed is a valuable primer for the faithful of all religions to learn the basic dialogue and discourse of true religion — lessons urgently needed in this country which is experiencing sharp religious divides and polarisation fanned by hindutva and Muslim extremists. Fr. Bob’s book of letters provides wonderful examples of how religious pluralism can fuel the engines of our own inner growth. There is much to be gained through interacting and learning from people of diverse religious backgrounds. Contrary to stereotypical perceptions about Christian missionaries, Fr. Bob doesn’t seek to convert people among…

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There’s a conspicuous conspiracy of silence on the subject of wasteful government expenditure within the Indian establishment including the intelligentsia and media.  In this connection, it’s pertinent to note that for years, the Union budget didn’t disclose the salary and wages bill of the Central government. This glaring omission prompted your editor to file an RTI (Right to Information Act, 2005) application in 2013 addressed to the Union ministry of finance to disclose this information, which it did after a gap of six months. But happily, two years ago the Union budget suddenly began publishing an item under the head of ‘establishment expenditure’. As suspected, the Central government’s expenditure under this head is huge — Rs.5.08 lakh crore of its total expenditure of Rs.24.42 lakh crore (including the fiscal deficit of 3.5 percent) budgeted for 2018-19. This huge amount is the annual expenses bill (presumably salaries, rent, electricity etc) of a mere 3.8 million Central government servants. The aggregate annual establishment expenditure of the other 15 million netas and babus in the country’s 29 state governments and seven Union territories doesn’t bear thinking about.  An indicator of the extent to which the neta-babu brotherhood doesn’t give a jot about public money was dramatically illustrated by Akhilesh Yadav, former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Forced to reluctantly vacate the chief minister’s palatial official bungalow by a Supreme Court order following the defeat of the family-run Samajwadi Party in the UP assembly election last year, this worthy vandalised the property to the extent of yanking out all electricity sockets and fans, and digging up floor tiles of the house. But why is runaway government establishment expenditure a sacred cow for the intelligentsia and media? I have an explanation, for what it’s worth. All our great pundits and opinion makers have kith and kin in government and/or are themselves recipients of government perks and subsidies. Hence the blanket of silence on this subject. 

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The glaring failure of the Air India privatisation initiative of the Central government — not a single bid was received for the 74 percent equity stake of this bloated public sector airline offered to all investors worldwide on May 31 when bidding closed — is further proof that the country’s neta-babu brotherhood ensconced in the highly-subsidised comfort zone of Lutyens’ Delhi, lives in a fantasy world.  For one, which investor in his right mind would want to partner with an airline which during the past 65 years since it was nationalised purportedly in the public interest, has run up an accumulated loss of Rs.55,000 crore despite several government bailouts? Even if this massive loss is written off and dumped on the public exchequer as hinted by the government, are big ticket investors so stupid that they would fail to discern that by retaining 26 percent equity, the clear intent of the government is to switch from front to back seat piloting of Air India?  Moreover, it’s well-known that one of the non-negotiable preconditions of the global auction is that the employment and rights of Air India’s 21,000 employees divided into ten unions are sacrosanct (hence the 26 percent equity retention). And why this overriding concern for the well-being of the airline’s employees? Because 99 percent of them are employed on the basis of their political connections rather than competence. Unsurprisingly, Air India has more employees per aircraft than any commercial airline worldwide, a major cause of its pathetic condition.  Presumably chastened by the global rejection of its proposal, the government is reportedly reconciled to sell this broken airline — which chalks up a loss of Rs.3 crore per day — lock, stock and barrel. But even so it’s doubtful if there won’t be disabling preconditions because there’s no real will within the establishment to sell this golden goose, notwithstanding its emaciated condition.

