Many a times after the initial euphoria or shock after a cataclysmic event, it takes a little time for the feeble voices to group together. Sometimes they are heard, but many a times they are lost to the winds. It is just beginning to happen after the RTE act 2010 by Government of India. Private schools are now raising their voices of objection against the bill. Will they be heard? or should they be heard?
RTE (Right to Education) is a boon to every child that was denied education till date. Now the government is forced to ensure elementary education for all children in India. The concept and philosophy cannot be debated without sounding Talibanistic - if that word exists. But I find funny the way the government chose to implement the philosophy.
I would expect, if the government is making the rule, they would find a way to implement it as well. In a way, yes. Only that it is not ready to pull the weight all by itself. It may be the just realization by the government that it could do very little in the last 60 years in this regard. But with a little clause in the bill, they have made the thriving private schools partly responsible for implementing the rule.
It is a well known fact that government run schools are in shambles. They used to be good and many a times the only ones that were available about 30-40 years ago. But with the rise of private schooling, which is by far the most preferred one today in many urban and semi-urban areas (even our maid servant's kid went to a private school), there are very few students and most likely no teachers and infrastructure for the government schools. I do not think it was lack of funding, it was more likely proper utilization of funds and utter lack of accountability on part of the system that includes the school administration staff, bureaucracy and the politicians. Walk into any government school and more than likely your comment would be "so where is the school?"
So someone in the government realized that for RTE to have a fair chance of success, it cannot be run by the government. As part of the bill, all private schools that do not receive any funding from the government are mandated to admit 25% of their students from the lower and weaker sections of the society. The government would reimburse the school to the extent of average expense incurred by the government on a student at a government school. So just to put this in context, imagine a school that charges an average of Rs. 50,000 per year as tuition fees, and a student strength of 1000. This is not a out of the world school, there is probably about 30 such schools in my city alone. I assume the government would pay about Rs.500 per student at best. There are two issues here.
1. The private school loses 90% of its revenue on the students admitted in this category. Consequently, they would most likely increase the fees on the regular students to compensate for this.
2. We are seeing the situation play out in the higher education sector, where the government is not able to pay up the promised scholarship fund bringing the colleges down on their knees (operationally). Many schools do not believe or expect to run their operations with funds from government. The red tape involved in obtaining these funds is a deterrent enough for them not to depend on it. Not that they will leave it alone and forget. Informal arrangements would be worked out with the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats and the funds will be eventually shared. They will not be wasted for sure.
A social impact that needs to be yet studied is the impact of mixing the students from various economic backgrounds in a school for 6 hours everyday. May be both benefit in the end. The spoilt rich kid will get to see from close quarters the way lesser mortals live and realize how lucky they are, and the kid from the weaker society can find some motivation in the hope that success in education can actually make a difference in his quality of life.
Next academic year, when the rubber meets the road will be the litmus test on the "how" of RTE. In fact, we will see it playing itself out in a few months from now when the admissions season starts in November/December for many of the good private schools in the country. Reminds me of Jagannadha Rath Yatra held in Orissa every year. The procession goes on... and it has to.
Let us wait and watch. Overall, it may be not a bad thing after all.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Things come to a head at AP professional colleges
Thanks to the ill planned government policies, the professional education system in the state is in a chaos. This time I am talking about financial chaos. Many colleges are on the brink of closure, faculty have not received salaries for months together and vendors are not willing to extend the credit anymore.
With more than 70% of their revenue dependent on government scholarship reimbursements, private professional colleges have no choice but to depend on the dole out by the government to survive. And the government just does not have the money to spend on the scholarship scheme anymore.
This is vote bank politics at its best or worst, depending on your perspective. A lesson in short sightedness. Scholarships were always there for about 20 - 25% of the students. But in an attempt to appease the vote banks, the last government thought of a great policy. Why not just make professional education free for almost all students? This they did, by providing more scholarships. Now almost 70% of students are covered under one or the other scheme.
Professional colleges of less repute that had a difficult time attracting students, suddenly were easily able to fill up their admissions. Students just flocked to any college they could get into because it was now free. Students were happy (they could study for free), college management folk were happy (they could attract students now) and the government was happy (they got their votes, and may be a share of the scholarship disbursement as well).
