tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42731397137707514852024-03-18T13:45:46.171+05:30Musings of Dheeraj SanghiI like to write about technical education in India, but I may write about other issues as well.Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.comBlogger334125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-27479198592767887392024-02-19T18:20:00.001+05:302024-02-19T18:20:33.245+05:30Are Students our Customers<p>Over the last two to three decades, the language in higher education has changed. When I was looking for higher education as a student, the talk was about quality of education and the affordability of education. But the language today is branding, return on investment, etc. I keep hearing that students are our customers and we must keep our customers happy. And in this situation, the customer delight is all about placement or more bluntly, return-on-investment (that too in short term).</p><p>I am too old fashioned to appreciate this.</p><p>To me the relationship between the student/alumni and an educational institution is not transactional. It is not that one pays some money and one gets some education in return. There is a relationship that is life long and the relationship is one with no expectations or in some sense, huge expectations. When I was looking at my flight options from Delhi to Cancun, Mexico, I could change flights in multiple cities in North America or Europe, but I chose to spend several hours in Washington DC, since my alma mater, University of Maryland, College Park is nearby and I would like to meet some alums and faculty members there before hopping on to the next flight. I can't imagine visiting Kanpur without dropping by in IIT Kanpur campus. A transactional relationship does not last this long.<br /></p><p>People whom I have taught decades ago still keep in touch, still ask for advice and I still reply. In which business, the organization will spend time to help someone who was a customer 25 years ago. We do this because we are not a business.</p><p>And how do you compute return-on-investment anyway. And how much return is good enough?</p><p>Quality education has many consequences, a higher salary is just one of them. You pick up certain skills which may not immediately provide you returns in terms of first salary but will help you in life. It enables you to take better decisions in all spheres of life including dealing with family and friends. You become part of an alumni network which often provides certain level of support in various situations. What monetary numbers are you going to put for these benefits to evaluate your RoI?</p><p>A student who considers himself as customer will invariably demand better facilities (which is ok) but a student who considers herself as a learner is more likely to demand better education. <br /></p><p>But, of course, it is not just students and parents who think of themselves as customers, even some universities consider students as customers. They also realize that the RoI computation by these customers is strictly based on first month salary after the program. These universities will in their curriculum put focus on those skills which are immediately in demand, and they don't care if the knowledge of these graduates will become obsolete very soon. On the other hand, good universities will want to ensure lifelong success of their students which means a very different approach to education. Learning how to learn becomes important. Skills like Critical thinking become important. More focus on basic concepts is needed.</p><p>Whenever I say things like these, the question that I often get asked is this. "I want to be a learner and not a customer. But how do I evaluate that there is better learning in a university. If metrics like higher return-on-investment are not indicative of better learning, then what is." Well, I have answered it in many blogs in the past. The bottomline is "faculty." And the best way to find out is by looking at their profile, and by visiting the campus and talking to some of them and their students.</p><p>To close, I will repeat what I have said in the beginning. I don't consider myself as a past customer of IIT Kanpur or University of Maryland. I have a lifelong relationship with my alma maters and not a transactional one.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-4337102735182799472024-02-06T12:03:00.003+05:302024-02-06T12:03:35.571+05:30Sports Quota in IIT Madras<p><span class="break-words
"><span><span dir="ltr">Recently, <a href="https://www.iitm.ac.in/">IIT Madras</a> announced admission to its flagship BTech programs for those who excel in sports. They call it <a href="https://jeeadv.iitm.ac.in/sea/information.html">Sports Excellence Admission</a>. The student should have got at least one medal at an international or national event in a specified list of sports. The ranking would depend on the number of medals, whether gold/silver/bronze, the type of competition, etc. The student should also have done well in JEE Mains and be selected to take JEE Advanced. He should have further done well in JEE Advanced to receive a rank in whatever category the student belongs to (whether general or SC/ST/PD/OBC and so on). The student should also have passed eligibility in 12th class. IIT Madras is creating two seats in each of its BTech programs for sports excellence.<br /></span></span></span></p><p><span class="break-words
"><span><span dir="ltr">It is the first time any IIT is considering admission based on excellence in sports. For a long time, the admission was strictly based on JEE. In the 1960s, there were admissions for board toppers. And then in 1960s and 1970s, there were lateral admission in 2nd year to a few students (at least in IIT Kanpur, but only one of those actually joined, and left IITK after a semester, so no one from lateral admission ever received a degree).</span></span></span></p><p><span class="break-words
"><span><span dir="ltr">I have written many articles over the years asking IITs to consider an alternate admission mechanism based on performance in Olympiads (Science and Informatics), and there is thankfully some progress in that over the last few years. I know at least IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur and IIT Gandhinagar have admission processes based on Olympiads performance.</span></span></span></p><p><span class="break-words
"><span><span dir="ltr">Having alternate admission mechanisms bring in diversity in the classroom which enhances the quality of education for everyone (and not just for those who came in through alternate mechanism). Also, if this move catches on and other IITs also offer similar admissions (and hopefully lower the academic bar), there will be many school students who will feel less stressed and can follow their passion.<br /></span></span></span></p><p><span class="break-words
"><span><span dir="ltr">The key issue here is what should be the academic bar for these admissions. The
problem is that if you do not have any academic requirement, then
obviously the sports quota student may have serious difficulty in
carrying out academic work at an IIT. On the other hand, having a
very high bar will mean
that anyone who has spent a lot of time on the field will not be able to
come through this mechanism. What is the right balance? Difficult to say.<br /><br />I
wonder if IIT Madras did some research into this and are there students
who get medals at national level games and also get a rank in IIT JEE
(Advanced), and are there many of them. They are talking about 2 seats
per UG program. Hence, about 20 seats. Are there 20 such students. I doubt it. So,
are they hoping that this will encourage many sports persons to go for
JEE coaching.<br /><br />In IIIT Delhi, we had similarly desired to attract
sports persons to the institute, and we took a slightly different
approach. We said that if someone worked hard to play for India (in
recognized sports events), they worked less on their JEE (Mains) preparation and
we will assume (based on some research) that if they had not spent that
time on sports, they would have got a 2 percentile increase in their
JEE score (which is a rank improvement by 20,000). Similarly, if they
played at the national level (represented their state), we will add 1
percentile to their JEE score. Similarly, for Chess, we said that we
will work with FIDE rating. Above a certain rating, we will add 2
percentile to your JEE score, and above a lower cutoff, we will add 1
percentile to your JEE score.<br /><br />The beauty of this scheme was that
we didn't need any super-numerary seats. We didn't need to worry about
reservations in these seats (since there is no seat outside the
reservation system), we didn't need to find a complicated way to rank
sports persons from different sports. We didn't need to decide how many
seats in each program. We just bumped up their JEE score and put them
back in the counseling process. Simple.<br /><br />It worked for us as we
got a couple of students through this mechanism every year. But, we were
working with JEE Mains which I believe is better aligned with school
board syllabus than JEE (Advanced), and hence the requirement of
performance in JEE Advanced is much harder for a sports person to meet. So even with JEE Mains, getting 20 sports persons to get decent ranks would be a challenge. But with JEE Advanced, this seems like an impossible ask.<br /><br />So,
on the face of it, the announcement appears to be just to collect
brownie points with no real intention to admit sports persons. But I
hope I am proven wrong and there will be at least 4-5 student joining
IITM this year, if not 20.</span></span></span></p><p><span class="break-words
"><span><span dir="ltr"><br /></span></span></span></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-87571647447813458122023-09-22T15:23:00.001+05:302023-09-22T15:23:34.076+05:30Multi-disciplinary Education: Why is it important?<p>NEP 2020 talks about universities becoming multi-disciplinary and offering programs which have courses from multiple disciplines. What is multi-disciplinary education?</p><p>It is simple. When you study to get a degree in a particular discipline, you don't just study courses in that discipline, but from various other disciplines as well. For example, if you want to do a major in Computer Science, you will study a significant number of courses in Computer Science, but you will also do courses from Mathematics, Engineering, Humanities, and so on.</p><p>This all sounds familiar. The important question is: Aren't all university programs multi-disciplinary in nature already. Why is NEP or educationists in general even talking about it. If everyone has accepted it, what is the point of this blog.</p><p>Well, everyone hasn't accepted it, and a lot of universities are simply paying lip service to it. And it is a matter of degree. If there is a program in which you have to do 40 courses in 4 years, should you have 10 courses from outside the major discipline, or 20 or 25. So details are important.</p><p>Frankly, students have not accepted it, and many universities haven't understood the reason to do it and therefore implement it in ways that goes counter to the reason why it should be done.</p><p>For a long time, good universities had a broad based under-graduate education because the education was supposed to make you a good citizen who should be aware of a lot of different things. It was felt that under-graduate program is to improve the breadth and to enable a large number of different careers. If students can pick up very different careers, they ought to have been trained on several different things. But lately, even in the western world, college education is being seen more as improving employability and preparing for a narrower set of careers. People are talking about education being an investment and looking for a return on investment (RoI).</p><p>In this new world, students are demanding to know why every course is being taught and how it is going to be useful in one's career. And by "career", they often don't mean next 30-50 years, but the first job that they expect through campus placement. And a large number of courses that we teach (even within the major discipline) aren't meant to help find the first job. <br /></p><p>The reality is that your first job is often based on knowledge and skills that you can pick up through a good school education and perhaps six to twelve months of additional training. So if you are only looking for the first job and only want to study which will quickly get you that first job, you don't need to join college at all. (Of course, there is a signaling value in joining a college.)</p><p>If I look at the journey of an engineering student, s/he would have started studying for JEE (or other exams) while in 11th class (if not in 9th class, and sometimes even earlier). They had a goal to get into IITs or some other good institution. When they finally take admission to some college, their earlier goal has become irrelevant (whether they succeeded in it or not). To maintain their sanity and motivation, they need to quickly decide on their next goal and works towards them. And often, the goal they choose is to get a job at the end of 4 years (as distinct from thinking about a long term career, or to have a goal of becoming a good engineer independent of what job they will get). And they start thinking of how they will find that job. They figure that they will need to learn a few things and get some soft skills which will be useful in the interview process. Note that they are only focusing on getting a job and not doing a job well. Very quickly they figure out that pretty much no software company asks them questions on chemistry or physics, or a lathe machine, or sociology and so on. And they start questioning why these subjects are being taught to them.</p><p>The faculty members are often able to say that courses like partial differential equation will help solve some problems in future (do software developer even code matrix manipulation? no, they just make function calls). But even faculty members are not able to explain why a CS student needs to study Chemistry.</p><p>The fact of the matter is that the broad based education has different goals than a very narrow goal that the students want to pursue. And instead of explaining them how a course will help in their narrow goals, we should be talking about why broader goals are important. And the broader goals are not only to become a good citizen aware of a lot of different things from various different perspectives, but also to prepare for future jobs which are yet unknown, and since we don't know what the future requirements are, it is good to have a broad based education since that would increase the chance of success in that unknown world.</p><p>If one wants to be highly successful in one's career, there are often two ways to get there. One, you be amongst the best in your chosen field (top 1-2%). This way, you would have respect, you will rise quickly, you will make an impact. Two, you be very good in more than one field (top 25% in say computer science and music). Since most people focus on one field, people who are very good in two or more fields are in big demand and they rise quickly. And most people find it easier to be very good in two things than excellent in one. You have chosen one major discipline based on your interest or guidance you received. Now, you should think of another discipline to be good at. If your curriculum at the university is multi-disciplinary, you would be exposed to many disciplines, learn them seriously and think about what did you enjoy doing the most. That could be your second discipline to get very good at.</p><p>The other reason to study multiple things is that most technical knowledge and skills would be obsolete within a few years. A student entering college today would almost certainly be working 50 years from now. How does one survive if most things that one learnt in the university are obsolete. Well, you need to keep learning always. And how do learn as adults. We learn by connecting any new information with the old information we already have. If you know a wide variety of things, there is a better chance that the new thing you need to learn has some connection with what you already know.</p><p>In fact, when you learn a seemingly unrelated topic, you still get ideas from that course which can be useful in your primary discipline. Many problems that you will solve in future will require an understanding of its domain.</p><p>People become more creative when they study multiple subjects. Some people may be born creative. But a lot of people who are creative have seen many different perspectives in life and are able to use all that knowledge in coming up with a solution.</p><p>I can go on and on, but the point is that learning topics from different disciplines have several advantages if you consider broader life and career goals as opposed to just succeed in a campus placement interview.