The Central government should allow private accreditation and grant permission to assessment providing agencies, said Arun Nigavekar, former chairman, University Grants Commission (UGC).
“It is long overdue. That is where healthy competition will start,” he said, while speaking at a national conference on ‘Higher Education – The Quality Paradigm' organised by the Education Promotion Society for India (EPSI) in Mumbai.
The conference was the third in the series of national conferences held on the same topic in Delhi and Chennai earlier. Private educational institutions have excellent physical infrastructure and good academic infrastructure, but they lack good teaching staff who have the capability to act as facilitators of learning, he said, adding that while 1990s was an era of economic liberalisation, 2012 should be known for the liberalisation of knowledge-giving institutions.
The private educational institutions should have a transparent fee structure which will also include fair profit. “For-profit, educational organisations with fair profit concept have been approved by Gandhi as well. A company with fair profit will provide service for the necessity of the country. Thus, the financial relations start changing and the surplus goes into the system to enhance it,” Mr. Nigavekar said.
P.K. Gupta, Chancellor of Sharda University, said the students should be made to pay for their higher education so that they realise its value. He claimed that many students who enrol for higher education do not value it as they do not have to pay for it. While talking about the quality of education imparted in the country today, K B Powar, former secretary general of Association of Indian Universities, said there were no measures to define excellence in education.
“The degree certificate will only tell that the student was enrolled in the college for these many years. But we should have a national qualifications framework which should define what to expect from a graduate,” he said.
“We need to define excellence in education. Global competencies should be developed in students,” he said. He also proposed that the durations of courses, especially in the science faculty, should be increased. “At the individual level, we should clarify the concept of quality, use performance indicator. We should encourage private participation, distance education. Are we interested in reforming our education system or in taking care of the interest of mediocre students?” Mr. Powar asked.
Apoorva Patkar, executive president of Consortium of Management Education (COME), said the failure of the private educational institutes lay in the fact that they were not able to deliver values as expected by the regulators.
“Institutions will have to deliver values and not commodities in the education system. We are not able to deliver value expected by the regulators. There is also a need to think what leadership is driving our institution. That will bring about a positive impact,” she said.
G. Viswanathan, president of EPSI, called for de-regularisation of private higher education institutions. He proposed that the only role the government should play is to send an accreditation team which will evaluate the quality of education every year or every two years. “Healthy competition in the field will automatically wash away the mediocre educational institutions,” he said, asking private educational institutions to widely publicise their accreditations and affiliations.
