In his remarkable book The Diploma Disease (1976), Ronald Dore captured the enormous surge for higher education in the South Asian region that resulted in the accumulation of degrees without much hope or opportunity for employment. The demand for quality higher education has only grown in the decades that followed, despite high unemployment figures. In Timepass (2010) Craig Jeffrey documents the dilemma in which young men in a small town in northern India find themselves. Equipped with double MA degrees, they languish in the university, in search of coveted ‘service’, waiting for something to happen and essentially passing time. This is the reality in the vast expanse of higher education in India: degrees aplenty, but limited opportunities for growth!
The current outcry about the University Grants Commission (UGC) decision to curtail MPhil and PhD seats in universities perhaps needs to factor in this as well as what goes on in universities. We must recognise that while students enrol for research, some drop out due to compelling reasons such as employment. There are also some departments in Delhi University, for example, which have the dubious distinction of churning out dozens of mediocre PhDs each year.
The rigours of research
Far from being an innocuous phenomenon, the number of students a supervisor is allotted is significant. The supervisor is critical to the student’s intellectual life and is called upon if a student seeks a job reference, participation in a conference or workshop, funding, a hostel seat, or action on any form of injustice. The supervisor is the student’s lifeline. In order to be efficient in her interaction with students, it is impossible for a professorial supervisor to deal with more than six-eight PhD students or one or two MPhil students at any given time. A professor also teaches and tutors other students, evaluates their essays and examination papers, and struggles to find time for research.
The pursuit of doctoral research (in the social sciences) is ostensibly with a purpose to examine a problem with fine-tuned research, doing first-hand fieldwork, and making sense from different perspectives. The task of writing about it comes later. That is why doing research, in the social sciences at least, takes a phenomenally long time. It needs substantial commitment, abilities for meticulous data collection and analysis and, above all, the strength to persevere despite all odds. The MPhil degree, I may add at the risk of being pilloried, does not adequately prepare a student for all this.
A good PhD programme must have compulsory coursework, and it is this coursework that prepares a student for doctoral research. It is a myth to assume, however much you might want to retain the MPhil, that it helps prepare students for research. The MPhil degree in itself also does not result in eligibility for a university position. It is passing the ubiquitous National Eligibility Test (NET) administered by the UGC, or State Level Eligibility Test (SLET) at the State-level, or completing a PhD degree that in fact ensures eligibility for a teaching position in the university system.
Mentoring serious students
All students who register for the MPhil programme do not necessarily have their eyes set on doctoral research. While many students committed to research may at first seek entry into the MPhil programme, some of them also do so for other reasons, notably, waiting for admission to universities abroad, retaining a privileged hostel seat, or simply remaining in the university system. A reality check would tell us how many of them have their eyes set on an eventual PhD programme. It is those students who are serious about doing research, belonging to different categories and socio-economic backgrounds, whom one must nurture and help to grow, as researchers and scholars, in our efforts as educators.
Retaining MPhil and PhD seats merely because we seek to keep vistas of opportunity open is not the reason we should do so. Such opportunities are increasingly more and more difficult to come by and we must be open to other avenues through which scholarship is to be supported, encouraged and developed. The pursuit of degrees alone does not necessarily nurture scholarship. It perhaps diminishes higher education far more rapidly. An emphasis on quality in our research programmes in a range of disciplines — rather than in the number of seats at our disposal — is the only way we can contribute to the growth of higher education and scholarship in this country.
Let us first ensure this quality, outside Delhi and major Central universities, to ensure that students not only receive good education but also find themselves capable of having the skills for employment, and not necessarily in the university system alone.
Meenakshi Thapan teaches Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics
