Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Time for India to derecognize/stop student loans for bad courses?

NASSCOM, FII, industry leaders claim that anywhere from 10%-25% of India's graduates are directly employable after they graduate. Now, one may argue that college is not a trade school, so companies should not expect colleges to do the hard lifting and tailor the curriculum to their needs. Well, that is true especially when it comes to technical subjects where the pace of curriculum revision is slow so companies do not find the contents relevant to their needs. But as it turns out, the issues are with very basic technical skills(coding, logic, knowing accounting principles) and soft skills(English, writing, reading, etiquette, critical thinking etc). Recruiters can quite easily teach technical skills to those with the requisite aptitude but to teach soft skills to 20year olds, is something which should have been handled at school and college levels. So what is the result of this?
  • Low proportion of employable, this is opening the route for 'finishing school' institutes like Purple Leap, NIIT and others. 
  • Enormous application/job ratio for 'safe' PSU jobs
  • Very low level of English and critical discourse on public forums. For example, when someone posts a job with clear instructions to email  the CV, some retards reply with comments under that asking the recruiter to consider their applications.
  • High level of plagiarism and deterioration of writing skills, as students copy/outsource project reports and assignments. 
 While one can go with the finishing school option, this is a clear recognition that the system is broken. But thanks to the powerful education barons(many of them elected legislators) owning these colleges, there is little likelihood of change in the system, despite what AICTE/UGC/NAAC may do. So what is the way out? Social media reviews of colleges, compulsary national level passing out test on the lines of GRE, which would be used to measure college quality at an aggregate level etc. These scores could be then used by colleges to fix filters for the college programs eligible for education loans.And if tracking the employment status is possible, even that could be used as a metric, as also student rating of the college after graduation(via social media/forums)

In the present system, the false notion of education inclusion makes banks extend loans even to colleges they know are worthless, and to students for enrolling in those colleges. This has already lead to increasing education loan defaults, though not on the scale prevalent in USA. Maybe its time to do what China did(http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/11/23/china-to-cancel-college-majors-that-dont-pay/) and pull the plug on ineffective subjects. I recognize that these would include many arts/commerce courses besides engineering, and while I do not have an elitist bias or prejudice towards any stream, one should recognize that if this present situation continues, the education bubble may set into India as well/.

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