Is college education in India not world class?
India, a developing country with the largest pool of youth aged between 18-30.To satisfy their needs there is really a great number of universities and colleges. But the question is "Are they really up to the standards? Are they really capable of producing the intelligent and wise man power to boost our nation's growth?"
The answer would be a great NO. Though there are a lot of government and private universities in India, they are not up to the global standards. They educate and train their students to shine globally. But, not every one of them succeeds.
As Philip G Altbach said, "India is a world-class country without world-class universities"; the rising global power doesn't have world-class universities for world-class education. Indian education system is characterized by pinnacles of excellence in a sea of mediocrity. Even IIT's-"The Best universities at World standards" as tagged by the Indian government doesn't shine in global ranking.
The first reason is the lack of necessary infrastructure. The Indian government is not interested in funding its universities heavily for research and development. But other countries like US, China, UK, France fund their universities heavily to make their manpower intellectually strong. For instance the CS building of UUIC, Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford costs around $100 million. Just a building of one department has been built at a cost of around 500cr INR. But the scenario here is totally different. Government has never funded such a lump sum amount for constructing a world-class university.
When we take a look at China, the touted competitor of India we could find that it has funded 100 of its universities for reconstruction, improvisation and research. Whereas our supremos failed to take such steps which is also a cause for the downfall of education standards.
The next reason is the large number of students to be served. The number students entering graduate courses are more in India when compared to US, China and UK. This also adds up to the cause of lack of education standards. Providing world class education to such greater population is a tough task, but when it is accomplished the dream of becoming a super power will be no way far.
The next greater difficulty the institutions here face is the lack decent faculties to provide quality teaching and to guide the students. The faculty staffs are too young and are in experienced to quench the knowledge thirst of Indian students. The next biggest concern is that Indian students are trained and thought theoretically and lack practical classes. This makes practical approach a great difficulty for them. They are capable of putting their tricks to work in paper than practically.
Privatization of education is also a main factor for backdrop. Private universities concentrate in money making than in quality education. Therefore they employ inexperienced faculty, provide facilities and infrastructure that are not up to the standards.
These all factors will finally lead to just a single point in the form of "Hinderance to National Development". It can be rectified by the following measures. Instead of creating more and more universities and colleges The Indian Government should first focus on increasing the funds for universities for improvisation and research. it would be better to have few skilled graduates than to have a swarm of unskilled graduates having a large number universities doesn't men that you have the best quality of education. Numbers can't compensate quality. Rules of UGC should be made more severe and should be followed strictly.
Finally, the college education we have is not the best and the worst too.The system is not in par with the standards but there are really some good institutions where some of the CEO's like Indira Nooyi (CEO of Pepsico) and Ajay Banga(CEO of Mastercards) of global MNCs got graduated and became skilled and fit for their present postings. Indian universities should really be improvised to global standards so that they can train the net gen Indian students.
Bharanidhar.T.S
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