A learning culture

Like schools, higher education needs creative solutions

The National Curriculum Framework (NCF) offers a creative corrective to the weaknesses in the school-education system. It seeks to reduce the curriculum load in each subject to lessen rote learning and encourage critical thinking. To this end, it has suggested holding board exams twice in an academic year so that students can be judged on a “best of two” results system rather than be subjected to the tensions of a single high-stakes outcome. In the long run, the idea is to allow “on-demand” board exams for students to appear in subjects that they have completed and feel ready for. At the same time, by affording greater flexibility of selection in subjects that students can attempt in their senior years by allowing combinations of the sciences and arts and, importantly, vocational education, the NCF has created the conditions for inter-disciplinary skilling, which is increasingly in demand in the 21st-century workplace. These imaginative suggestions will go a long way in addressing the stressful competitive exam-driven mode of school education in which results rather than the depth of learning count for more.

But addressing the key pain points of school education does not really solve the increasingly serious crisis in the tertiary education system. This is where the real race begins. To gain entrance into the handful of reputed universities, or tech or management institutes, students have to pass the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for engineering, and the Common Admission Test (CAT) or Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), among others, for management institutes. Inevitably, cracking such exams becomes the key to gaining admission into the more reputed institutions — the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), and a handful of well-reputed private institutions. The spawning of the fast-growing industry in crammers or coaching institutes, which charge lakhs to prepare students for these exams, has been an inevitable corollary to this admission paradigm. The introduction of the Common University Entrance Test for undergraduate university admission is likely to accelerate this trend. Given the government’s historic focus on creating IITs and IIMs, it is ironic that the current crisis arises from a demand-supply mismatch. There are too many students chasing too few decent institutions. In 2022, for instance, about 900,000 students sat for the JEE. Only 250,000 qualified. Of these, the 23 IITs, all government-subsidised, could offer admission to only about 17,385. The rest can seek admission in about 4,400 ranked engineering colleges of variable repute.

Small wonder, then, that parents are willing to stake their life savings on sending their children to coaching classes in towns like Kota to increase the odds for a top-notch exam ranking. No surprise also that overwhelming parental and peer pressure is driving larger numbers of students to suicide. In 2020, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recorded that 8.2 per cent of the student deaths in India were by suicide. The NCRB calculated that every day more than 34 students died by suicide. A solution to this distressing situation is yet to be found. The Kota city administration’s direction to student hostels to be fitted out with spring-loaded fans to dissuade suicide by hanging offers a typically insensitive bureaucratic approach to the symptoms, not the cause. As with school curriculum, a creative solution to the socio-economic crisis in higher education is urgently needed.