DOES INDIA NEED NEW REGULATION IN EDUCATION?

QUALITY CONTROL IN EDUCATION AND THE NEED FOR A
NEW REGULATORY MECHANISM
Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

This article, some important portions edited for space, appeared as an OpEd in The Indian Express and The New Indian Express, dated May 22, 2006: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/4867.html

The Planning Commission’s recent concept paper for the Eleventh Plan recommends to the government the establishment of a “grading system” for private, unaided educational institutions – institutions that it calls “education companies”. It is a relief to see government agencies talking a language about education that does not demean the commercial value embedded in its business. It is time the government also took notice of the ambiguity and lacunae in each of the committees and independent monitoring bodies it has created so far. While, as the Commission says, strict regulations are needed, the key issues to address are application of uniform standards, flexibility in translation of institutional vision and values, and ensuring implementation of the claimed vision and values.

Our private education system today is an evidence of the kind of diversity in quality we have in our country. If, on the one hand, this is in keeping with the principles of democracy, on the other, the situation is vintage Chaotic India. Because of government funding aid, a small percentage of the educational institutions can afford to offer good education at a reasonable cost. An increasingly large majority of the institutes – the “non-aided” ones – depend solely on student fees for sustenance, resource development and working capital. In effect, the government has created an inherent quota system for the rich. If these disparities have to be removed, and if the business of education has to be limited to serious players with objectives and means, here is the alternative: re-regulate.

A November 2005 “ruling” by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) resonates that thought. It summarily (and with not much explanation either) mandates, among other things, that no technical course can be started or even renewed without AICTE’s prior approval. On the surface, the AICTE’s notification (and subsequent “public notice” to aspiring students to warn them of dubious claims by institutions) makes sense.

However, there are at least two problems with the AICTE as it exists today: One, the AICTE supervises technical and management programmes alone. This inherent restriction leaves out a number of professional programmes such as mass communication and several newer ones that AICTE did not bring under its umbrella. There is no mechanism to regulate those programmes in a similar way. As a result, there has been a spurt in such programmes across the country. Many of these lack basic resources, infrastructure and faculty.

The second problem is that AICTE does not supervise non-affiliated programmes (i.e., non-university programmes). The government must clearly distinguish between a university affiliation and quality control. If the government decides to give more teeth for quality control to universities, that decision would be welcome so long as universities are provided with standardized criteria, resources and information to do so. Ideally, however, a centralized committee such as the AICTE has proved more effective in going beyond mountains of cumbersome paperwork and in translating to institutions the vision for compliance and even initiative. A centralized committee can also ensure uniform application of required standards across the country.

But at a deeper level, the government requires to radically rethink the existence of AICTE, and the key to this rethink is “effectiveness”. The AICTE places too much importance on the input, as opposed to the output. The number of computers in a lab is less important than the number of CEOs (or editors, or heads of organizations) that the institution is capable of producing. The vision of AICTE in that direction is restrictive, and indeed, this vision must be coupled with the institution’s own, in its depth of understanding of the needs and values of the marketplace which the graduating professional will enter. We need a regulator that can standardize and control quality, because we need institutions to be effective in their delivery of professionals who can carry our nation forward.

What we need today, therefore, is a regulatory-accrediting commission that can take care of a broader set of institutions as well as a broader set of criteria. Infrastructure and resources alone are not enough: Many of the AICTE-compliant institutions do not deliver as effectively as they are expected to. Last week, the Planning Commission recommended the establishment of a “grading authority” that would categorize institutions on the basis of what they offer on a variety of criteria, rather than continue with compliance with threshold criteria that institutions must meet. The Commission hopes to bring the issue up at an appropriate time with the government. The concept is similar to what the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, or NAAC, follows. NAAC is an independent body under the UGC, and grades institutions on seven criteria that it believes are essential to education: a) Curricular aspects, b) Teaching-learning-evaluation, c) Research, consultancy and extension, d) Infrastructure and resources, e) Student support and progression, f) Organization and management, and g) Healthy practices. At the moment, NAAC only assesses affiliated institutes and universities (although there have been inexplicable exceptions), and uses a methodology that is mostly mathematical, rather than qualitative. A number of changes are still warranted.

The government needs to proactively (and hastily) mandate a system for all, not just affiliated or aided, institutions. A combination of ensuring compliance and monitoring application of professed concepts and norms is the answer. The combination would ensure that minimum standards are followed, but not in a way that seals the approval with compliance of those standards alone. The method of “due diligence” inspects and approves existing standards and methods, typically for an inter-organizational collaboration. Applied to education for its compatibility with agreed educational goals, this process of validation would entail assessing how effectively an institution is translating its own professed philosophies, rather than follow the somewhat convenient standard of benchmarking. For example, the curricular structure of one institution may differ from another. But the key question that a regulatory authority must ask is: how is the institution able to deliver quality professionals stemming from these policies? The individual institutions then have the responsibility of presenting evidence how. Because it believes that educators can think for themselves, this process, through its flexibility, ensures a healthy mutual respect between regulators and educators.

Regulation must entail applicability of curricular content and methods of delivery in the industry, career counselling, inclusion of ethical practice as mandatory curricular input, student access to books, journals, computers and other resources as required for individual programmes, disability access, etc. Validation processes could stem from the professed policies of individual institutions. For example, an institute may claim to train its students for the industry, and in doing so, recruits faculty with high levels of industry experience. Rather than counting the number of doctorates on campus, the committee then proceeds to evaluate how the faculty accomplishes what they claim to.

Concurrent with due diligence are in-built checks and balances. For example, if an institute believes in keeping its students busy through the day in simulation of a workplace, then how is the balance maintained between classroom input and out-of-class input? For example, what daypart is spent on assimilating classroom learning through, say, assignments? Since students spend a major part of the day on campus, what resources are available to them outside the classroom? The mandate must go further for educational institutions in terms of transparency: Each institution must declare the grade in each of their public announcements, and in its literature and on its website. Once this is made the norm, aspiring students know where to apply. Evidently, this grade must be subject to periodic revision.

In a liberalized marketplace, education is business. (Big business, mostly!) Delivery of education must therefore be treated at par with delivery of products and services, with regulatory mechanisms in place that are like those for other industries. The products are the professionals that institutions churn out, and in order to control the quality of that output, it is necessary to control the quality of input (methods to ensure learning, quality of faculty, resources, and infrastructure). The sooner our government and its regulatory agencies recognize that education can be delivered in a professional way, the quicker will we witness efforts and processes at institutional levels to ensure effectiveness of education.