| |9 October 2016HIGHERReviewvery easy thing in India--just take a ride through some of the rural areas and you will see what I mean. You will see scores of colleges and universities that do not have even basic facilities or amenities. And then you ask the question as to how these institutions even came to be signed off; and the answer is quite obvious. We have heard of Universities and colleges going without teaching positions filled for months, if not years. The schism between Tier One, Two and Three will continue to exist as long as there is no proper will to execute a plan of action that benefits the student community. And then when we look at the State government institutions and recruitment to teaching positions, we are in a totally different ballpark with a scenario that is quite baffling indeed.We often announce the opening new IITs and IIMs without worrying about where the faculty will come from. Unless we are able to attract bright minds to teaching and research, our universities and institutions will have no chance to carve out rightful place in the world academic space.The bottom line for Indian higher education is not ourselves patting on our shoulders and saying how great we are. Proliferating ranking agencies within India is not exactly going to push the quality of education in the country. Ultimately we have to be at par with the best in the world for this is a globalised world where no country can pretend to operate on its own. And to achieve this, we must be able to attract the brightest minds to teaching and research offering globally competitive salaries and benefits. We have to nurture our junior faculty to excel. We must pay attention to curriculum reengineering with active input from industry representatives. We must pay a lot of attention to placement providing skills training to make sure that the student gets placed. This is not a numbers game, but a plan that every institution must have to make sure that the student is successfully placed and in the field that he/she has studied. Of course there can be marginal inter-relatedness of jobs; but for the most part the student should derive satisfaction from the job after all those years put in colleges and universities.In all this talk about higher education, fine tuning higher education and coming to terms with the educated unemployed, we also have to factor in the basic educational system in India as it pertains to what is being imparted at schools for the simple reason that the "pool" generated from these schools is what is received by institutions of higher learning. Here again we find a vast difference between the government schools and private schools, although to categorically say that the latter has always had the edge is somewhat mis-leading. 1.We must work hard to bring prestige to the teaching profession.2. Teaching profession should not be allowed to become a dumping ground for people who do not find place elsewhere in the economy. We must attract good students to teaching by nurturing them and paying decent living wages.We must make no compromise on quality, be it with respect to teachers or infrastructure. Proliferating ranking agencies within India is not exactly going to push the quality of education in the country
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