How To Make Our Colleges Better

Context: Making our colleges better cannot be legislated from above but should be spurred by student ambition. The walls between our classrooms and our lives must be broken.

Background: Global QS ranking with just 12 Indian universities and institutions in the top-100 presents a better opportunity to acknowledge that many colleges are offering higher education but are not very good.

Reason Behind Poor Performance of Institutions: a strong link between education and career prospects.

• Low desire among students: due to job-oriented education as students lose academic ambition if studying does not lead to career improvement.
  • For E.g. Many work extremely hard to secure admission in IITs but then lose motivation and drift towards near-certain graduation.
  • Students of varied subjects thus remain uninterested in their core syllabi. They focus on social activities, organise college events, build coding skills, and so on.
• Few high-quality jobs: (e.g. the best academic and research jobs) provides no incentives for the colleges to improve themselves. (hard to displace top colleges backed by history and incumbency)

Way Forward: Ensure system-wide organic growth in opportunity from below through involvement of following stakeholders-

• Policymakers: Utilising demography to engage the young demography of more than 650 million people under age 25.
• Industry: Ensure indigenous technology development (instead of importing slightly older technology) to pull the college system upward.
• Teachers: College teachers raise their game as their employers aim higher and as their students bring more into the classroom.
• Students: high-quality demand education, colleges will sooner or later supply it.
  • For example, student writing on social media would improve the quality of poor college and help good colleges to attract better students. They must aim to relate their learning for society.
• Society: must see value in education, and walls between classrooms and society must be broke for colleges to flourish. (Students will demand better education only if betterness is valued by society)
  • Focus on work in food, health, design, manufacturing, transport, safety, garbage, water, energy, farming to do better.
  • Improve technical workforce for colleges to impart internationally relevant skills as well.

Conclusion: Students must aim to relate their learning to society and must-see their learning not as an obstacle course leading to a rubber stamp but as an initiation into a process that yields tangible long-term value.