What are the issues with education?
- The twin issues of accessibility and affordability combine into a deadly double blow for parents struggling to educate their children.
- Especially, for the poor, access to affordable government education is limited due to the absence of requisite physical and soft infrastructure.
- At the higher education level, the Centre has targeted to achieve a 30% enrolment level in higher education by 2020.
- If one in every three eligible students who have completed high school actually wants to join college, we need to create 40 million university seats.
- Despite the spectacular growth in private sector education, we are still millions of seats short of the target.
What happened recently?
- Apart from the constitutionally mandated reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, we have all kinds of other quotas at the State level.
- Recently, in Tamil Nadu, the State government decreed that as much as 85% of engineering and medical college seats in the State will be reserved for students who had completed the qualifying exam under the State’s own board of secondary education.
- The move followed a dismal showing by State-board students in the NEET for admission.
- Simultaneously, in Delhi — the Aam Aadmi Party government passed a resolution in the State Assembly demanding that Delhi University reserve 80% of its seats for students from Delhi.
Why employers apply strict filters?
- As hundreds of engineering seats are goes-begging, as word gets around that the graduates are proving to be unemployable in the job market.
- The trouble is that our education system has never been able to convince stakeholders that it performs its human resource development function of equipping a candidate with the appropriate skills and knowledge.
- Hence, employers apply stricter filters to decide on who gets a job offer and who doesn’t.
What could be the way forward?
- In our country, a high school degree is just not good enough to become a doctor or engineer, which is why we have exams like NEET, JEE, and so on.
- The only workable solution is to ensure uniformity in the quality of education at the school level to start with.
- This means, for instance, going for a nationwide CBSE system, instead of State boards of varying quality.
Source: The Hindu