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The intensive media trial of ICICI banK chief executive Chanda Kochhar for presiding over a committee of this blue-chip private sector bank which granted huge loans aggregating Rs.3,250 crore to Videocon Industries in 2012-15, after which the latter had paid a Rs.391 crore consultancy fees to a firm promoted by Kochhar’s husband, and reluctance of the board of directors of Axis Bank to renew the term of its CEO Shikha Sharma, has prompted a recall of disappointing experiences with successful women who have risen to high office in the corporate and media domains. Throughout a long career in law, industry and the media, your editor has championed gender equality and affirmative action in favour of the country’s historically short-changed women in all fields of endeavour.  As editor of India’s pioneer business magazines (Business India and Businessworld), I celebrated the appointment of Vinita Bali to a senior position in Coca Cola, USA in the 1980s and her steady ascent up the executive ladder thereafter. But when she was appointed the Bangalore-based CEO of Britannia Industries from which this tiny organ is published, dozens of letters and phone calls remained unanswered. Likewise, the Harvard-educated Naina Lal Kidwai, CEO of Hongkong Bank, whose son I taught to play squash.  Similarly, a mild suggestion in a review of her long-forgotten smutty novel Starry Nights to the effect that she could have provided a deeper insight into the movie production process in Bollywood, prompted celebrity novelist and columnist Shobha De to comprehensively trash my novel Succession Derby (1991) — as yet the only authentic and credible corporate novel — and cut off all social relations. Ditto career counsellor Usha Albuquerque and journalist Tavleen Singh — friends of several years. The transformation of these once charming women into rude, embittered Hindi soap opera-style mothers-in-law, raises disturbing questions as to whether the so-called fair sex is equipped with the temperament and life skills required for high office.  These are just a few examples of women friends suo motu-turned foes. A mysterious reverse alchemy.

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More universities are expected to consider adopting Sweden’s “block teaching” system after a pilot at an Australian institution exceeded expectations. Melbourne’s Victoria University says that it will roll out across all undergraduate year groups the model of making students focus on one topic at a time for four weeks, rather than the traditional Australian approach of juggling four subjects at once, after first-year students who tried it recorded better pass and retention rates than their counterparts from earlier cohorts. At Victoria, full-time students complete eight intensive blocks per academic year, working in groups of about 30. Vice chancellor Peter Dawkins says the approach has effectively halved failure rates among this year’s cohort of commencing students. Subject pass rates, which averaged 72 percent last year, increased to 90 percent for the first four-week block and 85 percent for the second. By the end of the third block, first-year retention stood at 89 percent compared with the usual level of about 80 percent. Andrew Dempster, a higher education consultant at Canberra-based Proofpoint Advisory, says other institutions are watching closely. “Universities are genuinely interested in redesigning the way they offer education, to be more focused on how students want to learn,” he says. But according to Dempster, a former head of corporate affairs at Swinburne University of Technology, the biggest challenge will be securing staff support. “Universities tend to be fairly conservative places. It’s difficult to get people to sign on and give something genuinely new a try,” he says. The block system has long been favoured in Sweden, where many universities teach just one or two subjects at a time. Malmo University, for example, offers sequential units of five weeks each. Quest University, a small private institution in British Columbia, introduced the system more than a decade ago. Other colleges in Canada, as well as US institutions in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky and Tennessee, have followed suit, offering blocks of between three and a half and eight weeks. Prof. Dawkins says the reform is well-suited to the institution’s base of disadvantaged and first-in-family students, easing what could be a “bewildering” transition from school and helping to alleviate doubts about university during the crucial first few months. Annabelle Goonasekera, a first-year psychology student at Victoria agrees. “If you’re studying multiple subjects, it’s easy to procrastinate and get lost or to drown in the content,” she says. Goonasekera says block system rules also make it easier for students to catch up if they fall behind, or to switch to different disciplines if courses are not to their liking. A classmate has been able to transfer instantly into teaching — a shift that would normally require her to wait until at least the next semester. (Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times Higher Education)