</p><p>Now, where do Tier 2/3 universities go wrong in implementing multi-disciplinary curriculum. Note that all the advantages we talked about are accrued by studying a wide variety of subjects. It is not about any specific subjects. While there may be some topics from outside the major discipline which are very important for that discipline (like some Mathematics for Computer Science), and hence can be made compulsory, for the rest of the courses, any set of courses will do as long as there is sufficient breadth. For a computer science program, we may insist on some maths courses, some science courses, some humanities and social science courses, and so on, to require breadth, but there is no justification for making these non-major courses as compulsory. If you want the student to have breadth, let the student decide what will constitute that breadth. If these courses are being done to help in an uncertain future, often your guess regarding what might help a particular student 20 years from now is going to be as bad as the student's own guess.</p><p>But most Tier 2/3 universities do not understand the importance of multi-disciplinary curriculum. They are doing it because NEP2020 says so, and because the AICTE model curriculum suggests so. But they have this feeling that this is waste of time, and since these are not "useful" courses, there is no point in investing in them. So no choice to students. May be we can get temporary faculty (low-cost) to teach these courses.</p><p>Multi-disciplinary curriculum is so important that one ought to look at university programs from this perspective before confirming admission. And the way to find out whether the university is only paying lip service or is actually serious about multi-disciplinarity is the following:</p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Check the fraction of credits from outside the major discipline. If the major discipline has more than 50 percent credits, it is not good.</li><li>Does the university offer second major and minor programs (minor in other disciplines as opposed to specialization within the discipline).</li><li>Does the university offer non-major courses as compulsory courses only or are these electives.</li></ol><p> Once you have determined whether a university is serious about multi-disciplinarity, give that a significant weight while comparing your higher education options.</p><p>Note: I had recently given a webinar on this topic with iDreamCareer.com and the recording of that webinar is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85-InERkRWM</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-52312611721426101972023-09-09T00:11:00.000+05:302023-09-09T00:11:34.573+05:30IITians in ISRO and other national missions<p>Recently, ISRO made us all proud by landing near the south pole of the moon, an achievement that no other nation has been able to do. During the festivities that followed, one thing that came out in media repeatedly was that there were very few IITians involved in this project. Indeed, there are very few IITian employees in ISRO.</p><p>When this was repeated, there were two implications. One is, of course, that we have a strong talent pool beyond the so-called top institutions in the country. This is very positive for the nation. But, the second implication is a complaint that IITians do not participate in the nation building through government projects. If you go through the comments on the newspaper reports, there is also a sense that if we can get high quality scientists from Tier 2 institutions (at a much lower cost), should we be spending so much on IITs. Should we force IITians to spend a couple of years after their graduation to work in the government sector.</p><p>What do numbers say. Well, everyone quotes a <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/just-2-of-isros-engineers-are-from-iits-nits/articleshow/43458127.cms">news report from 2014</a> in which it was stated that 2 percent of ISRO employees were alums of IITs or NITs. This information was received through an RTI application, and hence is largely believed to be true. But is this a good statistics to look at. When we look at ISRO employees, they include helpers, peons, drivers and so on. There will be many technicians, admin staff, security and what not. Even in technical staff, I suspect that there will be many jobs where they would prefer scientists over engineers. I couldn't find any distribution of employees in ISRO, but my gut feeling is that the number of jobs in ISRO where IITians can be reasonably expected to participate may be anywhere from one tenth to one fifth of the total number of jobs. Even if we look at one fifth as the number, it means that 10 percent of engineering jobs are taken by graduates of IITs and NITs. And 10 percent is not bad at all, particularly considering that IITs and NITs have never produced more than 3-4 percent of engineers in India.</p><p>Do IITians avoid government jobs since one often hears of very high salaries (even more than a crore) from MNCs. Far from it. You look at IAS, IPS, IFS, Forest Service, Revenue Service, Customs, and so on, you will find a lot of IITians there. You will also find IITians in all kind of services in Indian Railways, Military Engineering Services, Department of Telecom, DST, Public Works Departments (both at state and central level). You would also find a large number of them in government institutions and universities. So it does not seem like IITians are running away from the government sector. In fact, their contribution to nation building is truly admirable.</p><p>Still, if it seems that given the high profile nature of ISRO, more IITians should have been interested in the organization, there is one issue. A typical IITian prefer an on-campus recruitment or taking an exam which opens up a large number of good options. So the exams that many of them would be interested in include: Civil Services, Indian Engineering Services and now lately, GATE (since many PSUs have started shortlisting candidates based on GATE score). An organization having its own recruitment process which is not centered around on-campus recruitment will not attract IITians (or students from those campuses where there is easy availability of jobs). And there is no need to be judgmental about it. There is nothing wrong for an organization to have its own centralized recruitment process and there is nothing wrong in a student not interested in a process which they perceive as inconvenient. After all ISRO is attracting fabulous talent through its process. So why worry about someone not applying.</p><p>The last question is whether it means that we are over-spending on IITs (and by extension on other top institutions). If a smaller college with limited resources can produce such great scientists then why fund IITs and IISERs to such a large extent. I disagree. While you will find that the best graduates of Tier 2 institutions are equal to the best graduates of top institutions, the average graduate of a top institution is often better prepared academically than an average student of a Tier 2 institution. (Otherwise, the private sector wouldn't differentiate between the two.) The fraction of graduates of IITs and IISERs who are well trained is higher than the fraction of graduates of a Tier 2 institution who are well trained. And hence instead of thinking of IITs as wasteful, we should think of investing much more resources in Tier 2 institutions so that a much greater number of their graduates are in top league.</p><p>In summary, let us enjoy our moment of glory and success, let us feel good about there being talent in every nook and corner and not try to put down the top institutions. Everyone is contributing to the nation building.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-85040675204963360492023-09-04T01:26:00.002+05:302023-09-04T01:26:40.674+05:30Suicides in Kota: Students Need Career Counseling<p>Yet another young life lost. The average is more than one per month. Why is it happening.</p><p>The simple logic is that there are too few seats in our IITs (for engineering), or too few seats in good (read, government) medical colleges. The quality of education in the next level institutions is much worse. Parents have high aspirations. They push their wards to go to a far off place without the family support. They realize that the competition is extremely tough for those few seats. The students are afraid that they aren't going to come up to the expectations of their near and dear ones. Under that stress, sometimes an unfortunate extreme step is taken.</p><p>How do we handle this. Of course, we must provide counseling to these students (I really think all schools should provide counselors in 11th and 12th class at least). But what else.</p><p>In the discussion, it is assumed that the stress is the result of too few seats in IITs and the next level institutions being much worse. While the statement is true, I disagree that this is the reason for the stress. I have myself talked to several coaching guys a few years ago when my son was in 11th class. A lot of students coming to coaching have no hopes of cracking IIT. And the coaching institutions tell them that it is important to do well in JEE Mains since that is a ticket to admissions in next level of institutions, including NITs. And stress happens when they realize that they aren't likely to be in the top 50,000 ranks, thereby even the next level institutions that they were targeting weren't quite within the reach.</p><p>Now, you may argue whether the stress is for being within the top 10,000 or within the top 50,000, it is all the same and the solution will be the same. I think the two situations are very different and therefore the solutions are very different.</p><p>My basic premise is that the quality of education that a top 10,000 person gets is much better than the quality of education that a 20,000 rank student gets. But the gap between the institution that a 20,000 rank student studies in and a 1,00,000 rank student studies in isn't very high.</p><p>If the assumption is that suicides happen because the gap between IITs and the next level is too high, then the solutions proposed would be a major restructuring of the education system. Let us expand IIT education. Let us put in a lot more money in NITs. Let us allow more autonomy to top private institutions and allow them to charge more fees. It could even be to hide the difference between IITs and the next level. Let us not talk about the placements, for example.</p><p>But if we were to believe that the suicides happen when the student feels that they can't even get 1 lakh rank in JEE Mains, then the solution is just career counseling which is doable now and we don't need a major restructuring of the education system. I mean, telling the students about other options that they will have if they were to get 1L rank or worse, which will be only marginally worse than what they could have been admitted at 40-50 thousand rank. This requires changing perceptions while the earlier assumption required changing reality.</p><p>There are so many institutions which provide a good quality education but aren't well known and one is unlikely to believe in their quality just because one person says so. The right thing to do, in my opinion, is that the student after the JEE Mains result is out, should seek information from various sources about the possible colleges to get admission at that level of performance. Go through their websites, get whatever information they think is important, and select 10 colleges. Take the risk and include 2 such colleges about which you are unsure but someone tells you that they are good but unknown. And now visit all these 10 colleges even if they are in 5 different cities. Remember the cost of coaching in Kota would be much more than this visit of 10 campuses and this is the most important decision of your career.</p><p>So, basically, what I am suggesting is that if there is career counseling available to students in coaching (and indeed, in all schools across the country) whereby the student is told of several options at various ranks, <b>told that the gap between the well-known colleges and the next level ones isn't too much,</b> encouraged to do research on colleges and shortlist, and visit to finalize the college, I think we can reduce the stress. We don't have to wait for the country to restructure entire education to save lives.</p><p>At least in Engineering and Computer Science, they can be told of online resources that they can use to get quality education even if they get admitted to lesser known colleges. They can be told of programs such as BSc of IIT Madras which they can do along with their other degrees. Overall, a student with 1-2 lakh JEE Mains rank has many good options in life and career counseling will make a difference to his/her stress levels..<br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-41606366346309344362023-08-14T09:24:00.000+05:302023-08-14T09:24:03.076+05:30Is India a super-competitive place for youth?<p>I recently read somewhere that India is a super-competitive place for youth. Everything is so difficult. There are 2.5 crore babies born in the country in a year. If you want to succeed in any sphere, you need to compete with all these people. JEE is so difficult, NEET is so difficult, and so on. And of course, this leads to stress, anxiety and other mental health issues.</p><p>Is it really true? On the face of it, yes, of course. We have a serious shortage of quality education opportunities. For 2.5 crore babies born, only 2.5 lakh of them will get to really good quality college education like IITs, Ashoka, BITS, NIDs, and so on. To be in the top 1 percent of the population is not easy in such a large group.</p><p>But what if I change my goal to be in the top 2 percent. Is it still difficult?<br></p><p>And the answer is surprisingly in negative. There are enough decent quality institutions in India where getting admission is relatively easy. You have to invest time and effort in finding places which are not so well known, visit them personally and select one of them and take admission. (<a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in">JK Lakshmipat University</a> is one such example.)<br></p><p>After getting admission, make sure that you divide your time between academics and fun judiciously. And you do take your academics seriously. The interesting part of Indian education is that a very large number of students copy assignments and even projects. The universities compete with each other in providing simple question papers with lots of options in exams. The lab exams are a joke and neither students nor faculty take academics seriously. </p><p>Every student entering colleges have been told numerous times that they needed to do hard work only in 11th and 12th class and then the life will be easy. They have done that, and now expect life to be easy which means that they should not have to work hard in college. This attitude and the quality of faculty implies, to take an example from Computer Science education, that 98-99 percent students don't even learn to write good quality 500-lines of code. So, if you want to be in the top 2 percent of the country, the only thing you need to do is to teach yourself quality coding and pass all courses. And this only means that write a few programs yourself over the four years of college. And at least in Computer Science, you can learn all this on your own through online courses even if the faculty in your college is not upto the mark.<br></p><p>Now, if you can be in the top 2 percent of the country (at least at the time of exit from college) by simply doing all the programming yourself (and not copy), would you call this super-competitive education. I won't.</p><p>I think India is the easiest country to build a career. Nowhere else in the world it would take so little to be in the top 2 percent.</p><p> </p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-76938393725443569032023-08-13T21:02:00.001+05:302023-08-13T21:02:14.775+05:30Marketing by Universities: What should parents do?<p>All my life, I have been in institutions where marketing was taboo. I had, of course, seen ads in print, on TV, on hoardings and in magazines, and often wondered the utility of these. Do people really take the most important decision of their career by looking at the ads. And once I joined the private sector myself, I realize that the answer to this question is an unambiguous YES. Even the NAAC accreditation team that visited <a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in">JK Lakshmipat University</a> last year wrote amongst its suggestions that we do greater amount of marketing so that more students are aware of the excellent opportunities that we provide.<br /></p><p>I am told that advertisement revenue from education sector is greater than almost all other sectors in the country. Most private colleges spend more than 10 percent of their revenue on marketing and the total spend is more than a billion USD. That is a lot of money which could have been used to improve the quality of education.</p><p>Marketing is, of course, essential in any business and it is essential that universities reach out to potential students and tell them about its strengths. Only a few top universities can avoid marketing and depend purely on word of mouth. My concern is whether there is too much focus on marketing, too much money being spent on marketing which could have been spent on improving education, and whether the potential students and parents are taking decisions based on what they see in advertisements or do they only shortlist based on marketing and then try to get additional information before taking the final decision.