Sunday, June 10, 2007

It's official: a vast majority of our colleges are mediocre


Via Tarunabh (who runs the Human Rights Law in India, a link blog) comes this Indian Express story on how bad our colleges and universities really are:

In this season of celebrating toppers and staggering cut-offs in college admissions across the country, the University Grants Commission (UGC) has come up with a startling admission: Over half of the students who pass Class XII don’t even enter the higher-education sector; 90 per cent of colleges and 68 per cent of universities across the country are of middling or poor quality. On almost all indicators, from faculty standards to library facilities, from computer availability to student-teacher ratio, higher education is in crying need for an upgrade.

The “quality gap” in both universities and colleges is alarming: 25 per cent faculty positions in universities remain vacant; 57 per cent teachers in colleges do not have either an M Phil or PhD; there is only one computer for 229 students, on an average, in colleges.

These results appear in a report by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (I'm not able to find the link to this report), covering 123 universities and 2,956 colleges (out of 378 universities and 18,064 colleges).

These results are all the more depressing because the universities and colleges accredited by NAAC got it done voluntarily. The others chose to avoid NAAC's visits probably because of their own estimate of the low grades they were likely to get.

2 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    The report is absolutely correct. Even the famed Anna Varsity(Chennai) suffers from all these vices. In aeronautical dept. the notice board states that there are three professors. The reality? One is the registrar of the varsity and so doesn't teach at all. Another is our HOD and he somehow manages to teach 2 paper(per sem) for us and run his official duties despite his age.(He is well past his retirement age but still serves there because of shortage of faculty.) And the last one is the director of our research center (CASR) and naturally he is also engaged in his own work(but teaches 2 papers, of course). The number of active professors? None.
    Sigh! Who to blame?

  2. Anonymous said...

    What more can be expected after this