The tax payers money was being distributed for free, but who cares. The tax payer is too busy to protest, trying to make money to pay the tax.
But things have come to a head today. Such government policies bankrupted the treasury. Little revenue and more spend - can't go on for ever. Over the last year, there have been delays in the scholarships disbursement by the government. The backlog has accrued to a few thousand crores of rupees - each college on average should get about 3-4 crores. Given that the revenue of an average college is just about 5 crores, this is quite a bit of their budget. Colleges played along for a little while - as long as they could afford to. They in turn delayed their payments - salaries, payments to vendors, investments into the colleges and education. But they cannot be delayed for ever.
With the latest announcement that colleges would have to close functioning from May 26th, if there are no disbursements - they have finally decided to call a spade a spade. The government woke up. There were several meetings, ministers meeting each other, they meeting the college managements etc, but so far there is no solution. The college managements for their part are sticking to their decision.
Some state ministers made farcical remarks - the colleges cannot threaten this way because of a delay. I couldn't stop myself from laughing out loud, wonder what they are supposed to do? play along for how long? I think the government will yield a bit and release some funds.. take the heat out of the moment for now. They will let it come to a boil again another day.. but at it saves the day today.
But in the big picture, this is one more reason for the pathetic quality of professional education in the state today.
With more than 70% of their revenue dependent on government scholarship reimbursements, private professional colleges have no choice but to depend on the dole out by the government to survive. And the government just does not have the money to spend on the scholarship scheme anymore.
This is vote bank politics at its best or worst, depending on your perspective. A lesson in short sightedness. Scholarships were always there for about 20 - 25% of the students. But in an attempt to appease the vote banks, the last government thought of a great policy. Why not just make professional education free for almost all students? This they did, by providing more scholarships. Now almost 70% of students are covered under one or the other scheme.
Professional colleges of less repute that had a difficult time attracting students, suddenly were easily able to fill up their admissions. Students just flocked to any college they could get into because it was now free. Students were happy (they could study for free), college management folk were happy (they could attract students now) and the government was happy (they got their votes, and may be a share of the scholarship disbursement as well).
The tax payers money was being distributed for free, but who cares. The tax payer is too busy to protest, trying to make money to pay the tax.
But things have come to a head today. Such government policies bankrupted the treasury. Little revenue and more spend - can't go on for ever. Over the last year, there have been delays in the scholarships disbursement by the government. The backlog has accrued to a few thousand crores of rupees - each college on average should get about 3-4 crores. Given that the revenue of an average college is just about 5 crores, this is quite a bit of their budget. Colleges played along for a little while - as long as they could afford to. They in turn delayed their payments - salaries, payments to vendors, investments into the colleges and education. But they cannot be delayed for ever.
With the latest announcement that colleges would have to close functioning from May 26th, if there are no disbursements - they have finally decided to call a spade a spade. The government woke up. There were several meetings, ministers meeting each other, they meeting the college managements etc, but so far there is no solution. The college managements for their part are sticking to their decision.
Some state ministers made farcical remarks - the colleges cannot threaten this way because of a delay. I couldn't stop myself from laughing out loud, wonder what they are supposed to do? play along for how long? I think the government will yield a bit and release some funds.. take the heat out of the moment for now. They will let it come to a boil again another day.. but at it saves the day today.
But in the big picture, this is one more reason for the pathetic quality of professional education in the state today.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Schools, Parents and Kids - existing unsigned agreement
A BBC news report says last year Finland's 15 year old kids scored the highest among all OECD countries for science and came in second only to South Koreans in Maths. This when most of them start schooling when they are 7 years old compared to 5 or 6 in most other countries. Apparently there were more than 100 foreign delegations visiting Helsinki to figure out how the Finnish make it happen.
Some of the reasons are cultural:
1. Teaching is a prestigious career in Finland
2. Culture of reading with kids at home
3. High parent teacher interaction
My parents say teaching was a prestigious career in India about 40-50 years ago. A school headmaster would be held at the same rank and carried the same esteem as a Tahsildar. Everyone in the village/town knew the headmaster. Today a school headmaster is a social non-entity and probably earns the same paltry sum that he/she earned at that time (well maybe marginally better now). So what went wrong? While the number of educational institutes exploded with privatization, somewhere along we stopped attracting quality candidates to the teaching position.
