Faults in our higher education system …..
From past few days, I have been thinking a lot about how can our(Indian) education system become better. I am personally very unsatisfied with it. It has to do with the curriculum, quality of teaching methods, quality of teachers, availability of school and colleges, market relevance of subjects and few more reasons.
I was fortunate enough to study at arguably the best school in my district. But even in that school, we had troubles finding good teachers. We had good teachers till 9th grade. As I moved to 10th, I realized the problem. For 10th standard, I had to teach myself mathematics, physics and chemistry. Luckily in 12th standard we had good chemistry teacher, but mathematics and physics teachers were hopeless. Many of us preferred to study on our own.
Because of such problems, I was determined to not compromise with my college and get into a reputed one. I worked really hard and got into NITK Surathkal(ranked about 10th in India then). Professors who taught me in first year of my engineering were surely qualified well, but very few of them were good teachers. Keep in mind that first year is common for all branches here, but starting second year we get subject specific to our branches. From second year onward, the teachers who taught us were officially qualified to teach us, but most of them were not even as knowledgeable as us. Because of compulsory attendance we had to suffer through their lectures. We had to haggle for marks. If our answers didn’t match the textbook, we wouldn’t get the marks. They didn’t have the capability to understand the answer and figure out if it is right. A nice machine learning algorithm could have replaced them in grading. Grading for projects was even worse. Imagine a monkey typing random numbers(of course, you accept the input only if it is matching with the corresponding student’s past performance :) ). Projects were always team projects and the student who performed well in exams would get more marks even if she did contribute less to the project. But our placements were still really good. Reason being that this was a a pool of highly selected students and they worked really hard in their extra time. Teachers did more harm than help. Students did well because they taught themselves useful things and found the right kind of group to do it with. After talking to my friends in various other colleges I realized that this is the situation of every college in India. I can excuse few IITs, but I am assuming that.
State colleges are even worse. They don’t have any placements, most students remain jobless after college. Professors have no knowledge about what is happening in the industry. In my brother’s college, they teach programming in Turbo-C. That’s how detached they are.
When I compare this with west (US, Canada, Europe), I see that, there, even people with Arts and Commerce streams are doing computer programming, while here engineers with a CS degree have hard times finding a software developer’s job. A lot of that has do with the fact they don’t have to get through the barrier of learning English. But most of Indian engineering students and a big chunk of Arts and Commerce students understand English reasonably well. If we can solve the problem for them, it would be nothing less than revolutionary for them. I believe it is the biggest problem worth solving right now in the India.
Higher education around the world in general is in a bad shape. Reputed colleges are reputed not, because of their education system, but because of their legacy and research. There is a need to differentiate between undergraduate programs and graduate programs. Reputed colleges like MIT, Harvard and IITs in India are great for research and thus great for MS and PhD students, but they are not good for non-research programs(Undergraduate programs and some graduate programs) as these colleges host smart professors, who are not necessarily good teachers.
We need a system that cultivates good teachers and we need a lot of them. A professor is selected on the basis of her research work and not based on how a good of a teacher she is. Professors do not have an incentive to work hard for their lectures and make sure that their students do well, as it doesn’t fulfill their goal of producing good research. Electives that colleges offer are also based on professors research interest. Since the corporate world pays more than academia, many good researchers prefer to do research in the industry rather than in college. We need to separate research from teaching. Cultivate good teachers for higher education and compensate them well. We have to make sure that good teachers reach more students. Good study material alone is not sufficient. Students need somebody who guides them and somebody who can be approached for understanding difficult concepts.
…. And how to fix them https://medium.com/@kishansagathiya/and-how-to-fix-them-6372a6a49efe