<br /></p><p>Taking decisions based on marketing is ok and perhaps the only way to buy a lot of goods and services. It is alright to buy a TV based on the ad that you saw. The maximum loss is that perhaps another TV would have given you a better value. In that sense, you perhaps took a small loss at the most. Same is true for most things. But education is different. Choosing one program over another, or one university over another, could impact your entire career. Choosing a program at a university only based on the highest package advertised by the university could mean a poor job at the end of your program while in another university, you could have done so much better.</p><p>Also, unlike most goods and services where it is very difficult for a lay person to compare the offerings, in the education field, it is not too difficult to get a sense of quality offered by different universities if you invest your time into it. Not trivial, but not impossible even for a layman. Marketing essentially assumes that all customers have very limited amount of time in which they want to decide and hence if certain messaging can be communicated a few times consistently, the customers will respond to it. And, for most goods and services, as we said above, it is ok. But it is not ok, if the consequences are very serious.</p><p>How many people will buy their homes based on advertisements. I would guess, very few. Advertisements can at best tell them about the potential projects, but they will visit a lot of places, want to see a model apartment, may be visit multiple times with their families and friends, talk to people living there in the neighborhood, and so on. Isn't college education more important than that. College education will determine whether you can buy that property or not in future. So, one needs to spend even more time to decide college education than buying a property.</p><p>I sincerely hope that students and parents will use advertisements only for shortlisting the top few choices (say, 6-8) and then get more information about them and there is no shortcut to actually visiting the university, talking to current students and faculty randomly (not the guys in admissions office), ask a lot of questions, see the facilities. Yes, it can be time consuming and if one is looking for universities outside the home town, there is additional expense of travel, but this is the most important decision of your career, and you should at least do as much due diligence as you would do in buying a property.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-82929513653981406052023-07-29T00:30:00.001+05:302023-07-29T00:30:17.576+05:30How to Pay for Quality Higher Education<p> Higher education is accessible in India. Scratch that. Worthless degrees are quite accessible in India. How do we change that and ensure that quality higher education is accessible to most in India.</p><p>Let us do the numbers. NEP2020 has set a goal of 50% GER in a little over a decade. As of now, the total number of people in India in the age group of 18 to 23 are over 12 crores. 50% GER would mean that there are 6 crore people doing higher education. If we assume that quality education would cost about Rs 5 lakhs per student per year, the total money to be spent is Rs. 30 lakh crores. That is pretty much the entire receipts of the central government in a year, and this is the money needed only for higher education. Clearly, it is not possible to have free high quality university education for all in India. A vast majority of Indian youth is dependent on private sector to get college education and cannot afford this level of costs.</p><p>Note that the current solution to this problem is to provide quality education to a few who can do well in various entrance exams for a few top government institutions and to provide quality education to a few who can afford a few institutions in the private sector. Many of the resourceful people go abroad to get that quality education. Everyone else gets poor quality education. How do we change this.</p><p>We need to work on two sides. One, reduce the cost of providing quality education. And two, do some financial jugglery to match the expenses with the income flows. All universities have an incentive to reduce their costs and become more competitive. So I am not going to talk about that in this blog. Suffice to say, we need to use technology for this - online education, simulators, virtual labs, and so on. But the interesting problem is to enable a student from under-privileged background to get quality education in private sector.</p><p>The tuition and other expenses of the student can be borne through five channels:</p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Government subsidies</li><li>Private philanthropy</li><li>Cross subsidy through resource generation by the university</li><li>Payment through current incomes and savings by the student/family</li><li>Delayed payments (in some sense, like loans) </li></ol><p>Let us discuss how we can innovate in all these five channels to ensure that a much greater number of people in the country have access to quality education. Note that dependence on only one channel may not suffice when the gap between costs and income is very large.</p><p>The first issue is how government subsidies can reduce the burden on students. As we have said in the beginning, our current public finances do not allow every student to be financed for quality education. But it is certainly possible to expand the current support. As of now, government provides scholarships to students from under-privileged backgrounds (even if they study in private institutions), and also some scholarships for board toppers, etc. It is definitely possible to expand this to more students. May be government can provide graded support like top 5% in all boards get a scholarship of Rs 2 lakh per annum, next 5% getting Rs. 1.5 lakh per annum, and so on. There can be other models. If you need additional help, the government can have schemes like the graduates will have to work for the government for X number of years after graduation, or will have to serve in rural or less popular geographies, and so on. Support from government will reduce dependence on other channels of funding, particularly payment through savings/incomes and payment through loans.</p><p>The second channel of support is private philanthropy. A large number of US universities have huge endowments that goes into billions of dollars with Harvard at the top with 50 billion USD of endowment. Princeton gets 55% of its alumni donating regularly. We need to create a similar culture of giving gifts to educational institutions in India. Government can help in this. The tax incentive needs to be rationalized. Currently, donations to IITs and other central government institutions get 100% tax exemption, but donations to universities like <a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in">JKLU</a> only get 50% tax exemption. This discrepancy should go and all educational institutions should get 100% tax exemption. In US, it is very common for industry to match individual donations. This needs to be encouraged in India too. Companies should be able to match donations by their employees through their CSR kitty (perhaps even otherwise). The process to support education through CSR funds should be smooth. At JKLU, we get a majority of our funding from such donations (and not tuition money), and hence able to keep our fees reasonable, but we are a rarity. Most universities manage their budget only through tuition income.</p><p>The third channel of resource generation by the university is an interesting one. The most common thing is research funding by the government (and sometimes by industry too). In India, the overhead on research project is so little that every research project is a loss to the university. Of course, it is much better to do research through government support than to use tuition income in research. But the government really needs to increase the overhead very substantially. This will encourage all universities to do better research and if not cross subsidize tuition, at least not use tuition money for research. The other common revenue stream is continuing education programs. Unfortunately, till now, only management schools have been able to generate substantive revenues through this route and that too only a few privileged ones. But I think if universities really focus on this, they can get a decent revenue stream through this route. Other revenue streams institutions have tried include setting up research parks, having commercial establishments on campus, generating and leveraging IPRs, etc. But frankly, this channel hasn't really helped reduce tuition burden in any substantive way in most institutions. Of course, all universities have a bit of cross subsidy through the system of scholarships. But scholarships are meant for a variety of reasons like academic performance, performance in sports and so on, and therefore, means-based scholarships can cover only a small number of students.<br /></p><p>The fourth channel is of payment through savings and current incomes in the family. In this channel, the innovation that can be done is to provide well paying campus jobs to students, particularly in the vacation period, but even part-time during the semesters. For example, at JKLU, we provide some campus jobs at a rate of Rs. 200 per hour only to financially needy students. The government can introduce small savings scheme which are meant to be encashed only at the time of college education and are attractive in terms of rate of interest and income tax applicability.</p><p>There is another way to self-finance education which somehow is not taken positively in India. What is the need to do a 4-year program in four years. It would be of immense educational value to the student if s/he takes a semester off, works in industry and returns to the university. This would provide a deep insight on what is the need of the industry, what does the student likes and dislikes, and on return to the university, can take electives accordingly. This system is of value to everyone, but for someone with poor financial status, this can earn moneys to sustain education and have less dependence on other channels like loans.<br /></p><p>The fifth channel of delayed payment is what most people talk about to enable quality education to financially weak families. And the most common instrument for this is a loan. But there are other possibilities as well that we will talk about a little later in this article. The system of education loans has serious limitations.</p><p>The first limitation of an education loan is that of a guarantee or a collateral. Students from under-privileged backgrounds aren't able to provide either a collateral or a guarantor. And hence banks are often reluctant to offer loans to those who need them the most. Government has mandated that upto a certain amount, the education loans need not have any collateral or guarantee. But in the absence of these, getting repayments from even well-to-do become an issue sometimes.<br /></p><p>The second limitation is that students who do not get a good enough job struggle to repay the loan and that stress keeps on growing. In fact, in some cases, the graduating students feel compelled to take up jobs that they won't like only because they are paying better. If a student wants to work in social sector (NGO) or if someone wants to go for higher studies, the loan repayment becomes a bigger challenge.</p><p>A related problem to repayment is the concept of EMI - the Equated Monthly Installments. Payments in terms of EMI makes no sense for a recent graduate and that too in a medium or high interest economy. A recent graduate typically starts with a low salary and after a couple of years of experience starts climbing the corporate ladder with higher pay. In the initial part of the career, the EMI is extremely difficult to pay and defaults happen, while it would be much easier to pay the same amount when the pay has doubled. The EMI concept requires the borrower to pay the entire monthly interest and some part of the principle. On the other hand, if we allow the borrower to pay only the real interest (interest rate minus inflation), then the loan amount is essentially remaining the same for the first few years while the capacity to pay is improving and hence the person will be able to pay it much more easily.</p><p>If I have a loan of Rs. 10 lakhs when my income is Rs 5 lakhs, the lenders have a certain risk. Assuming that the inflation is 5%, the rate of interest is 11%, and my income increases by 10% in a year. If I pay 6% (or Rs. 60,000 in the year), I have a loan of Rs. 10.5 lakhs next year while my income is Rs. 5.5 lakhs, the lender's risk has actually come down as my capacity to pay even the increased amount has improved. So we need to have an Increasing Monthly Installments or IMI instead of EMI.<br /></p><p>In terms of collateral, one possibility is to use the degree certificate as collateral. For this to happen, there will have to be a tripartite agreement between the student, university and the lender. The university will not provide the degree certificate to the student till the loan is paid off. Yes, any time, the student takes up a job, the new employer can directly ask the university to verify the degree status. In fact, if we can make it a legal requirement for all large employers to seek either a copy of the degree or a copy of the loan agreement, and if there is a loan agreement, the employer agrees to deduct an agreed upon amount and pay it to the bank, this will further reduce the risk of default.</p><p>There are other possibilities that various fintech startups can explore. For example, it is not necessary that the loan is to be sanctioned at the time of admission only. A nimble player can have an agreement with a university that the university will share all data (anonymized for privacy reasons) of placement in an honest fashion (which many universities will refuse, but universities like JKLU would love it, and I am sure others will fall in line when their students are disadvantaged in the loan market). The university will also share the current transcript and any other relevant details of the loan applicant. Let us assume that this loan application is being made after the first year of college. Now, the lender can make a much better guess about the potential earning of this student after graduation and hence can sanction loan based on potential.</p><p>In fact, universities can help further by delaying the payment of first year tuition. One can seek tuition later in the program, say after the first year. Now, the student can be evaluated by the potential lender, an amount can be sanctioned based on that potential and the university can be paid first year fee and the future fees at that time. It is already happening for very short term courses like six months courses. The provider provides education without asking for upfront payment. At the end of the course, if the student gets a job, there will be lenders who can sanction loan which is paid to the education provider. (Check: <a href="https://www.masaischool.com/">Masai School</a>.)<br /></p><p>We mentioned earlier that there are possibilities of delayed payments other than loans. One of the prominent ones emerging in the world is an income sharing agreement or ISA. Under an ISA, the student agrees to pay a certain fraction of his/her income to the lender after the graduation. The agreement would typically mention a minimum income level below which no payment will be made. It will also mention the period for which this agreement is valid. And in case the student gets a very high salary, the agreement would typically state the maximum amount of money that the student will have to pay. So different people will pay different amounts depending on their incomes but noone will pay an inordinately large amount. Of course, the details will depend on what the two parties agree with and what the law permits in that jurisdiction.</p><p>Many people (and governments) are uncomfortable with ISAs because it seems unfair that different people are paying different amounts and that the person with the best jobs are effectively paying a very high rate of interest. It is possible that if someone does not understand the implications of the agreement or was forced by his/her circumstances to sign such an agreement, s/he will end up paying a very large sum in case of an excellent job. But if there can be legal safeguards to avoid exploitation such as model ISAs, this is an interesting model of financing higher education.</p><p>Yet another way of delayed payment is through differential taxes. This is like an ISA between a student and the government. The government can say that everyone seeking substantial government subsidy (like studying in a university well funded by the government) will pay, say, 2% extra income tax for a pre-defined period of time. Again, this would mean that if the income of the person is below the taxable limit then the person does not pay this extra amount also.</p><p>So the take away is that there are a large number of models for financing higher education. A poor country like India should not think of a single model like loan. A combination of several models is what is most likely going to work for us.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-40789630879174796112023-07-19T10:54:00.006+05:302023-07-19T11:00:34.013+05:30Faculty Selections: Preference for PhDs from top institutions?<p> Recently, Prof. V Ramgopal Rao, Vice Chancellor of BITS Pilani, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7086687364915372032/">commented on LinkedIn</a> about the practice of giving higher weight to PhDs from certain institutions in shortlisting criteria. In the specific example, the institution has given 25 marks to PhDs from IITs and top 500 ranked universities in the world, 20 marks to NIT PhDs, 15 to CFTI PhDs, 10 to state government institutions and 5 to others.</p><p>While his specific comment was use of source of funding to judge the quality of PhDs, the larger question is whether any criteria that gives preference to the students from certain set of institutions is a good criteria.</p><p>Let me admit that the specific criteria was very poorly designed even if such a criteria is needed. For example, a PhD from a university which is ranked in 501-1000 in the world will be considered amongst the worst category in this list. But assuming that someone can do a better categorization of universities, would it then make sense. Almost everyone who commented on Prof. Rao's post (barring a few exceptions) seem to agree that it wouldn't make sense even then.</p><p>One of the rare <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7086809377122189312/">rebuttals</a> had this to say:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><i>"<span class="break-words"><span><span dir="ltr">Prof. V Ramgopal Rao It's seemingly easy