The other two relate to parent engagement in the learning process. Let us take each of the stakeholders: schools, parents and students and see it from their perspective.
Many schools, even the supposed to be good ones, pay a lip service to parent engagement. They do not want parents to "meddle" around their internal affairs. They are scared to death of a parent forum. They just want the parents to pay the fees and forget about the rest of educating part. While parents are customers, they are also partners in the process of educating the kid. This is not very well understood by many schools. Many a times, letting in new perspectives helps improve a thing and it is the same when it comes to school learning. A clear and visible channel of parental engagement has to be established - but at present schools feel they are best left alone.
Parents are equally responsible. In this dog eat dog world, they are in a constant rat race to get to somewhere, and then from there to some other where. Who has the time to slow down a tad and take a look at what the kid is upto? Just pamper them enough when they throw an attention deficit tantrum and buy their way out of the guilt (if any). Hell, why have kids if you cannot spend some time with them?
Kids have very little say in the whole thing. They start out trying to get the time from parents and teachers but figure out quickly that parents are too busy and teachers don't like being questioned much. They form their own circles of friends, either real or surreal on the Internet. Soon they develop their own world and grow so comfortable in that world, that they don't even like anyone "intruding" into it.
Schools are making money. Parents are either getting "somewhere" or burn out getting there. There goes the opportunity to engage a kid. The system gets worse and worse.
Some of the reasons are cultural:
1. Teaching is a prestigious career in Finland
2. Culture of reading with kids at home
3. High parent teacher interaction
My parents say teaching was a prestigious career in India about 40-50 years ago. A school headmaster would be held at the same rank and carried the same esteem as a Tahsildar. Everyone in the village/town knew the headmaster. Today a school headmaster is a social non-entity and probably earns the same paltry sum that he/she earned at that time (well maybe marginally better now). So what went wrong? While the number of educational institutes exploded with privatization, somewhere along we stopped attracting quality candidates to the teaching position.
The other two relate to parent engagement in the learning process. Let us take each of the stakeholders: schools, parents and students and see it from their perspective.
Many schools, even the supposed to be good ones, pay a lip service to parent engagement. They do not want parents to "meddle" around their internal affairs. They are scared to death of a parent forum. They just want the parents to pay the fees and forget about the rest of educating part. While parents are customers, they are also partners in the process of educating the kid. This is not very well understood by many schools. Many a times, letting in new perspectives helps improve a thing and it is the same when it comes to school learning. A clear and visible channel of parental engagement has to be established - but at present schools feel they are best left alone.
Parents are equally responsible. In this dog eat dog world, they are in a constant rat race to get to somewhere, and then from there to some other where. Who has the time to slow down a tad and take a look at what the kid is upto? Just pamper them enough when they throw an attention deficit tantrum and buy their way out of the guilt (if any). Hell, why have kids if you cannot spend some time with them?
Kids have very little say in the whole thing. They start out trying to get the time from parents and teachers but figure out quickly that parents are too busy and teachers don't like being questioned much. They form their own circles of friends, either real or surreal on the Internet. Soon they develop their own world and grow so comfortable in that world, that they don't even like anyone "intruding" into it.
Schools are making money. Parents are either getting "somewhere" or burn out getting there. There goes the opportunity to engage a kid. The system gets worse and worse.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Foreign Education Bill
Kapil Sibal is in a hurry and that is a major deviation for any other Cabinet Minister in my memory. The lethargic HRD ministry that Arjun Singh groomed is now forced to act. About time, says I.
For all the shortcomings in higher education in India, it is actually not a bad story. Until the early 1990s, higher education was limited to the very few (less than 1%) to those who a) could make the cut and b) could make the cut. No, not a typo. That was the way it was. If you are not the brightest in your batch, well sorry but try somewhere else, which was actually no where in India.
