Higher Education in India ~ Group Discussion Ideas

The plight of Indian Higher Education System can be understood from the fact that Indians spend Rs. 65,000 crores annually on foreign education which is almost the twice of the government’s higher education budget. Also, every year only one or two Indian universities are able to secure a place in the top 200 universities of the world. These two facts are very alarming when we know and boast of India being a young country. If we are unable to work on their upliftment these human resources are going to become a burden on the country. Let’s look at some of the reasons why even the Indians don’t prefer India for higher education:

Underinvestment: Though we have been establishing national level institutes from the past 40 years but we haven’t been investing to maintain their standards. Funds are needed for quality education. Even the top Indian institutes lack proper infrastructure, labs, resources etc. And even whatever is available is just for the sake of passing the students in the examination and sits idle the rest of the time.
Rapid Expansion: Education has expanded rapidly in India. India has a higher number of educational institutes as compared to some of the developed (or developing countries which are doing better than India) countries. Now to handle this expansion we have standardized the education forgetting that different people need a different type of education. With standardization two things happened:
- Marks became the prime focus instead of learning. The teachers taught in a standard way which would prepare the students for exams, students studied just for the sake of passing or getting good marks in the exams, this also paved way for the coaching classes, stereotyping of marks etc.
- Those institutes who could have done better had they moved on independently, got caught up in this process of standardization and watertight rules.
Failed Alumni network: On institute’s part they have failed to establish a long-term network with their alumni. They could help the institutes financially and also act as guides to the students. The alumni also don’t think of this as their duty which is a very common norm in the foreign.
Failed to understand the worth of education: Indians as a whole consider the educational institutions as job machines, we expect to enter unemployed and come out with employment. We don’t realize that we will have to upgrade our skills to become worthy of employment. This is the reason that more than 80% of engineers are unemployable and the figures are even worse for the non-engineers.
Inability to bring different disciplines together: Today no problem has a single solution or no new technology is related to a single discipline. We need multiple inputs from multiple disciplines and our institutes have failed in doing so.
Lack of lucrative research opportunities: Indian students perform brilliantly when they go to different countries in the field of research. It means that we don’t lack talent, we lack infrastructure, healthy environment for our sharp minds.
Shortage of quality teachers: We haven’t been paying our teachers on the scales of what their counterparts earn in other countries. As a result, people are reluctant to the idea of teaching as a career. We have also failed to lure successful foreign faculties for our institutes.

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Conclusion :-

When it comes to education, no certification from the government or any other body can take place of the performance and feedbacks of the alumni. The quality and its desirability lies in the eyes of the budding student who is going to take a life altering decision. We can imagine the quality and desirability of Indian institutes from the fact that every year close to 40,000 Indian students go abroad for higher education but not even 1% of this number comes to India from other countries.

Government institutes are very less and they are also not of top-quality international institutes. The private players in this field just ask for rampant fees from students and in return give them degree and poor education. Still, these institutes flourish because the demand exceeds the supply.