The hundreds of fancy combinations of degree courses in the State universities will be pruned to offer more relevant and feasible combinations to ensure students get relevant skills and don't lose higher education opportunities.
The exercise of reducing the numerous combinations available in various streams is on and it might be brought down to 30 combinations as against over 100 now offered across all universities. For example, Andhra University offers nearly 120 combinations while Osmania University offers about 90, and some of them have either become irrelevant or deny higher education opportunities in some fields.
Students of some science streams are not eligible for the teacher posts in the State government while some B.Com combinations deny them similar opportunities. Students who pursued such courses with an eye on the job market feel they have lost out on Government jobs, which they didn't realise while taking admissions. “There is a need to restructure the combinations as students are losing a lot of time studying unnecessary subjects,” agrees P. Jayaprakash Rao, chairman of APSCHE. “Narrow specialisations should go,” he feels.
Three different committees of senior professors have been constituted and their recommendations would be submitted soon. Prof. Rao says there is a lot of overlapping, and at the same time, some emerging areas have been left out. For example, Bio-technology was introduced under B.Sc stream but labs are not provided due to high costs. Moreover, it limits PG options but students lapped it up without realising the limitations. “Study of molecules will play a key role in development of science but there is no focus on it at undergraduate level,” says Janardhan Reddy, former OU Science College principal.