Privatization ushered in new colleges and universities that filled the void. Accepted that the quality is not on par. But it is to be expected, when a new system evolves, there is bound to be confusion and cacophony. Over the course of time things will stabilize and the winners emerge. When I did my B.Tech, there were hardly 20 colleges in my state. Today we have more than 650! And I am not that old yet, this was just 17 yrs ago. Out of the 650, probably about 50 odd colleges are good, the rest are trying to mimic the good ones and some are just in the process of making money, which is fine by me. People figure things out quickly.
With the foreign education bill, Kapil Sibal is trying to change things all over again. Whatever the critics have to say, one has to accept that the quality of higher education will only improve with the entry of more competition. Competition among businesses has very rarely, if ever, actually caused problems for the consumer. Critics talk about inclusive education, well, let the government worry about that. If the upwardly mobile Indian middle class wants world class education at its doorsteps, why not? Don't stop a good thing for lack of a coherent argument against it.
For all the shortcomings in higher education in India, it is actually not a bad story. Until the early 1990s, higher education was limited to the very few (less than 1%) to those who a) could make the cut and b) could make the cut. No, not a typo. That was the way it was. If you are not the brightest in your batch, well sorry but try somewhere else, which was actually no where in India.
Privatization ushered in new colleges and universities that filled the void. Accepted that the quality is not on par. But it is to be expected, when a new system evolves, there is bound to be confusion and cacophony. Over the course of time things will stabilize and the winners emerge. When I did my B.Tech, there were hardly 20 colleges in my state. Today we have more than 650! And I am not that old yet, this was just 17 yrs ago. Out of the 650, probably about 50 odd colleges are good, the rest are trying to mimic the good ones and some are just in the process of making money, which is fine by me. People figure things out quickly.
With the foreign education bill, Kapil Sibal is trying to change things all over again. Whatever the critics have to say, one has to accept that the quality of higher education will only improve with the entry of more competition. Competition among businesses has very rarely, if ever, actually caused problems for the consumer. Critics talk about inclusive education, well, let the government worry about that. If the upwardly mobile Indian middle class wants world class education at its doorsteps, why not? Don't stop a good thing for lack of a coherent argument against it.
Monday, November 30, 2009
CAT wobbles online
Conducting Online Exams is no trivial matter when it involves about 10,000 test takers at the same time. Prometric has had a 2nd day of troubles in just as many days of conducting the exam.
Prometric is a great firm and the best experienced there is for conducting online exams. No doubt. But have they had experience with this kind of volumes? CAT is a one of its kind of exam. Close to 250,000 test takers spread across the country, completing the exam in 10 days. Moreover, I hear that it was just not the exam itself - but also the surrounding security measures such as biometric identification of the candidate, video surveillance of the center that were included in the equation for Prometric to figure out.
Without knowing the exact problem(s) involved, it is easy to jump on the wagon and harp on the technology and its failure. This one for sure is not about technology. There is ample technology available that can conduct this kind of exercise ten times over. I would look at the program management of the initiative and see what was missed out there. One of the biggest sore point of the whole initiative that points the blame at program management, is the fact that CAT decided to fly blind without even a Plan B. Was it super confidence or just lack of planning?
I am sure that the problems will be figured out sooner or later - the efforts involved in conducting this exam manually and publishing the results is just way too much.
Prometric is a great firm and the best experienced there is for conducting online exams. No doubt. But have they had experience with this kind of volumes? CAT is a one of its kind of exam. Close to 250,000 test takers spread across the country, completing the exam in 10 days. Moreover, I hear that it was just not the exam itself - but also the surrounding security measures such as biometric identification of the candidate, video surveillance of the center that were included in the equation for Prometric to figure out.
Without knowing the exact problem(s) involved, it is easy to jump on the wagon and harp on the technology and its failure. This one for sure is not about technology. There is ample technology available that can conduct this kind of exercise ten times over. I would look at the program management of the initiative and see what was missed out there. One of the biggest sore point of the whole initiative that points the blame at program management, is the fact that CAT decided to fly blind without even a Plan B. Was it super confidence or just lack of planning?
