The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 had a bottom-up approach with its focus on colleges, said M.K. Sridhar, member, University Grants Commission and the Policy drafting committee, at a webinar organised by the Association of Self-Financing Arts, Science and Management Colleges of Tamil Nadu on Saturday.
“If the Central government implements the Policy, colleges, not universities, will be the focus and in their strength lies the strength of higher education in the country. Thus far, the quality of universities mattered. It will not be the case henceforth.”
Mr. Sridhar told an online group of teachers, principals and representatives of college managements that the universities mattered because they set the syllabus, question paper and evaluated the answer papers in the affiliating system.
Now with the Policy proposing to do away with the affiliation system and colleges attached to the universities getting varying degree of autonomy depending on various parameters, it would be the colleges that would matter as they would offer degrees.
The Policy also wanted the colleges to offer multi-disciplinary courses saying 40% of the 40,000-odd higher education institutions in the country offered a programme or programmes in a discipline. This as excluding the B.Ed. colleges.
If the colleges were to offer multi-disciplinary programmes it would help widen the students’ intellectual horizon and provide them a diverse platform to choose various courses. And, such a multi-disciplinary academic environment would also help the faculty learn from one another or collaborate.
The Policy, Mr. Sridhar said, gave freedom to students in that they could enter and exit any time, choosing courses at their convenience. This would mean that students could choose a course from college and another course from another college.
This would also mean that he could store the earned credits for a course in a credit bank, take a break from academics and return to complete the remaining credits for a degree. Taking this farther would mean that faculty also need not be restricted to a college.
A faculty could be offering a course in different institutions, if needed, he added.
The Association office-bearers also participated.
