Ficci For Revamping Higher Education System

Ensuring effective linkages and developing symbiotic relationship between industry and university education is the only way out to make students suitable for consumption by industry, according to Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry.

For this, training of students from secondary education to university stage and commercialisation of higher research will be the necessary component in the envisaged revamping process of higher education, says the chamber in a recent study on University Education at Cross-roads An Agenda for the New Government.

The study says the feedback mechanism providing regular input of information from industry to universities for maintaining curricula up-to-date, accreditation to engineering programmes, advice on policy formulation, technology and environment will be the basic bed-rock for making the current defunct higher education relevant and meaningful.

 

Industry on its part would have to play a more pro-active and effective role in building a positive training culture and evolving cohesive synthesis of education and training for use of business and industry in this re-orientation strategy.

There have been attempts to integrate theory and practice. In this scenario, apprenticeship system and co-operative education will form education-business interface. This is a strategy of applied learning involving a structured programme developed and supervised by an educational institution in collaboration with the co-operating employers. Relevant, productive and paid work is an integral part of a students academic programme and an essential component of the final assessment. Realising the emerging need of cooperative education has already come in vogue in many countries and is established in numerous universities., polytechnics and other tertiary institutions.

The study says higher education in India has turned meaningless despite a well-developed university education infrastructure. It is defunct and rudderless, it adds.