I am sure that the problems will be figured out sooner or later - the efforts involved in conducting this exam manually and publishing the results is just way too much.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Student threatens VC over attendance
I have heard of quite a few instances of student - teacher skirmishes, but this one takes the cake. It could just be that this is the first time I have heard of such a thing, but today's Deccan Chronicle first page article reads .."Student threatens VC over attendance". This student is no novice when it comes to technology. He has apparently used a new masking technology to make this threat over email that was sent to the VC of JNTU, the CM of the state Mr. Rosiah and the State Minister for higher education Mr. Sreedhar Babu. The police have all but given up on tracing the email with an excuse that the student has used a new masking technology to send the email from the VC's id to the VC himself.
It could be one of the two cases - either our police is highly ineffective and has no clue of the technologies they need to work with, or the student is supremly qualified. If it is the later, well I wouldn't blame the student - he definitely does not need to attend the classes at JNTU if he can fool the entire state of AP and the JNTU technologists. What can they possibly teach this guy in terms of technology?
The mischeif aside, the event does throw light on one question - why is attendance a criteria for awarding a degree? After all the degree says that this student is now a qualified engineer. Does attending all classes make someone an engineer? As long as the student does well in the exams, I actually do not see a reason why the administrators should be so hung up on the attendance or absence of a student from classes. It isn't like the quality of faculty at many of the affiliated colleges of JNTU provides one with much confidence that they can actually teach technology.
It could be one of the two cases - either our police is highly ineffective and has no clue of the technologies they need to work with, or the student is supremly qualified. If it is the later, well I wouldn't blame the student - he definitely does not need to attend the classes at JNTU if he can fool the entire state of AP and the JNTU technologists. What can they possibly teach this guy in terms of technology?
The mischeif aside, the event does throw light on one question - why is attendance a criteria for awarding a degree? After all the degree says that this student is now a qualified engineer. Does attending all classes make someone an engineer? As long as the student does well in the exams, I actually do not see a reason why the administrators should be so hung up on the attendance or absence of a student from classes. It isn't like the quality of faculty at many of the affiliated colleges of JNTU provides one with much confidence that they can actually teach technology.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Is there a hope?
A recent article in The Business Line by Kannan Moudgalya, head of Distance Education at IIT Bombay, made a strong case for deregulation of engineering education. He quotes numbers from a McKinsey study that says 75 percent of engineering graduates in India are unemployable! I think the numbers are slightly on the lower side - the study may have had a fairly low bar when it came to being ready for employment.
More stats were presented, not sure of their origin since very little references were presented, but here is one more. This one is staggering: Every year, a whopping Rs. 10,000 crores is spent by students from India who pursue undergraduate engineering degrees overseas. Now this is something. Compare this to the grand plan of Kapil Sibal, on the front page of the same newspaper of the same day (Aug 12th, 2009) - to start 2500 model schools in the 11th plan - coincidentally the plan outlay is Rs. 10,000 crores!
AP Govt, went through a similar thought process way back in the mid 1990s when they opened up professional education for the private sector. Thousands of students from the state were going to study in Karnataka and Tamilnadu every year due to lack of opportunities in the state. The idea was to keep these funds within the state by opening it up to the private sector. The funds certainly stayed in the state. More than that, with in a decade more about 600 engineering colleges were started in the state. As of today, the state accounts for close to a third of all engineering students in the country! Now every student that wants to become an engineer has an opportunity and incentive as well. The government pays complete tuition fees of almost 50 to 60% of the candidates. Isn't this great? Well it would be, only if the colleges themselves had anything to show for themselves. The pathetically low quality of colleges, faculty, students and the complete system of professional education makes a farce of the accreditation system and the regulator, the all powerful and corrupt AICTE. The chairman of the regulatory body, Mr. Yadav was suspended for corruption just over a year after assuming office for a three year tenure.
If the AICTE does its job as it should, in terms of monitoring the quality of resources and facilities before santioning a college to function every year, there would be less than a tenth of the colleges that exist today. That is the magnitude of corruption and callousness that has come to be the hallmark of AICTE.