to successfully play to the gallery. I will be happy to see at least one
"excellent faculty candidate from a non-descript institution" at BITS. <br /><br />As
a matter of unwritten rule, top pedigree, foreign post doc and at least
one Q1 paper always mattered in IIT faculty candidate shortlisting
process. On the other hand, barring a few, almost all NITs till recently
nurtured Godfather's candidates or a deep regional bias in the faculty
recruitment process. Course correction has just started with the
plethora of applications as IITS are churning out Ph.Ds in hundreds of
not in thousands and some directors are determined to shed nepotism,
parochialism and regional culture. <br /><br />This is precisely because if
you don't disregard the non-descript institutions, you run into
thousands of applications in search of fire in their belly at the cost
of tilting the faculty quality balance in your own institution. Truth is
better told louder (by e.g NIT Hamirpur) than practised in silence by
all directors of prestigious institutions.Does maintaining public
transparency amount to trivialising the recruitment process ?"</span></span></span></i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="break-words"><span><span dir="ltr"></span></span></span></i>Interesting debate, and it made me think. Of course, almost everyone use pedigree as a signal. In fact, a lot of people have argued that the value of the university is more in signaling than anything else, and if somehow we are able to evaluate a large number of people quickly, the top universities of the world will face tremendous challenges in attracting good students. After all, the next best institutions aren't that bad but cheaper, easier to get in and all that. (And it is happening slowly with AI evaluating millions of CVs on a portal - which, by the way, has its own problems, but that is for another time.)<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">But I still disagree with the specific rebuttal. It almost gets personal. I think there is a difference between factoring in pedigree as one of the many indicators of quality informally, and formally saying that we have a strong preference for pedigree and it will impact shortlisting. For example, at <a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in">JK Lakshmipat University (JKLU)</a>, we always say in our faculty ads for engineering faculty, "Preference for IIT PhDs." To me, that line is a signal to potential job seekers that my quality requirement is at least an average PhD from an average IIT. If you think that you are equal to that, please do apply. (And in the last two years as VC of JKLU, we have made several offers of faculty positions to non-IIT PhDs, though the majority offers are to IIT PhDs.) There is no doubt in my mind that the best PhDs from NITs are better than worst PhDs from IITs, and hence a blanket ban or reducing the order in the shortlist without checking any other parameter of the quality is problematic.</p><p style="text-align: left;">But the rebuttal raises an important question. What is to be done if there are a large number of applications. And this is where, Prof. Rao is silent. Indeed, I feel frustrated in reading a lot of posts from Prof. Rao because he will raise questions but either no answers or the answer is a single word, "leadership." He does not explain what leadership should do. Raising questions is a good service to the nation, but I think someone with his pedigree should also analyse the situation in greater detail and suggest solutions.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The way I look at the issue is this. What is the problem being solved through this mechanism by the specific institution. The problem today is that the government in 6th pay commission and later in 7th pay commission raised the faculty salaries tremendously. This did lead to improvements in faculty selections in some government institutions (though poorly funded government institutions stopped hiring regular faculty and started getting dependent on ad hoc faculty). But these salaries are beyond the capacity of an average Indian student to pay for. Therefore, the private institutions salaries are much less (in most cases the fees is capped so even if the private institutions were to try increasing the salary, they can't). Now, the private sector employs 80% of the faculty. So whenever a government institution like an NIT advertises a job, a very large number of applications pour in since the salaries and perks are so good and along with that they are funded well for research (again, something that private institutions are unable to do) and there is stability in job. What should be the process to deal with such a deluge of applications and select the best faculty.</p><p style="text-align: left;">There are two processes really. One process is to do the shortlisting, and the other process is to do the selection. Now, if there is a deluge of applications and it is understood that faculty is the most important resource for an educational institution, the first thing that should happen is that the institution should be willing to have a larger number getting shortlisted and spend time and resources to deeply consider that large number of shortlisted candidates. If an NIT is using a shortlisting criteria to decide interaction with only 5 individuals for a post, they are not serving themselves well nor are they being fair to the applicants.</p><p style="text-align: left;">On the other hand, shortlisting a large number of candidates will also not lead to good selections. If we shortlist 50 candidates for a post and interact with each of them for 10 minutes each, that selection will eventually lead to some bean counter counting the number of papers and other parameters.</p><p style="text-align: left;">To criticize shortlisting is to miss the point that a large shortlist will compromise the selection process badly and while it may seem "fair," it actually will be much worse. For example, if research output is one of the most important criteria then I can either shortlist 20 candidates based on number of papers, citations, ranking of those journals/conferences and so on, and then read a few papers, get a few experts to comment on them, get these 20 to give research seminars and interact with them, and all that. Alternatively, I can shortlist 50 candidates, and then I don't have time to do any of the above. I interact for 10 minutes each and I have no option but to only decide selection based on the CV. Taking a call based on this 10 minute interaction will usually not result in good selection.</p><p style="text-align: left;">So shortlisting is important and it is important to shortlist a reasonable number - not too small and not too large a group. (I am using 20 as just an indicative number, it is not a magic number.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">Now, ideally, the shortlisting too can be subjective like selection often is. But there is a crucial difference between the two processes when you have such a deluge of applications. As an NIT, you can request an external expert to come for 2 days and interact with 20 candidates over 2 days (and even more, if needed). It will be very difficult for an NIT to seek help from an external expert in reading 100s of CVs and then record their comments on each of them and then help in shortlisting. Remember, you need multiple experts who should have a deep insight into their area and have some understanding of the discipline at large so that they can work with other experts to compare candidates across sub-disciplines. Frankly, not a very practical approach. And hence it becomes necessary for them to use numbers as a proxy to quality.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Also remember that regulators like UGC and the politicians have been strongly encouraging objective criteria. UGC has been sharing a methodology to give marks for every SCI paper, or every FDP, or every year of experience and so on. So you have a large number of applications, you don't have strong internal resources for evaluating them, and you have the government telling you that you must use objective criteria. What are your options now?</p><p style="text-align: left;">So the only thing you can do is to choose those numbers carefully. Anything that you will choose will be criticized. This is because your choice of parameters can only be dictated by statistics (or perception of it) and individuals cannot be evaluated based on statistics. For example, statistically, an average PhD from an IIT could be in some sense better than an average PhD from an NIT, and hence we may be tempted to assign higher marks for an IIT PhD over an NIT PhD, but we all know that the best PhDs of NITs are certainly better than worst PhDs of IITs (they could even be similar to the best PhDs of IITs). Similarly, someone with 10 SCI papers is likely to be a better researcher than someone with 5 SCI papers, but there are far too many exceptions to this.</p><p style="text-align: left;">So any objective criteria will lead to missing out of talent. But remember not doing shortlist or doing a very liberal shortlisting will compromise your selection process to the extent that you will miss out on talent there. So the question to me is the following:</p><p style="text-align: left;">Assigning 5 extra marks to an IIT PhD compared with an NIT PhD will lead to some talent missed. At the same time, assigning 1 mark for each SCI paper will lead to some talent being missed. The solution is to have subjective evaluation but I do not have the capacity. What should I do. And frankly, there is no easy answer. Whenever anyone has asked me for an answer in the past (when I was not VC), my solution has been that I can personally help you with the subjective process in Computer Science if you do not have the capacity to do it on your own. If enough faculty members of top institutions are willing to help the next tier institutions, this comparison of two bad policies will not be needed. That is when the leadership of NITs will come into play because they will have to defend the subjectivity. A large number of applicants will point out that their number of SCI papers was larger than those shortlisted. They will put in RTI queries, they will go to court, the government will ask questions, and the leadership will have to stay firm. But if the leadership knows that they don't have the capacity and it is not easy to get several experts in each area to do this semester after semester, I wouldn't blame them for using objective criteria.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Of course, one still has to see what objective criteria is likely to retain most of the talent in the shortlisted pool. Ideally, one should decide the shortlisting criteria after one has seen the applications. I would like to do the experiment of tweaking the criteria and seeing that with each tweak, what applications get missed out and what comes in and then study those applications to see what works better for the institute. This is where I would blame the leadership. Most institutional leaders would love to announce the shortlisting criteria upfront and keep it same for all disciplines which is frankly, stupid. It is because in financial matters, tenders, it is assumed that if you do not reveal the criteria upfront, you will manipulate it later to benefit someone and CAG/CVC have taken exception to this. Yes, the same thing can happen in faculty selection also, but a leader should be confident that s/he will not let it happen in the final selection where external experts will play an important role.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Finally, should we have 5 extra marks for IIT PhDs over NIT PhDs. I don't think the answer is as straightforward as Prof. Rao makes it out to be. It is very nuanced as I have explained above. I wouldn't want to do it myself, but would I criticize others who do it, may be not.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-63956270946283464542023-06-28T12:25:00.004+05:302023-06-28T12:45:51.478+05:30JOSSA Counseling: Confusion in ordering choices<p> I am no longer a Professor at IIT Kanpur and I have not posted any new blog on JEE counseling for many years now. But still, I keep getting emails, phone calls and even personal visits to seek clarity on ordering choices. It is indeed a very stressful period for students and parents.</p><p>What amazes me every year is the lack of application of common sense from people who are the "best" students of the country. When someone asks me whether they should prefer choice 'A' or choice 'B', my first question is what is the source of confusion. In my thinking, the source could be that they don't have enough information about the two choices and they are seeking information from me, or they are unable to interpret that information into positives and negatives for the two choices and they are seeking my help in doing that, or they are unable to evaluate those positives and negatives in the context of this particular student and they are asking me how to do that.</p><p>Often, it is none of these. The source of confusion is this. Last year data shows that many students preferred 'A' while many others preferred 'B'. So I don't know which herd to follow. Between choices where the closing ranks last year were widely separated, there is no confusion at all. I know what the herd decided, and I believe in the wisdom of the masses. But if the masses were not sure, how can I be sure.</p><p>My response is that if there are two programs such that 50% students preferred one and the other 50% preferred the other, and if you believe in the wisdom of the herd, then you should perhaps decide on the basis of convenience (geography, for example), or on the basis of a toss of a coin. And people take offense, because even though just admitted that most of their choices were based on last year's closing ranks, they still want to portray that they are evaluating choices on some merit criteria that they can't explain.<br /></p><p>Having done this for almost 30 years, my take is that the stress happens when there is a conflict between the thought that the decision should be based on merit of each program (whatever that means) and the thought that doing it on the basis of wisdom of the herd will give them maximum brownie points in the community. (You choose Civil over CS, and you will have to face a barrage of criticism from all near and dear ones.)</p><p>If you were to consider the choices logically, it is actually not a very big problem. Just yesterday, a student asked me for advice between 5-year BTech-MTech dual degree in CSE at IIT-KGP versus a 4-year BTech (CSE) from IIT Roorkee. In this particular case, the student was very logical, and I wrote to him a 2-line email, and he understood and came back with the right way of choosing. But I was thinking of hundreds of discussion on similar lines and I thought I will illustrate how I have dealt with this particular choice issue in the past.</p><p>I will first ask: What would have been your choice between 4-year BTech (CSE) at KGP and the same program at Roorkee. The answer is always, KGP.</p><p>I will ask why KGP. And there are some mumblings. Obviously, the student hasn't thought through and it is purely wisdom of the herd. But the claim will be that we have heard better this or better that at KGP. <br /></p><p>Me: Now, KGP is putting a condition on you. They are saying that you will have to spend an extra year. But in this extra year, we will not charge you any tuition, and we will give you enough scholarship to take care of all your costs. So you won't be dependent on your parents. And to top it, we will throw in an extra KGP degree at the end of the year. Isn't all adding value to the 4-year program. If you would have preferred the 4-year program and the 5-year program is better than the 4-year program, then shouldn't you prefer the 5-year program.</p><p>The student is confused and has no reply. I would then suggest to think of what could make the 5-year program less attractive than the 4-year program (and some of that is in my old blogs). The student remains confused but with some prodding, is able to point out that you lose one year's income in a 5-year program.