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Earlier last month (May) Peking University played host to perhaps the grandest global gathering ever of the higher-education business. Senior figures from the world’s most famous universities — Harvard and Yale, Oxford and Cambridge among them — enjoyed or endured a two-hour opening ceremony followed by a packed programme of mandatory cultural events interspersed with speeches lauding ‘Xi Jinping thought’. The party was thrown to celebrate Peking University’s 120th birthday and less explicitly, China’s success in a race that started 20 years ago. In May 1998 Jiang Zemin, China’s president at the time, announced Project 985, named for the year and the month. Its purpose was to create world-class universities. Nian Cai Liu, a professor of polymeric materials science and engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, got swept up in this initiative. “I asked myself many questions, including: what is the definition of and criteria for a world-class university? What are the positions of top Chinese universities?”  Once he started benchmarking them against foreign institutions, he found that “governments, universities and stakeholders from all around the world” were interested. So, in 2003, he produced the first ranking of 500 leading global institutions. Nobody, least of all the modest Prof. Liu, expected the Shanghai rankings to be so popular. “Indeed, it was a real surprise,” he says. People are suckers for league tables, be they of wealth, beauty, fame — or institutions of higher education. University rankings don’t just feed humanity’s competitive urges. They are also an important source of consumer intelligence about a good on which people spend huge amounts of time and money, and about which precious little other information is available. Hence the existence of national league tables, such as US News & World Report’s ranking of American universities. But the creation of global league tables — there are now around 20, with Shanghai, the Times Higher Education (THE) and QS the most important — took competition to a new level. It set not just universities, but governments, against each other. When the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings were first published, the “knowledge economy” was emerging in the global consciousness. Governments realised that great universities were no longer just sources of cultural pride and finishing schools for the children of the well-off, but the engines of future prosperity — generators of human capital, of ideas and of innovative companies. Propelled by a combination of national pride and economic pragmatism, the idea spread swiftly that this was a global competition in which all self-respecting countries should take part. Thirty-one rich and middle-income countries have announced an excellence initiative of some sort. India, where world rankings were once regarded with post-colonial disdain, is the latest to join the race: in 2016 the finance minister announced that 20 institutions would aim to become world-class universities. The most generously funded initiatives are in France, China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The most unrealistic targets are Nigeria’s, to get at least two universities in the world’s Top 200, and Russia’s, to get five in…

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Having “good” researchers teach undergraduate students does not improve their grades, according to a study in the Economics of Education Review, which also found that students rated highly-cited researchers as poor teachers. The study analysed the grades and teacher evaluations of thousands of students from the University of Maastricht’s School of Business and Economics, where students are randomly allocated teachers for a particular course but are given the same exam at the end. The study then measured the research quality of teachers by their publication records. It found that having teachers with a large number of publications or articles in highly respected journals didn’t result in students getting better grades or in those teachers getting high ratings. The only exception was that Masters students were found to get better grades when they were taught by teachers with high-quality publications, although the study found that the Masters students did not in turn rate them as good teachers. Overall, bachelor’s students gave lower than average scores to teachers with strong publication records. Roel van Elk from the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, one of the report’s authors, told Times Higher Education that they had been unable to find a link between high-quality researchers and good-quality teaching, particularly at undergraduate level. Addressing the relationship between the research quality of academics and their teaching performance is important because it can help universities distribute resources more efficiently, he says. For example, if leading researchers are asked to do teaching, it may be better to allocate them to Masters programmes, he argues. According to van Elk, it makes sense that Masters students get better results from high-quality researchers who are experts in their subject “as Masters courses are more specialised in the interest areas of teachers and taken by relatively motivated students, whereas undergraduate courses are more generalised”.

