At a time when there is a sizeable employability gap, how do higher education institutes solve the conundrum of low employability-level of students and fewer people opting to take up teaching? Does one lead to another?
One of the areas where there is scope for improvement, says Susan Thomas, professor, Human Resources, at Loyola Institute of Business Administration (LIBA), is applying principles of management in education.
At a day-long workshop on ‘Capacity building and sustainable management in education’, conducted by LIBA for heads of colleges, the focus was building a vision for the institute, realising it, and looking at performance management of students and faculty that goes beyond the regular parameters.
“For students there is no system of evaluation other than marks. And faculty is graded on their ability to make students get good grades,” said Father Emmanuel Arockiam, deputy director and dean, LIBA. One of the sessions was on looking at rewarding other competencies in faculty such as good communication, institutional membership and knowledge upgradation, for instance. Colleges were also given metrics, using which students and faculty can be evaluated.
Gopal Srinivasan, founder, chairman and managing director, TVS Capital Funds Limited, said critical thinking had to be cultivated. “Everyone has got facts. But they are not connecting the dots,” he said. When companies recruit, they see how well they can do this, he said.