</p><p>I will then say how strongly you would prefer the 4-year program at KGP over 4-year program over Roorkee. If that preference is very strong, and you really believe that this will help your career in a significant way then wouldn't you recoup the one year loss of income during the 50-year long career you are expected to have. Would you not believe that the "better" education would result in even 1-2% higher income or higher happiness per year. So if the preference of KGP was strong then at least to the extent of this logic, one should accept the 5-year program. If the preference of KGP was mild, then perhaps 4-year at Roorkee is OK. Note that if earning as soon as possible was a necessity (when the student is from a very poor background and need to start supporting family at the earliest), the student would not be having this discussion. They will choose the 4-year program only.<br /></p><p>Why is 4-year at Roorkee OK in case of mild preference for KGP. Well, because, I am not a big fan of asking a 12th class student to commit to doing a thesis 4 years from now. That is a personal preference.</p><p>So once you have noted down pluses and minuses of the two choices, it will boil down to whether you believe that the so-called advantage that you perceive of studying in KGP is so much that it compensates for the so-called disadvantage of an extra year. May be you will start believing that there is no disadvantage of an extra year. And once you have noted down these things, the choice becomes easy. And one is confident about making those choices and not be stressed about this process.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-39507242760836686432022-11-14T00:47:00.001+05:302022-11-14T22:56:18.641+05:30Importance of Placement Data in Choosing College<p>Placement is one thing that I have written a lot about over the last 10-15 years. Most of the time, I have pointed out that it is impossible to get trustworthy information about placement from universities and hence this should not be a criteria for selection of college.</p><p>Why parents love to hear about placement. Two things. One, it is seen as a proxy for quality of education. Two, every parent assume that their ward will get the highest package when s/he comes to final year.</p><p>First, the proxy for quality thing. Everyone would agree that they want high quality of education (in whichever way they define quality - whether narrow or broad, for example). The problem is that they don't know how to evaluate faculty quality, the quality of curriculum, the importance of flexibility and so on. But everyone understands money, and hence higher the money, the better must have been the quality of the institute.</p><p>Let us compare two colleges. In both colleges, there are 100 students, same discipline, etc. In one college, everyone gets a job of Rs. 6 lakhs, while in the other college, two students get a package of Rs. 1 crore each, and the other 98 students get a job of Rs. 4.5 lakhs each. Which one is more likely to provide a higher quality of education. Notice that the first college has a median and average of Rs. 6 lakhs. The second college has a median of Rs. 4.5 lakhs and an average of 6.41 lakhs. If you consider the highest or the average, the second college has better numbers, but one should think if they just got lucky with those two students. If the quality of education was really good, shouldn't they have a greater number of students with higher packages.</p><p>In my opinion, if you want to consider placement as a proxy for quality, you should look at the median package. And, of course, that is difficult to get. Most colleges do not reveal that since average is almost always higher than median in placement data. Most colleges may not even understand what is median and may tell you average when you ask for median. But if it is possible to get median, take that as a more valuable information than any other placement stats.<br /></p><p>The second thing was about the assumption that every parent has that their ward will get the highest package. Can we really say that if you work very hard for four years, you will get the highest package. One can easily say that students working hard to acquire knowledge and skills in the college will get a good job. But getting the highest job requires a bit of luck during the interview process and it also depends on what knowledge/skills are in the highest demand that year, which you may not be able to predict when you were in first or second year. And in any case, if you really care for money, you should care for money that you will earn in your career and not just the money you will earn in the first month.</p><p>The last point about placement is that the correct data is not easily available and what is interesting is that often even the students who have gone through this exercise do not have any clue about the data of their batch. I have many stories about colleges perceived among the best but have poor placements (I happened to have seen data), but if you ask anyone on the campus - student or faculty - they have the perception that their placements are great. Now, if the students who are going through the placements do not know about their own batch, how can you hope to get realistic data from anywhere. This perception of good placement happens because in a typical college, students who get good jobs host a dinner or a treat for their batchmates and hence everyone knows about them, and those who get poor jobs don't talk about it as much. So if we keep hearing good stories, we will assume that everyone is getting those good jobs.</p><p>If you have junk data and you take decisions based on this junk data, you are playing into a model which is based on Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO).</p><p>A very large number of engineering colleges today are dependent upon software services industry (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL and so on) for placing their students, and most of these companies pay a salary of around Rs. 3.5 lakhs, and hence a large number of colleges (including some of the very reputed ones) have a median job offer of Rs. 3.5 lakhs. Of course, they will always talk about the average which could be substantially higher. But remember, median is the closest proxy to quality.</p><p>At JKLU, the B.Tech. batch that graduated in 2022 had a median of Rs. 7.0 lakhs (double of a typical engineering college), and the initial indication about the 2023 graduating batch is that their median will also be Rs. 7.0 lakhs despite economy not doing too well, and many companies not recruiting or even letting employees go. (But still, I advise people to consider JKLU as their higher education destination only if they are convinced of the quality of its faculty, flexibility in curriculum, ability to spend a semester in an IIT or IIIT, and many other such things, and not focus on placements.)<br /></p><p>Parents will now ask how they should decide for their wards, if they can't ask or depend on placement data. They don't feel comfortable taking a call based on other parameters like faculty, curriculum, pedagogy, etc. And my advice for the last couple of decades has been to visit the potential colleges. This is one of the most important career decision. They must invest some time and effort in understanding their options and no better way to do that than to visit the campuses that you are considering. If you talk to random students and faculty on the campus (and not just the admissions office folks), you will get a good insight into the college and that would help you decide.</p><p> </p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-5912868657312236882022-11-13T02:13:00.002+05:302022-11-13T13:27:00.767+05:30What does Industry Readiness Mean for a College Student?<p>Educational institutions are not what they used to be. They no longer produce graduates that are "industry ready." This is something all of us in academia have heard often. But what is meant by "industry readiness?"</p><p>We are often told that we must update our curriculum regularly, to include technologies that the industry is currently working on. Since our faculty may not be able to update themselves so quickly, we should invite working professionals in our classrooms. Students should be encouraged to work on "live projects" (whatever that means). All this is supposed to ensure that the graduate when joins some company would hit the ground running. Currently, there is a lot of cost that companies incur on training and if that cost can be saved, our industry would be able to compete better in the global market.<br /></p><p>But I still don't understand what will make students "industry ready."</p><p>In various industry forums, I ask a simple question. Will top 50 companies who generally hire graduates of the same discipline (say, Computer Science or Information Technology) come together and tell academia what programming language they want the graduates to know, and promise that 4 years later when these students graduate knowing that programming language, they will recruit them and assign them projects where they are required to work on programs in that particular language. (And programming language is just the most basic skill. We can ask the question about other knowledge elements and skills.)</p><p>I don't think any company can promise today that four years from now they will need only these technologies and not others. In such a situation, does it make sense to chase the dream of graduate being ready to contribute to a project on the day of joining. <br /></p><p>When I pose such questions, some experienced industry veterans would point out that the industry readiness is not about removing the training requirement completely, but is about reducing the training requirement substantially. Can the graduate learn on the job, picking up a new skill or a new technology in a couple of weeks. Industry readiness, as per these experts is about having the skills to learn oneself.</p><p>This revised definition makes sense to me. And thankfully, it is possible to train students to be industry ready as per this definition. But, the folks visiting colleges for campus placements and those who attend these industry-academia workshops don't seem to be articulating this definition and therefore, there is utter confusion in academia.</p><p>The usual reply to this is that we ask for the graduate to be ready on day 1 in the hope that academia would provide graduates who are ready within a month of joining. So the day 1 thing is a negotiating position and they are willing to settle for day 31.</p><p>And herein lies the problem of lack of understanding of academia by industry. If an academic institution has to make its graduate ready for day 1, the curriculum and pedagogy will be very different than if the academic institution has to make its graduate ready for quick learning. So it is not a matter of negotiation since the two situations are very far apart. To make a student ready for day 1, an academic institution will have to select a few roles that it wants to prepare students for and have a curriculum that includes all technologies and skills needed for that role. But to make students ready for quick learning, an academic institution will have to have a deeper focus on basics, they will have to ensure that the student can apply knowledge from multiple courses (so do large projects), that the student can learn somethings on its own (through online or whatever) and after this, one can be reasonably sure that the student is ready for self-learning and will pick up any new knowledge/skills in 30 days.</p><p>So day 1 readiness means a narrower focus of education which is not good for either industry or for the career of the student. If industry really needs people who can learn things quickly, why not articulate that need clearly.</p><p>I am seeing some changes in industry already. For the last few years, it has become common for the job interviewers to ask what have students learn outside the curriculum. This is to see whether students have tried to do self-learning which is an indication of whether they will be able to pick up new knowledge/skills quickly.</p><p>If a company really wants the academic institution to prepare their graduates with specific skills and knowledge, they should recruit students very early on (say after 2 years or even earlier), start paying that student a salary (treat them as employees), ask them to take specific electives, do projects and internships as desired by the employer (since the student is now an employee), even ask them to take a semester off from academics and work and then come back and complete the degree, and if some student is willing to sign up for it, that would be fine. But demanding that all academic institutions teach a specific technology to all its students is not in the long term interest of students or even industry.<br /></p><p>Of course, all this discussion is only about 20 percent of academic institutions. Eighty percent of academic institutions would not be able to prepare its graduates for day 1 or day 31 or day 101 irrespective of what definition of industry readiness is used.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-6303069743208671792022-09-21T11:00:00.001+05:302022-09-21T11:00:06.997+05:30How to Choose an Engineering College (2022)<p>This is an updated blog article on engineering admissions to colleges other than the top few like IITs. I wrote <a href="https://dsanghi.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-to-chose-engineering-college.html" target="_blank">one with exactly the same title</a> in 2015 and another one in 2009. This one has a large overlap with the article I wrote in 2015. After all what parameters indicate a college to be providing quality education hasn't changed all these years. But my learning and experience in the last one decade, particularly working with IIIT Delhi, PEC Chandigarh and now at <a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in" target="_blank">JKLU Jaipur</a> has given me insights into what are the typical questions students and parents have at the time of admission.<br /> <br />
The reason I wrote this in 2009 and again in 2015 is rather simple. I
get lots of emails on my views on different engineering colleges, and
request to compare this with that. I am not in the habit of comparing
things based on what I have read on social media or what I have heard in
the corridors. And hence in most cases, I have to decline any comments.
And I thought instead of just saying that I have no opinion, I could
give them an algorithm to make some progress in coming to a decision.
And hence this article.<br />
<br />
First of all, which is a good college. Yes, I know. The highest package.
Sorry, I disagree.<br />
<br />
Let me suggest an alternative. It prepares you to achieve your goals.
And, of course, your goal could be to be rich. But you don't become rich
by having large paycheck in the first month. You become rich by having a
long paying career. The first job is no guarantee of a successful
career. And placement statistics anyway are most unreliable. So may be
you should be looking at how alumni are doing 5-10 year hence rather
than how final year students are doing. But then that statistics is even
harder to get. (But don't worry, I will talk about how placement statistics can give you limited insights regarding quality little later in the article.)<br />
<br />
So let us look at factors that are most likely going to lead to a successful career. These factors are:<br />
</p><ul><li>Your passion and interest in the
area you are working in </li><li>Your preparedness as far as knowledge and skills are concerned (this is why the quality of
education is so important)</li><li>Your ability to keep learning lifelong
as most things a college will teach you will be outdated over the next 5-10-20 years and your career is 50 years (this is why good faculty is absolutely important - to
not just teach you some technical stuff, but mentor you to learn how
to learn yourself)</li><li>Your soft skills, attitude, ethics, etc. (this is best learnt at
school, but a good college would improve upon this, particularly a
residential campus where you learn many things from hostel activities) </li><li>Your network of friends (this is where a good college which attracts more good students will help), and</li><li>A huge amount of luck.</li></ul>
This article is not about choosing a branch, though I would like to add
that if you do not have a particular interest in a discipline (and most
12th class students don't - it is ok), then prefer a good college over a
popular discipline.<br />
<br />
And this article is not about luck. I can just wish you all a huge amount of luck.<br />
<br />
So let us focus on the other factors.<br />
<br />
The most important factor is the <b>quality of faculty</b>. It not only
helps you in learning how to learn lifelong, but also ensures that you
pick up adequate knowledge and skills from the program. How do we know
which college has a better faculty than the other.<b> </b>Well, visit their website, and look for
the following information:
<br />
<ul><li> Number of full-time faculty members. Please make sure that
you read the details, and find out who is a full-time faculty
member, and who is a part-time or adjunct faculty member.