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For almost 30 years, branch campuses set up by foreign universities have been a central part of Malaysia’s higher education strategy, and it now hosts outposts of 12 overseas institutions. It’s an approach that has helped to establish the country as a leading international education hub, boosted by its proximity to south-east Asia’s star education performer, Singapore. The strategy has also been aided by Malaysia’s relative political stability. However, this approach is under scrutiny after the defeat in May of the dominant Barisan Nasional coalition for the first time in 60 years and the ousting of Najib Razak, the leader of the coalition’s dominant party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). He has been replaced by former UMNO leader Mahathir Mohamad, who now heads the Pakatan Harapan coalition. Najib had been a firm backer of the branch campus strategy as prime minister and in previous government roles. As an alumnus of the University of Nottingham, as education minister he likely played a key role in its establishing a base in Malaysia in the 1990s. Morshidi Sirat, senior research fellow at Malaysia’s National Higher Education Research Institute, based at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, says that Najib may have been the “primary mover” in supporting new branch campuses as prime minister, but that the strategy was always much wider than one politician and it has been scaled back in recent times anyway. Referring to the original motivation for the strategy, he says “while Malaysia has several good public universities almost all… were not successful in attracting international students at the undergraduate level as these institutions use Malay language as the medium of instruction”. As time has gone on, the branch campuses have also increasingly attracted domestic students, especially those from Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese and Indian communities who found it difficult to access the public university system. In part, this was because of a quota system introduced in the past as part of an “affirmative action” policy of getting more students from Malaysia’s indigenous bhumiputra population into the system, says Prof. Morshidi. However, as branch campuses have attracted more domestic students — increasingly including those from middle-class bhumiputra communities — this has also indicated “that they have not been able to attract substantial numbers of international students”. A “moratorium” on new higher education institutions had begun in 2012, says Morshidi, and although this did not cover the EduCity Iskandar development near the Singapore border, even this location is becoming full. Ka Ho Mok, vice-president and Lam Man Tsan, chair professor of comparative policy at Lingnan University Hong Kong, says that one possibility is the opening up of the public system to more Indian and Chinese students, which could lead to “keen competition” with the branch campuses. But potentially more important, he said, would be the new government’s attitude over how to meet the demands of Malaysia’s labour market. “If the labour market favours locally groomed graduates, those who graduate from the branch campus may be (in a) disadvantaged position,” says Prof.…

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In many ways Zhang Dayin, a 30-year-old doctoral student of finance at the University of California, Berkeley, is living the American dream. He grew up in a small town in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, the son of a physically challenged seller of lottery tickets. A decade ago he became the first person in his family to go to university — Renmin University in Beijing, one of the country’s best. The capital’s affluence impressed him. Zhang is one of more than 5.2 million Chinese who have gone abroad to study since Deng Xiaoping launched his “reform and opening” policy in 1978. The numbers are surging. In 2017, more than 600,000 Chinese headed abroad to university, four times the figure a decade earlier, bringing the number studying at that level outside China to nearly 1.5 million. The main destinations are English-speaking countries, with America way ahead. Between 2006-2016 the number of Chinese students at US universities has increased fivefold, to more than 320,000. They make up nearly one-third of foreign students at the country’s universities. And they contribute more than $12 billion (Rs.81,000 crore) annually to its economy, according to America’s Department of Commerce. The demand in China for education in the West, and the ease with which wealthier Chinese can secure it, has been a boon for many educational establishments. In America, cuts in state-government support have made public universities increasingly reliant on foreign students who pay the full fee. At Berkeley, that is more than $45,000 (Rs.30 lakh) per year for undergraduates. American optimism about the power of education to make foreign students more like Americans has a long history. “I can think of no more valuable asset to our country than the friendship of future world leaders who have been educated here,” said Colin Powell, America’s then secretary of state, in 2001. Yet American officials and scholars find it hard to demonstrate any clear diplomatic benefits from having educated some 2 million Chinese in America since the late 1970s. Among them have been children of several Chinese leaders of the reform-and-opening period: Deng’s son Deng Zhifang, Jiang Zemin’s son Jiang Mianheng, Hu Jintao’s daughter Hu Haiqing (by some accounts) and Xi Jinping’s daughter Xi Mingze (who graduated from Harvard in 2014). On the contrary, in the past decade relations between China and America have become ever more distant and strained. Students who went to America in the 1980s did show promising signs of enthusiasm for Western democracy. But China’s economic take-off in the 1990s, however, began to change those views. Students arriving in America since then have voiced mixed feelings about democracy and free markets, and how useful they might be for China. Now at Berkeley for a Ph D, Zhang has his doubts. “The whole world is getting confused,” he says, sitting in a coffee shop in nearby San Francisco. “Which system is good, which system is bad? There’s a lot of criticism of democracy in America and Britain. China is doing really well.” The nationalism…

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