Poor response from students is forcing colleges affiliated to the Mahatma Gandhi University to wrap up ‘job-oriented courses’.
Faculty members of a few colleges cited the shortage of adequate infrastructure as a major reason for the decline in popularity of many courses that were billed as ‘job-oriented’.
The university, however, has no clue about how many courses were stopped by colleges over the last several years. This flies in the face of the norm that the affiliated educational institution must inform the university about their decision to stop offering any academic programme.
The academic section of the varsity, which is supposed to have an updated list of academic courses available in each college, is also groping in the dark. All that the varsity can offer is that such dropped courses were mainly in the areas of management, information technology and biotechnology.
The academic section is now busy identifying the courses that were dropped.
Rajan Varughese, former Pro-Vice Chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University, blamed the colleges of not doing proper homework before introducing a course. Students would reject courses that would not help secure jobs or improve their chances of pursuing a postgraduate programme, he said.
University officials cited how a college management wanted to persist with an undergraduate programme in Geology despite lacking proper facilities. The varsity refused permission, while directing to stop the course immediately.
Even the supposedly coveted B.Tech programmes in courses such as Information Technology had to be dropped within a year or two of their introduction since they failed to attract young aspirants.