Try to see the full time equivalent (FTE) like two part-time faculty teaching one course in every semester together will be one FTE. Also check the number of students. The important parameter is <b>faculty to student ratio</b>.
</li><li> Their qualifications. How many are PhDs.</li><li>Where did the faculty members study. If they did one of their degrees from IITs/BITS and other fine institutions in India or abroad, they are more likely to have achieved academic excellence early in their lives, and at the very least, they have been exposed to quality systems and education and they will more likely pass on that quality experience to their students.<br /></li><li> If a significant portion of faculty received their
highest degree (whether PhD, MTech, or BTech) from
the same college, then that should raise some alarms.
On the other hand, faculty members having a lower
degree from the same college but a higher degree from a different institution, implies that they value
the place enough that they returned back to the same
place after getting a higher degree from elsewhere.
</li><li> If the highest qualification for any faculty member
is BTech or MCA, then be alarmed. Top places will only
higher PhDs. Good places may have some MTechs. But if
colleges are hiring BTechs and MCAs for teaching courses,
it means that they are not able to attract enough
good faculty, and that should be a cause for concern.
</li><li> What are faculty doing. Are they teaching three courses
a semester or two. Are they doing at least some bit of
research publications.</li></ul><p>
Of course, people will argue how important it is to be a PhD to be a
good teacher. And I have no doubt that there are some excellent teachers
who are not PhDs, and there are some lousy teachers who are PhDs.
However, there is no doubt that places which have a lot of non-PhD
teachers have them because they failed to attract PhD faculty, not
because they just hired great teachers, and it so happened that many of
them were MTechs. And if you look at the background of those MTechs, it
is quite unlikely that you will find many of those MTechs from IITs,
IISc, and other top institutions. And, in general, PhD from a good
university would have a higher chance of being a good teacher than an
MTech from a tier two college.<br />
<br />
Another factor that gives an indication of the quality of faculty is the <b>research output</b>
of the institution. I believe that there are good researchers who are
not good teachers, and similarly, there are good teachers who are not
good researcher. However, in general, faculty members who are actively
pursuing some research interests would be current on the subject and
would have a deeper understanding of the topics. But more importantly,
research flourishes when
there is an institutional support for it. If faculty
members are doing research, then it shows that the college
management is serious about the quality of education.
Research can be measured by the following parameters. </p><p>The problem in checking research output is that it is very difficult for a layman to even get an idea. It is very difficult to know which journals and conferences are good and which are paid ones. In any case, most of the Tier 3 and Tier 2 institutions aren't doing great on this parameter. But if you have a friend in academia, a faculty member, they may be able to advise you on this parameter.<br /></p><p></p><p>Now, let us look at the second factor for a successful career. That is,
level of preparedness or the knowledge and skills learned. This will,
of course, depend on quality of faculty, which we have already
discussed. But it requires a couple of other parameters as well. Most
important of them is the <b>curriculum</b>. Some of the things to look for in the curriculum are:
<br />
</p><ul><li> How many courses do they teach. Unlike the conventional
wisdom in India, I believe that the college that teaches you
less is a better college. It means that they do less spoon
feeding, and give you more space to grow and learn. There are surely
exceptions to this general
trend, but by and large colleges will try to teach you more,
if they know that they are doing a poor job of teaching,
and hope that if they try teaching you lots, then perhaps
in some courses they will be able to teach you something.A good college
may have 40-45 courses in the curriculum, while a poor quality college
may have more than 50 courses.</li><li> How many electives are there in the curriculum, giving
flexibility to the students to learn what they are interested
in. Many colleges may have slots for electives, but they
treat that slot as their choice to offer a course. So they
won't offer three courses, and ask students to choose one.
But instead they will offer one course of their own choice
(basically for whatever course they can find a faculty).
Elective slots are important since a student will develop interest in some topics more than the others and may want to build his/her career in that sub-field.</li><li>Also, the electives should not just be in the discipline area but there should also be open electives. If someone wants to study maths or design or business studies along with Computer Science, it should be possible to do so. The more diverse your courses are, easier it will be for you in the future to keep learning new things and remember, you have to keep learning for at least 50 years.<br /></li><li> Do they have enough number of humanities and social
science courses (at least 10 percent courses). One cannot
be a complete engineer without understanding economics,
sociology, psychology, etc. These courses also develop important skills like Critical Thinking. And come to think of it. No college can teach you anything which will not become obsolete in the next 10 years. But if they can give you skills like Critical Thinking, you will go far in your career.</li><li>Overall, curriculum should be multi-disciplinary whether through some compulsory core or through a large set of electives. Most problems that you will face in your life will require inputs from multiple domains. So if you are doing BTech in Computer Science and the college teaches you 20-25 courses in CS, they are not doing justice to your future growth. It ought to be much less with a lot of components from other fields.<br /></li></ul><p>
A lot of learning happens outside the classroom, and hence a <b>residential institute</b>
should be preferred over a place where all are day scholars. If there
is a mixed system (that is, some live in hostel, and some are day
scholars), it is still better than fully day scholar since even if there
are some students on campus 24x7, it would have facilities that even
day scholars can use when necessary. You won't have all labs close at 5
or 6pm. The library is likely to be open late. Indeed, one of the
parameters to look at while understanding the quality of an institute is
whether they allow access to their facilities for long hours, or are
they only from 9 to 5 on weekdays.<br />
<br />
Another important criteria is the autonomy of the institute. Can they
decide their own curriculum. Typically, universities (including
deemed-to-be-universities) can decide their own curriculum, and in
general I would <b>strongly recommend universities over affiliated colleges</b>.
Teaching someone else's curriculum is demotivating for teachers. If
they do not have much stake in the curriculum, it would also invariably
mean that exams are also conducted by someone else (by the universities,
except for some "autonomous" colleges), and that means students don't
care for the classes and teachers. This can not be conducive for
lifelong learning, not even for immediate learning. But, of course, a
vast majority of engineering education happens in such affiliated
colleges, and most of it is poor quality. This is
generalization, and certainly there are some affiliated colleges which
are doing a decent job.<br />
<br />
Fancy <b>infrastructure</b> is not something that impresses me, but yes,
they should have all the necessary labs, good Internet bandwith, WiFi
access so that you can use your own laptops and other devices anywhere, a
good library with lots of reading spaces, lecture rooms without a
projector is like living in dark ages, adequate sports facilities, etc.
(Caution: Some of the engineering colleges would have all of this and
more, but would not have faculty. Look at infrastructure only after you
are convinced about the faculty and curriculum, etc.)<br />
<br />
To ensure that your peer group is strong (since so much of learning will
happen outside the class room, and your career will be helped by a good
peer group), one may want to look at data such as what was the median performance of the admitted students in 10th board, 12th board, competitive exams like JEE, CUET, etc. Of course, it is extremely difficult to get this data and even more difficult to verify this data. An indication could be available through the minimum eligibility announced by the university. For example, if I am allowed to do some marketing for JKLU, we have announced a minimum eligibility of 70% in 10th and 70% in 12th (counting only 5 subjects in 10th and PCME in 12th, so your additional subjects with 98-100 marks are not counted) for BTech/CSE program. I am not aware of any other private institution that has such high eligibility requirement. As a result, our median 12th class marks are more than 85%, one of the highest in our peer group. But, if you can't get this data from other colleges, you may ignore this parameter.</p><p>Now, let me come back to the all important question of placement. Why do I say that one should not look at placement data.</p><p>Well, if you want to look at placement data from the perspective of return-on-investment, then you should be looking at the incomes over at least 10-15 years, if not 50 years. The first month salary has no correlation with long term success in career. Second, you have no idea about the placement statistics. Most of the time, even the students who are going through the placement in a college and talking to all their friends on a regular basis about where they have got placed usually have no clue about aggregate statistics. (Very surprising, I know, but I can give you many examples and explain why this happens later.) The colleges exaggerate. Are you sure you will be the one to get that highest package. No one can predict what will happen 4 years from now.</p><p>On the other hand, if you are looking at placement as a proxy for quality and saying that if top companies are coming here, they must have done a survey and decided that this college is good, then what should be the parameter to look at. Let me give you two examples to compare. Both colleges have 100 graduating students in the same discipline. First college, two students get a package of Rs 1 crore, and 98 students get a package of Rs 3 lakhs each. In the other college, everyone gets a package of Rs 5 lakhs. Which one is better. In my opinion, the second one is better quality. If the first one was good, how much that goodness reflected in just 2 jobs. Most probably, those two worked hard on their own despite college and not because of college. And hence quality is reflected not in highest package but in median package, which is the package that the middle or average student got. Most colleges will only talk about highest and average (since few getting high packages will lift the average). No one talks about median since that is usually the lower number. So, if you can find median number reliably (very difficult), you may think of using that as a proxy for quality. Otherwise, ignore the placement data.</p><p>What else you should not look at. Well MoUs can be signed a dime a dozen with foreign universities, with companies and so on. Please look at how many of them are effectively being worked on. Rankings are usually gamed. There is no verification process.</p><p>Then there are things which do not really matter in terms of quality,
but could be important for you. Feel free to factor them in, and indeed
they are important. One is Geographical location. Many people have
preference to stay close to home or away from home, in a similar
cultural environment or in a similar weather condition, etc. This is
fine. The other is finances. If the two places you are considering have
very different costs, then one has to look at whether those differences
are worth the extra cost. And it is never going to be easy to take a
call on that.</p><p>The last point I will make is that this is one of the most important decision of your life. Invest your time, effort, and even money into this decision making. Don't be lazy and just look at last year's closing ranks, or just looking at some lists on some sites. Do primary research. First visit the website and note down as much relevant information as possible. Then talk to people who may give you insider's information. Make a shortlist of colleges you are interested in. Then plan a visit even if the college is not in your city. This is very important and this is what I meant when I said above invest your money in decision making.</p><p>When you visit a place, you will know many things about the place which are difficult to judge otherwise. Many institutions have some special things which may appeal to you or may not be in line with what you desire. Talk to random students and faculty on the campus to get the real picture and not just the admissions team. For example, and again, marketing alert for JKLU, here the way we do Project based learning is completely different from everyone else in the country, our semester away program in IITs, IIITs, and fine institutions abroad, our Center for Communication and Critical Thinking, our Design thinking courses, and many more things are so unique but you won't be able to really understand their import just by looking at the website.<br />
<br />Best wishes for a great career ahead.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-69855044391633736752022-06-12T14:05:00.001+05:302022-06-12T14:51:42.138+05:30JKLU gets 'A' Grade in NAAC accreditation<p>Recently, we were accredited by <a href="http://naac.gov.in/index.php/en/">National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC)</a>, and we received an 'A' grade.</p><p>This is remarkable for a number of reasons. The state of Rajasthan has a large number of universities, both in private sector and in public sector, and also several deemed-to-be-universities. Only two universities have a grade which is higher than 'A'. Second, it is rare (perhaps never happened but we don't know for sure) that a university of our size gets an 'A' grade in NAAC accreditation in the very first round.</p><p>The university decided in 2019 that we will go for NAAC accreditation. We then realized that the amount of documentation that is needed is too large and it will take time for us to do everything required to get accreditation. Indeed, it takes time to just understand the process in the first instance. And the self study report (SSR) that you submit covers five academic years. So we had a target that we will include years up to 2019-20 in the SSR and plan to submit it soon after June, 2020. But then Covid happened and we could submit the report only in June, 2021. There were some queries that we answered. Then they fixed a date for the visit, but we had a few Covid cases on the campus and the visit had to be postponed. Then we fixed another date and basically it got delayed to April, 2022.</p><p>Now the issue with us was that the university had undertaken a massive overhaul in 2017-18 and since then there is a much sharper focus on quality in everything we do. Just to give an example, we have increased the minimum qualification for some programs from 45% to 70%. Despite sharply increasing the minimum qualifications, our admissions are increasing by 20-30% every year. Our research papers are more, the average and median CTC in our student placements is more than double of that time (in fact, our median CTC in BTech is higher than most top colleges you would have in your list), and in every parameter that NAAC looks at, we are far better today than where we were 5-6 years ago. In most cases, the faculty is from top institutions in India. The student body represents the whole of India while earlier most of the students were from Jaipur and nearby.