Undertake ranking of Private engineering colleges

Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala
The Government has decided to allow large Corporate Houses to establish non-profit companies to run technical colleges. These colleges will be under the direct control of the Corporate Houses. This will enable them to produce engineering graduates that meet their requirements. There is a huge mismatch today between the supply and demand of engineers. Large numbers of graduates churned out from the government colleges remain unemployed while Corporations find it difficult to find graduates with the desired skills. Private colleges can help bridge this gap.
Doubt, however, is whether adequate numbers of competent students are available to feed this expansion of technical education. Presently about five lac students appear for the IIT-JEE every year and compete for the 10k seats on the offer. My assessment is that the top 20 percent of the five lac applicants would do quite well if given admission. It is very difficult to distinguish between the competences within the top one lac  students who would meet the necessary requirements of succeeding in IITs. The selection of 10k out of these one lac who are qualified is largely subjective. It is like trying to select the best 100 in the field of marigold flowers. The success of these one lac students depends largely on the environment prevailing in the college. A student who is otherwise competent may turn out to be mediocre if placed in a ill-managed government college. The problem today is not the absence of good students. The problem is absence of a nurturing environment in the colleges where their potential can be brought out. I think adequate numbers of good students is available in the country for such expansion of colleges.
Similarly there is no paucity of competent faculty. The problem in the present setup is low pay scales. This, in turn, happens because it is not possible to provide effective incentives in a rule-based impersonal evaluation system prevailing in our colleges. It is not that we do not have competent persons to teach. It is that competent persons do not opt to become teachers. New private colleges should be able to break this mould and attract competent persons by providing incentives as they will not be shackled by bureaucracy.
Second area of doubt is whether Corporate Houses which have a ‘for profit’ culture ingrained into their veins will be able to maintain the quality of technical education. May it happen that they start running the colleges for profit and churn out substandard engineers? I think the market will take care of this. Already we find that many private colleges do not get applicants for admissions. They have provided poor quality education in the past and the word has got around. Many colleges are on the verge of closure. The same will happen again if the new ‘for profit’ colleges try to make quick money by charging hefty fees and provide poor education. Indeed this will entail a social cost. The first few batches of students will suffer. But this cost has to be borne by the society. The first few customers of a new model of motorbike take the risk of landing with a poor product. Their experience determines the behavior of the large numbers of next batch of customers. In the end the society is better off. Lessons learnt by few give direction to the many who follow them. Sub-standard motorbikes would continue to be churned out year after year in absence of such accountability in the market. This is what happened in Soviet Russia and led to the collapse of the government-controlled economy. The social cost of that failure was much greater. Similarly, the cost borne by the premier batch of students in getting poor education from new colleges will be small in comparison to the costs saved by large number students who would have suffered that fate year after year.
This cost too can be much reduced by the Government instituting independent ranking of colleges. Hotels are ranked across the world by both official and non-official agencies. These provide a quick preliminary assessment to the prospective clients. Initial Public Offerings of shares are routinely rated by institutions like CRISIL and CARE. Sovereign bonds issued by governments are rated by global agencies like Fitch, Moody’s and Standard and Poor. The Government should provide grants to more than one independent organization to similarly rank the colleges. That will help students assess the quality of college before taking admission.
An all-India examination along the lines of SAT or Graduate Record Examination can also be made compulsory. The grades obtained in this examination may be required to be printed on the mark sheet. This will help weed out sub-standard degrees from the genuine ones.
Private colleges will not solve all our problems though. It is seen that only a handful of Indian colleges figure in the global rankings. The new colleges may not be able to solve this problem. The reason for presently dismal performance, I think, is largely the dominance of government in technical education. There are three levels of performance. The highest level is that of institutions like the Harvard University that are established by charitable trusts where there is accountability as well as incentives both for research and teaching. The second level is of Corporate-run non-profit colleges. Here we may have accountability and incentives but mainly for teaching. Third level is of Government colleges where there is no accountability or incentives for either research or teaching. The present move will help us move from level three to level two. This may not bring the private colleges into the reckoning at the global level because they may provide incentives for good teaching but not for good research which is essential for attaining high rankings. This problem will be solved only when we have non-profit trusts like Harvard running educational institutions. It may take us time to evolve to that level. But it is good enough for the present if we can move from the decrepit government system to non-profit private system. We should not try to solve all problem at one go.
We should also not get swayed by the better performance of IITs in global rankings. IITs are heavily funded. The first Directors of these institutions had often had their education in the West and were seeped in that culture. This cannot be replicated on a large scale. Management of seven IITs and management of seven hundred IITs is a qualitatively different problem.
The last problem is of poor students. Indeed they are likely to be left out from the private institutions. The solution though does not lie in persevering with the non-performing decrepit government system. The solution lies in providing large numbers of scholarships to the poor students. In the result the move to allow private colleges is in the right direction. This can be facilitated by instituting ranking of colleges, making a SAT-type test compulsory and providing scholarships to the poor students.

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