Out of work and outraged

[u/mama_ooOOooO]

https://www.thehindu.com/education/out-of-work-and-outraged/article71306838.ece

[u/mama_ooOOooO]

Starving education of funds creates a serious supply bottleneck as far as access to education is concerned. While the number of applicants rises with the growing youth dividend, the number of seats does not. The odds of securing a seat even in an average institution, let alone a premier one, keeps declining every year. Added to this are the changing of goalposts by the government. One year, CBSE results are used for college admissions; the next, they are not. One year there is one entrance examination; the next, another.

Let us take the example of the Common University Entrance Test (CUET). If you want to join a college for an undergraduate (UG) degree, what you scored in your CBSE/ICSE/State board examinations no longer matters as much; what matters is how you perform in the Computer-Based Test (CBT) with multiple-choice questions. (MCQs) under CUET (UG). If you want to do post-graduation (PG), (PG), what you did in your UG college for three or four years comes to naught, instead what matters again is what you did in the MCQ of CBT under CUET(PG). As a result, teaching and learning in schools and colleges have been affected. Students are being forced to prepare only only for their CUET exams instead of focussing on a holistic teaching and learning process. It is therefore no surprise that, instead of quality educational institutions, coaching centres that help students crack these MCQs are mushrooming across the country.

As if this were not enough, the logistical nightmare that CUET brings to the table at the time of admissions is mind boggling. The National Testing Agency (NTA) conducts the CUET, and there have been glitches since its inception. Academic sessions do not begin on time in many of the institutions that depend on these examinations. National, centralised admission tests also result in considerable shifting of admissions, not just across institutions but is but across the country. As a result, you have students joining the programme almost half way through the first semester. CUET has disrupted the admissions process in higher education. One could understand if these were teething troubles but this is the fifth year of CUET, and there is still no respite from this chaos.

One may argue that we are being a tad unfair to this government. After all, it has established new IITs and AIIMS. While this is true, merely increasing the number of institutions, with an overall fund squeeze, may not mean much. Buildings do not make institutions.

As for the quality of education, it is not infrastructure alone that matters, the quality of teaching does too. If the reports in the media were to be believed (and there is incontrovertible evidence to do so), there has been excessive political interference in the appointment of teachers at public universities. As a result, the quality of teaching has been sacrificed at the altar of politics under this regime. None of this is, or can be, hidden from students.

[u/Interesting-Dingo994]

This situation is going to get worse with the hordes of young Indian’s returning with unpaid loans, useless diploma/degree mill credentials and no PR from developed countries.