</p><p>So if we were to get a grade based on the average of 2015-20 performance, the five years for which the report was submitted, we would have missed an 'A' grade. But thankfully, their process includes a visit by the team and the team is seeing on the ground what we are in 2022 and not what we were in 2015-20. We had a team consisting of five professors from different parts of the country, including North-East, Kashmir, Tamilnadu and Maharashtra. And let me admit that we were lucky to have such a team. They went through hundreds of files but they also went through all the buildings, labs, facilities, talked to random students, employees and faculty (besides formal meetings). And were they impressed. In their exit meeting on the last day of the visit, the summary had almost exclusively praises for a variety of innovative stuff we do, including our Olin inspired style of Project Based Learning. They were impressed with the flexibility that our curriculum had and which allowed our students to spend a semester in another fine institution in India and abroad, and indeed more than 10% of our students do this every year, going to places like IIT Gandhinagar, IIIT Delhi, University of Florida and so on.<br /></p><p>They very specifically mentioned about our faculty and staff recruitment process which had resulted in the most diverse set of staff members they had seen. They actually asked for numbers based on gender, caste, religion, state to which they belong, and so on. It took us some time to look at every file but when the final numbers came we were ourselves pleasantly surprised by the diversity that we have been able to achieve in our recruitment. In our recruitment process, we make sure that the interviewers would not have such personal information at the time of interview and we keep reminding our senior people that we ought to have a diverse set of employees (and students).</p><p>There were other little things that impressed them. Like our Covid policy. Unlike many institutions who putout full page ads saying that they will waive fees of students if the person paying their fees (father usually) dies of Covid and then didn't waive fees since it was impossible to get a death certificate specifying Covid as the cause, we thought we should not benefit from Covid, did not take out any ad but quietly implemented the policy without even seeking a proof of Covid death. And we are perhaps the only university where we are supporting the family of an employee who died out of Covid.<br /></p><p>Their recommendations for future were mainly to increase admissions and reduce our dependency on philanthropic funds from one source (JK Organization). They said that the benefit of our quality education should be accessible to a greater set of students and we should open our doors wider. Second, we should become more self-reliant and try to get funds from more industries, trusts, alumni, etc. Perhaps they wanted to say that our fees are too low for the kind of things we are doing but if we want to keep the fees low, we should find alternate sources of funds.<br /></p><p>The whole journey wasn't easy. Many of our peers who are better known and have better resources did not get accredited in the first instance or got accredited without an 'A' grade. It is not surprising since the process is really tough to even understand and it requires a huge team effort which is often under-estimated the first time. In our case, Prof. Sanjay Goel, was overall incharge of this project and he made sure that everyone on campus has a role to play.</p><p>And we are seeing what a change such an external recognition can bring. For the last one year in JKLU, my message to all students, faculty and staff has always been that the only thing we need to focus on is the culture of excellence and have the confidence of achieving excellence in whatever we do. While things have been improving, but this accreditation has made everyone more confident than ever before that we belong to the list of top quality universities in India and everyone is united in their determination to get there quickly.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-62696420872862490422022-02-08T23:24:00.005+05:302022-02-08T23:24:50.309+05:30Early Admissions at JKLU<p>For a very long time, I have been advocating that the admission cycle for undergraduate programs in the country should be advanced. There is no reason to compress the admission cycle to after the board exams. That does not allow students enough time to think about what they want to do, to visit the places before they accept the offer, and increases stress in general. And most parts of the world have a much earlier admission cycle. I even wrote<a href="https://dsanghi.blogspot.com/2017/03/early-admissions.html"> a blog</a> on this a few years ago.</p><p>I wrote that blog after my daughter received an admission offer in February from a good university. And that made so much difference in her life. She was totally stressed out, performing poorly in pre-boards in school, very anxious about the upcoming board exam. But the day she received her offer of admission, the life changed. She could focus on her studies, was always happy, and did exceedingly well in the board exams, way beyond her own expectations.</p><p>It was personal experiences like these that encouraged me to strengthen the early admissions program of JKLU. We, like many other private universities, would invariably open our admission portal in December or January, just in case someone happened to visit and apply and so on. But frankly, there was no reason to apply early. If you could get admission in January, you would be able to get admission in June as well. So why block your money.</p><p>We believed that even if students could get admission in June, securing admission early will impact them psychologically. They will be in a better mental state to try harder to get into colleges they consider better than JKLU. So we should make it attractive for them to to get early admission. (No doubt, it helps us too.)</p><p>Two things are different this year which make early admissions attractive.</p><p>First, our scholarships are significantly more liberal during early admission than later in the year. In fact, to be completely transparent, we have put out exact details of scholarships based on 10th and 12th class marks and performance in competitive exams on our website. I don't think anyone will find this level of transparency anywhere. To give an example, Let us say you have 90% marks in 10th and 93% in 12th class (assuming you dropped this year). If you applied before 15th April, you will get 75% scholarship, but if you applied after 15th April, you will get 50% scholarship. For those who are taking 12th class this year, you can still get provisional admission now and your scholarship decision will be taken after your school marks are available, but that decision will be based on the rules on the day of your application. So if you applied now, the chances of your scholarship after your results are out are much brighter. The detailed rules are available <a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in/scholarships/">here</a>.<br /></p><p>Second, our placements, particularly in engineering have been absolutely fantastic this year. While most engineering colleges (including some of the famous ones) have a median CTC of Rs. 3.5 lakhs or lower, our median this year was about Rs. 7 lakhs. We do expect that this would mean a significantly higher number of applications this year and there is a good chance that our selection criteria may become tougher as the time progresses. And to some people, who could possibly get admission in early rounds may not be able to secure admissions in the later rounds.</p><p>Let me also take this opportunity to talk about our efforts to enhance inclusion and diversity. The criteria for scholarships are relaxed for students from states from where we have received fewer applications in the past (primarily north east and union territories except Delhi). Also for SC/ST, Physically challenged students. For girl students in some programs. <br /></p><p>Visit our <a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in/undergraduate-admissions/">Under-graduate Admissions website</a> to know more details.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-67123290361890550912022-02-02T11:57:00.001+05:302022-02-02T11:57:11.957+05:30Migration Certificate in Indian Universities<p>There is this strange document called a "Migration Certificate" that a lot of (if not most) Indian universities demand after admission. The previous university where you studied (or school) is supposed to give such a certificate which essentially says that this student studied in our university in this program from this time to that time, and whether s/he got the degree or left in between.</p><p>Interestingly, IIT Kanpur is one of the few universities who do not ask for migration certificate (unless something has changed in the last few years). Of course, some students would attach it by sheer force of habit. Also, when one of the graduates or alum asks IIT Kanpur to issue a migration certificate, it states on its letterhead something to the effect that Inter University Board of India and Ceylon had recommended abolition of migration certificate and hence it does not issue such a certificate. But it has no objection to its graduate (with details) in seeking admission to any place.</p><p>This recommendation of Inter University Board of India and Ceylon is from 1972. (In 1973, the name of the body changed to Association of Indian Universities.) IIT Kanpur abolished migration certificates in 1973.</p><p>And yet, 50 years later, most of our universities (including IITs) continue to seek such a certificate.</p><p>Why was it needed and why was it abolished.</p><p>The main purpose of the certificate was to ensure that a student does not take admission in more than one university. If the student has to submit the migration certificate in original, then s/he can submit it at only one university, and hence this was the way to enforce the rule. However, IUBIC noted 50 years ago that this is not so simple. A student can simply go to the previous university and tell them that s/he has lost the migration certificate and get a duplicate one. So the universities were anyway seeking an undertaking that the student is not studying at another university. So that should suffice. If s/he has been found to give a false undertaking, you can take the same action that the university would have taken if the student used duplicate migration certificate in two universities.</p><p>After a while, even this rule about studying in two universities got dropped. In fact, AICTE and UGC are actively forcing universities not to keep original certificates. The student should be able to seek admissions in multiple institutions and take a decision on which one to continue much later. And indeed, today, UGC allows you to have admission in one full time program and one online degree program simultaneously. So whatever limited purpose migration certificate had is completely lost today.<br /></p><p>Why do universities demand this. Of course, guidelines or recommendations of AIU are not binding on the universities. So legally, I guess they can ignore this 50 year old guideline. (And may be, AIU has changed its guidelines in the last 50 years and IIT Kanpur is ignorant of such a change.)</p><p>My gut feeling is that this is looked at as an instrument of control, and a bit of revenue. Many universities do charge money to issue migration certificates, and if many graduate needs a copy, that can certainly pay for a few cups of tea. And if we are making money giving out this certificate, we better seek this certificate from others, since if the idea of not seeking MC catches on, we will lose our cups of tea.<br /></p><p>I would love to hear from others about its utility, if any, and why universities don't stop seeking it.<br /></p><p>For the record, we at JK Lakshmipat University (JKLU) do not ask for migration certificate from our students.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-3064964235823278882022-01-28T17:56:00.002+05:302022-01-28T17:56:23.978+05:30Lateral admission in JKLU<p>National Education Policy 2020 (NEP2020) has a very nice feature of student mobility. It desires that students be able to move around from one university to the other and take courses from different places and one university will consider credits from other university and if all academic requirements are met satisfactorily, it will grant degree to the student. At <a href="http://www.jklu.edu.in">JK Lakshmipat University</a> (JKLU, Jaipur), we have been supporting student mobility from a long time. We have encouraged our students to spend a semester or more at other fine institutions and we will consider the credits earned at those places towards the graduation requirements. In fact, we have gone a step further and look for such opportunities for our students, both in India and abroad, signed agreements where ever necessary. We, unlike most other private universities, would not double charge the students, and they pay tuition only at their host institution. And our students go in large numbers to IITs, IIITs, and universities abroad.</p><p>We have also been welcoming students from other colleges to spend a semester at JKLU, but frankly that hasn't been very successful. Not many universities in India allow their students to spend a semester elsewhere, and hence receiving exchange students is difficult.</p><p>The other thing that we have been doing even before NEP2020 is Lateral Admissions, that is, someone who has spent a year at some other college can seek admission at JKLU in the second year and we will grant appropriate credits for the work done at the other college, and the student can graduate in 3 additional years (for a 4-year program) and 2 additional years (for a 3-year program). This isn't popular either because most people are happy with what they have, and there is too much uncertainty about the process. And hence, this blog to explain the process of lateral admission to help students who may be interested in such a transfer.</p><p>I will take the example of B.Tech. program for explaining the process, though a similar process is available in other programs as well. A student takes admission in one college, and after several months, decides to apply to JKLU for the second year. We will expect the student to submit details of all the courses done at the other institution, including the curriculum, and also the transcript or marksheet from the university. Our faculty will review this. Some courses will be similar to the courses in our curriculum (whether we do that in our first year or second year, it does not matter). Depending on performance in that course, we may consider that course as having completed. Note that we are not looking for identical courses (because the chances are that the curriculum in two institutions will never really match 100%) but only sufficient overlap. For example, almost every college would have a programming course in the first year, and a couple of maths courses. We can consider them as equivalent to our courses. Some courses may not be in our curriculum but we may consider them as equivalent to our "Open Electives." So, after this evaluation, we will decide what courses the student still needs to do once s/he joins our program. (Even if you do not have the official transcripts, we can still plan your program, though admission will require the transcripts at a later stage.)<br /></p><p>For example, let us assume that our program has 40 courses spread over 4 years. The student comes after having done 10 courses in the first year. It is possible that we consider only 8 of them as equivalent to our program (including open electives). So now, we will say that 32 courses are still needed to be done for graduating with our degree. Now some faculty member will prepare a plan to complete these 32 courses over the remaining 3 years keeping in mind the pre-requisites, or any other constraints of the university. Now, you follow this plan (or make changes to suit your needs), and if you keep doing well, three years later, you will get a degree from JKLU.</p><p>So the lateral admission in JKLU is a pretty simple affair. If anyone is interested in switching from their college to JKLU, our admissions team would be happy to work with you on the same.</p><p>I do hope that many more institutions provide this kind of flexibility to their students and students of other institutions in line with NEP2020.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-32408537840658032572021-09-20T01:41:00.001+05:302021-09-20T18:37:23.806+05:30Why one should study Engineering at JKLU?<p> JEE results are out and students other than those who have performed exceedingly well and are preparing for JEE Advanced, are now starting to think of what engineering college they want to choose for their under-graduate education.</p><p>So let me warn. This is a marketing post. If you are thinking of a college for engineering or you know someone who is looking for admission to engineering programs, please do read, share, comment, get in touch, etc. Not interested in finding out the magic we are doing at JKLU, skip the rest of this post.