Education Boom or Education Doom ?

In the coming college session 2008-09 of Engineering, around 10 new colleges will add to the existing 19 colleges in the state of Chattisgarh. Also the number of seats in the existing colleges will go up. That would mean around 10000 seats for engineering admissions. Similar conditions exist in other states too where day by day new colleges, technical or otherwise, are coming up. Education is the one of the biggest investment areas now in India. Big parties are pooling up their legal or illegal money and setting up colleges. Just by showing basic fulfillment of norms, they are getting approval from the AICTE too. Students getting absolutely any rank or even no rank in the state’s entrance exam can now get admission in Engineering easily. The fees of this state is more than Rs.50000 per year, not taking into account donation money for management quota seats.

The question that arises is whether this education boom is actually a boon or bane? Will it prove useful in the long run for India or will it spell out the doom of Indian technical workforce? These are the important points to be considered before deciding the answer to this question.

# The quality of education is being compromised upon. The lecturers are mostly overloaded due to increase in seats and the ideal teacher to student ratio is not adhered to in most of the private colleges. Also sufficiently trained and good teachers are few in number. (Experience doesn’t always mean he/she is a good teacher).

# Even if new colleges offer quite high salary to attract lecturers, the quality of students in such colleges is very poor. I’ve already expressed my anguish over the quality of answer sheets an examiner gets to valuate. The reason can be that students with poor ranks in entrance exam take admission in such new colleges and do not have the aptitude for technical studies.

# In colleges which are already established, the salary or the increments are not much and hence dissatisfaction affects the performance of the staff. They tend to hop colleges and thus there is a shortage of teachers in colleges, as highlighted in this article in a local supplement of Hindi daily.

# Another point mentioned in the article is that the good students go to work in various sectors and only average students are left to join the teaching profession. This is ofcourse not 100% true.

# I feel generation after generation, students (of course not all) are losing interest in self study and becoming more dependent on spoon feeding by the teachers. They are increasingly resorting to the use of unfair means in exams. They don’t complete their assignments or do them on their own. A sense of freedom or casualness comes into them once they enter college.

# The state’s technical university’s recent semester’s ( Jan – June 08 ) result has been 39%. Needless to say its very poor. The reason for this can be any of the above. But due to this the overall scenario of technical education is getting tarnished and the future of Indian workforce is being compromised upon.

I don’t think the rampant setting up of new colleges on the pretext of spreading education and making India technically strong without attention to quality (both teacher and student wise) can ever prove useful to India. The Indian educationists are just sowing seeds of a lazy, technically unsound and insincere workforce by not maintaining a benchmark for receiving and imparting technical education in the country.