I have interacted with more than 300 colleges in the state and barring a few minor exceptions almost all of them window dress the institute for the mandatory and "surprise" visits of AICTE. Large sums are spent window dressing the institute, lest they lose the accreditation. Very few have actually lost the accreditation anytime. There are some really funny rules such as the one where a college has to subscribe to a minimum number of journals. These journals, hardly ever picked up by any student, forget the faculty, stay on the shelves and are then neatly binded at the end of the year. Other than generating work for the librarians and revenues for the publishers, this criteria has not achieved much at all. Accepted that not all regulator's prescriptions are such (and may be the intention is that over a long term students might eventually come to relish the journals and can't wait to get their hands on the next issue), but I can give umpteen such instances where funds are wasted by an institute today to meet the regulator's demands - funds that can be put to better use in attracting better quality faculty.
The case for deregulation definitely makes sense. If regulation isn't really helping the cause, why spend enormous amounts of funds trying to put one in place? Why can't we just let the market (essentially students) decide for themselves? Kannan also makes a case for a rating agency like CRISIL that ranks colleges by performance - something of the order of resultsontap.com that we developed for JNTU affiliated colleges three years ago.
Btw, if this is news to you - just about 29% of the students passed the JNTU Hyderabad 1st year engineering exam this year (resultsontap.com). And McKinsey says only about 25% of the graduates are employable - now one can do the math, 25% of 29% = a little over 7%. So what happens to the rest of the 93% students - who is taking responsibilty for them?
More stats were presented, not sure of their origin since very little references were presented, but here is one more. This one is staggering: Every year, a whopping Rs. 10,000 crores is spent by students from India who pursue undergraduate engineering degrees overseas. Now this is something. Compare this to the grand plan of Kapil Sibal, on the front page of the same newspaper of the same day (Aug 12th, 2009) - to start 2500 model schools in the 11th plan - coincidentally the plan outlay is Rs. 10,000 crores!
AP Govt, went through a similar thought process way back in the mid 1990s when they opened up professional education for the private sector. Thousands of students from the state were going to study in Karnataka and Tamilnadu every year due to lack of opportunities in the state. The idea was to keep these funds within the state by opening it up to the private sector. The funds certainly stayed in the state. More than that, with in a decade more about 600 engineering colleges were started in the state. As of today, the state accounts for close to a third of all engineering students in the country! Now every student that wants to become an engineer has an opportunity and incentive as well. The government pays complete tuition fees of almost 50 to 60% of the candidates. Isn't this great? Well it would be, only if the colleges themselves had anything to show for themselves. The pathetically low quality of colleges, faculty, students and the complete system of professional education makes a farce of the accreditation system and the regulator, the all powerful and corrupt AICTE. The chairman of the regulatory body, Mr. Yadav was suspended for corruption just over a year after assuming office for a three year tenure.
If the AICTE does its job as it should, in terms of monitoring the quality of resources and facilities before santioning a college to function every year, there would be less than a tenth of the colleges that exist today. That is the magnitude of corruption and callousness that has come to be the hallmark of AICTE.
I have interacted with more than 300 colleges in the state and barring a few minor exceptions almost all of them window dress the institute for the mandatory and "surprise" visits of AICTE. Large sums are spent window dressing the institute, lest they lose the accreditation. Very few have actually lost the accreditation anytime. There are some really funny rules such as the one where a college has to subscribe to a minimum number of journals. These journals, hardly ever picked up by any student, forget the faculty, stay on the shelves and are then neatly binded at the end of the year. Other than generating work for the librarians and revenues for the publishers, this criteria has not achieved much at all. Accepted that not all regulator's prescriptions are such (and may be the intention is that over a long term students might eventually come to relish the journals and can't wait to get their hands on the next issue), but I can give umpteen such instances where funds are wasted by an institute today to meet the regulator's demands - funds that can be put to better use in attracting better quality faculty.
The case for deregulation definitely makes sense. If regulation isn't really helping the cause, why spend enormous amounts of funds trying to put one in place? Why can't we just let the market (essentially students) decide for themselves? Kannan also makes a case for a rating agency like CRISIL that ranks colleges by performance - something of the order of resultsontap.com that we developed for JNTU affiliated colleges three years ago.
Btw, if this is news to you - just about 29% of the students passed the JNTU Hyderabad 1st year engineering exam this year (resultsontap.com). And McKinsey says only about 25% of the graduates are employable - now one can do the math, 25% of 29% = a little over 7%. So what happens to the rest of the 93% students - who is taking responsibilty for them?
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