Friday, May 31, 2013

What's new(s) in Indian higher ed


  1. Basant Kumar Mohanty reports in The Telegraph on the fairly steep fall in the number of Indian students going abroad. Since the number includes both undergraduate and graduate students, it's not clear what this trend signifies -- for example, the fall in the number going to the US has shown relatively smaller decline than that for the UK and Australia. And most of the students who go to the US are grad students.

  2. Anubhuti Vishnoi reports in The Indian Express: Faculty attrition hits IIT Rajasthan, 23 leave in 3 years.

  3. Basant Kumar Mohanty in The Telegraph: IIM director turns down fresh term - Request to appoint Boston teacher. Prof. Pankaj Chandra of IIM-Bangalore has apparently "declined a government offer to reappoint him to the top post of the institute." The second half of the news story speculates about some of the possible reasons.

  4. The Times of India reports that IIT-Hyderabad will receive a huge loan -- over 175 million US dollars! -- as development aid from Japan.

  5. K.C. Deepika reports in The Hindu that the Bangalore University has suspended its 4-year BS program this year due to "declining student response and lack of infrastructure and faculty." [Noteworthy primarily because of our Institute's 4-year BS program (which is doing quite well, thank you), and also because of the birth pangs of a similar program at the Delhi University.]

3 Comments:

  1. chitta said...

    Had a look at IIT Jodhpur's web page. Its faculty is grouped to four categories:

    (1) Biologically inspired System Sciences
    (2) Energy
    (3) Information and Communication Technology
    (4) System Sciences

    There is a trend of having *only* interdisciplinary units. But is IIT Jodhpur taking it to the extreme. I personally find this grouping very confusing.

  2. Vikram said...

    Regarding students going abroad, there seems to have been a definite shift away from Australia and the UK, and a significant one towards Canada.
    I conjecture that this is mainly driven by the structure of the immigration regime. Australia and the UK have both tightened migration laws. Whereas Canada and the US remain open.

    http://www.dreducation.com/2013/01/indian-students-US-UK-Canda-Australia.html

  3. PhD++ said...

    Completely agree with Chitta above. I've been having the same thoughts since a long time.