</p><p>The most important reason to select a college is its quality of education, and the main proxy for this parameter is the <b>faculty</b>. (I know a lot of people consider placement statistics as a proxy for quality, so we will talk about that too later in this post, but let us talk about faculty for now.) There are three things I would like to state about our Engineering faculty:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The faculty to student ratio in our engineering programs is 1:12. This is perhaps the best ratio in any engineering college in the country. And this does not include faculty of Communication, Humanities and Social Science, Management and Design, who do teach many courses. If we include them, then the ratio will be 1:10.<br /></li><li> More than 75% of our engineering faculty has a PhD degree. Again, I am not sure how many engineering colleges (other than IITs, NITs, and a few top colleges like BITS, LNMIIT, etc.) can boast of such a percentage of PhDs. And this number is increasing. We stopped recruiting non-PhDs some time ago, and all existing non-PhDs have been asked to enroll in PhD programs.</li><li>A majority of our engineering faculty have at least one degree from IITs, NITs, BITS or abroad. So they have been exposed to excellence and that builds a culture of excellence on the campus. Again, compare this with the background of faculty in other institutions that you are considering.</li></ul><p>And it is not just that the faculty is great. The <b>pedagogy</b> is great too. JKLU strongly believes in Project Based Learning. We did this transition to PBL in 2018. Earlier too, we were claiming to do PBL like everyone claims. In 2018, we said to ourselves, let us find out the world leaders in PBL and understand how to do it right. We found out that Olin College near Boston is the Gold standard of PBL. And they run a one week program every summer to teach academics from around the world how they do it. We invested heavily into this, sent a team of teachers to Olin for that program, then brought their faculty to JKLU for further training and help in transitioning to PBL. This summer, we again deputed a team for this one week program at Olin. To understand what this is, you may read one of my old <a href="https://dsanghi.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-week-in-olin-not-college-but-lab-in.html">blogs on my Olin experience</a>. So you start doing projects from the very first semester with a lot of guidance from faculty.<br /></p><p>One of the flexibility in our system that we are really proud of is <b>spending a semester at an IIT</b>, IIIT or another fine institution. There are institutions like IIT Kanpur and IIT Gandhinagar who have a process of admitting students of other colleges for a semester or two. However, hardly anyone makes use of this facility. And why wouldn't you want to study in an IIT if you always wanted to be an engineer. The problem is that most colleges do not have a system of counting the courses done at those IITs towards their own courses. And the second problem is that most colleges will ask their student interested in spending a semester elsewhere to pay full fee at both their home institution as well as this other institution, making it very expensive for the student. In case of JKLU, we have a process of replacing our courses with the courses you do elsewhere and we do not charge you tuition for the semester you are studying elsewhere. This has meant that almost 10% of our students spend a semester elsewhere (or did before Covid, last 3 semesters have been an exception). In the year before Covid, we had 6 students spend a semester at IIT Gandhinagar alone. We also have an agreement with IIIT Delhi, one of the finest institution in India for Computer Science and related disciplines under which our students can spend a semester there (and despite Covid, one student is spending the current semester there).</p><p>We also have agreements with several foreign universities for our students to spend a <b>semester abroad</b>. Some of them reduce tuition for our students. Some of them make it easier for our students to get admission in Masters programs if they had spent a semester abroad with them. University of Amsterdam does not charge any tuition from our students. Universities where one can for semester abroad include University of Birmingham, University of Florida, and many others. Of course, we also allow our students to spend a semester in any fine institution abroad including those with whom we do not have a formal tie up. We truly believe that having a global exposure is very important for a career in today's world and provide such opportunities to our students. Do ask the colleges you are considering if they entertain a possibility of spending a semester abroad.</p><p>The <b>cohort</b> that you will study with will have <b>good academic credentials</b>. As of today, about 92 percent of our students admitted to engineering programs have scored more than 75% marks in their 10th class. The median 10th class score is 86%. (This year, with board marks in 12th class not always reflecting the academic preparation, we decided to take a look at 10th class marks, which are usually lower than 12th class scores.) Frankly, I do not know if even IITs can claim this in terms of school level performance of their students. <br /></p><p>The next important consideration is that of <b>cost</b>. Not only we are charging tuition which is much less than our costs (with the JK group covering the losses), we are completely transparent about it. You can see the exact cost of all four years on our website. But the bigger deal is our extremely <b>liberal and transparent scholarship</b> regime. Please note that we have made scholarships extremely liberal this year to celebrate 10 years of the establishment of the university. In particular, we have made continuation of scholarship in all four years easier for this batch. Also, the scholarships cover not just the tuition but all academic fees and even hostel fees. On<a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in/scholarship"> our scholarship page</a>, you can find not just who is eligible for scholarship this year and how much scholarship you can get, you will also find out the conditions of its continuation in all four years. For students with JEE Mains percentile of greater than 92, one can actually study for free for all four years (other than the cost of mess and electricity). You won't find this kind of transparency, particularly regarding continuation of scholarship in successive years, in most colleges.</p><p>There are many other aspects of a great engineering college. Great infrastructure. A very green campus. Even though we are very small currently, the students are very active with lots of clubs, technical societies, sports, etc. They participate in several festivals of other colleges and conduct our own festivals (and did so even during Covid). We have a world class design school and they offer a couple of courses to all engineering students, and exposure to design is becoming almost a requirement in industry these days. We have been setup by 125-year old JK Organization, so our industry connect is really strong. The curriculum has the flexibility of several electives. You can choose to take courses in any of the latest streams like Machine Learning or Cyber Security or IoT or Automation, etc. We are one of the few institutions in India to setup Atal Incubation Center. So a strong support for your startup ideas. A great leadership team. The board is full of people who have built this nation. The academic council has people from best universities around the world. The internal leadership consists of people who have studied and worked in top institutions in the country.<br /></p><p>And finally, let me talk about <b>placements</b>. My own belief is that one should focus on quality of education and not on placements because if you have a great quality of education, but campus does not see many companies visiting, you may not get the first job of your choice, but the quality of education will take you far. But I know most people are not convinced by this. We had great placements till 2019, but in the Covid years, we were hit a bit harder than other good colleges and in 2020 and 2021 graduating batches, the placement was between 80-85%, which is very good compared to most colleges, but not what we were used to. But as economy is back on track, we are making special efforts for 2022 batch, and within 2 weeks of our placement season, one third of our batch has already been placed with a minimum CTC of Rs. 4 lakhs. One should pay attention to minimum because if we were agreeable to companies paying 2 lakhs to 3 lakhs, we may have placed the entire batch so early in the year. The highest CTC so far is 10.0 lakhs though there are interviews pending for companies offering 15L and higher. The median is 6.3 lakhs. And those who know me personally would know that these are not cooked up numbers unlike most other colleges. The number of companies already committed to visit us in September are half the number of graduating students. Eventually, we expect the number of companies visiting us to be more than the number of students graduating.</p><p>So don't worry about the placement. Focus on your education. Focus on quality. Do hard work. Have high aspirations. Have the aspirations to change the world. And no doubt, you will succeed.<br /></p><p>It is not possible to write down everything here. But let me invite each one of you to visit the beautiful campus and see things for yourself. You may contact me directly for any queries. You may visit admissions page at: https://applications.jklu.edu.in/lp/application2021.html<br /></p><p>Best wishes. Jai Hind.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-47031505006257734402021-08-23T22:43:00.000+05:302021-08-23T22:43:14.032+05:30Collaboration with Indian institutions<p> A few days ago, someone sent me the link to a news item, <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/cluster-system-to-be-initiated-in-9-city-colleges/articleshow/85193188.cms" target="_blank">Cluster system to be initiated in nine Hyderabad colleges</a>. These 9 colleges are working on an agreement with each other to allow students of other colleges to take their courses with a process of credit transfer. Later, there would also be faculty of one college teaching a course in another college.</p><p>This caught my attention. Of course, NEP 2020 talks about creating clusters of nearby colleges, and this seems the first such step to implement the same. The reason this caught my attention was that we often hear of Indian institutions signing MoUs with foreign universities, but not so much with Indian universities. And I have pointed this out repeatedly in my social media posts. So happy to see that NEP2020 is beginning to address that at least for colleges which are physically close to each other.</p><p> But what about institutions geographically far apart. Even if just consider teaching, it should be possible to register for an online course sitting anywhere, and in the post Covid era, even spend a semester fully at another institution.</p><p>And collaboration is not necessarily only for student exchange. As I have personally done in the past, faculty can teach a course in another institution. Of course, joint research projects are something that faculty in good institutions are already doing. But there can be collaboration in other processes also.</p><p>For example, can we collaborate in admissions. We already see government institutions doing join counseling. We also see that technical universities doing joint counseling for all engineering colleges affiliated to it. But what about universities. Slowly the number of students enrolled in private universities is increasing and the number in affiliated colleges is decreasing. If some of the private universities join hands and do admissions together through a common portal, similar to that offered by technical universities, this would be a great convenience for the students and parents. They don't have to fill a large number of forms, they don't have to pay money to multiple universities to reserve their seats and every time they get a better admission offer, seek refund from the previous one, and so on. And it is not just the convenience of students and parents. It also reduces the cost of student acquisition for the universities. The amount of money spent in admission publicity by private universities is humongous. If there is a common portal then all participants in the common admission process can reduce their advertising cost. And note, it is possible that every college may have its own admission criteria. They don't have to have a common merit list for them to use a common portal. Just like NITs and IITs don't have a common merit list and yet they use a common portal. So we all keep our academic autonomy and freedom to decide our admission criteria and still use a common portal. One huge advantage is the geographic reach of the university increases. If there are 5 universities who all have their sphere of influence in their region, a common portal will mean that students checking out the university in their region will notice the universities of other region as well.<br /></p><p>This is my long cherished dream that I have been writing about for more than a decade. I recall when I was at LNMIIT more than a decade ago, I had written to private universities within Rajasthan making this suggestion. It didn't happen then, and it may not happen in near future, but I will keep working on it.</p><p>Similarly, why can't we have joint degree programs between two universities of India. In fact, one of my dreams is a program where a student spends time at 3-4 institutions and get a joint degree signed by all these institutions. Again, we work with foreign universities for these things and not within the country. This will allow each institution to leverage their strengths and contribute the most in that area.<br /></p><p>I hope there are others out there who think similarly, and I would be happy to take any collaboration proposal which is of mutual benefit to the board of JKLU for consideration.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-21807184147597206172021-08-02T01:11:00.005+05:302021-08-03T13:16:46.115+05:30JKLU Partners with University of Birmingham<p>This week we announced a partnership with <a href="https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/index.aspx" target="_blank">University of Birmingham</a> in UK. We are very excited about it since UoB is a <b>top 100 university in the world</b> and getting access to such a university for our students will obviously boost their learning and their careers. The current partnership will mostly benefit our engineering students though we will keep working with them in the future to expand the scope of this relationship. <br /></p><p>The partnership entails two things. One is being able to move to UoB after completing their 2nd year at JKLU and earning the under-graduate degree from there (in a total of 4 years) with cutting edge specializations, and the other is a semester abroad program.</p><p></p><p>The first aspect of the partnership is applicable to students of Mechanical Engineering and Electronics Engineering. They can pursue degrees in Mechatronics, Robotics and Automotive engineering. Of course, they can also continue with a broad based degrees in Mechanical or Electronics too, if they so desire. Students who are performing well at JKLU can get lateral admission to these bachelors programs at UoB. This will be of interest to those students who want a specialization in their Bachelors degree and may want an international career. The fact that UoB is situated at the heart of innovation in UK, and has been rated number one on the list of UK universities most frequently targeted by the country's top employers in 2021 is a big plus.<br /></p><p>Studying abroad is expensive but these partnerships bring the threshold lower so that more people can afford it. In this particular case, one needs to spend only two years abroad and hence there is a cost reduction. Also, when you go through this partnership, there is a significant scholarship (up to 20% of the tuition there) that further reduces the cost. And what JKLU does is that it will charge the same tuition from students interested in these programs as it charges other engineering students (unlike some other private institutions who have a higher fee for students who show interest in such partnerships). In fact, since students interested in such partnerships will have to have a higher marks in 12th class, most of them will get a substantial scholarship from JKLU (usually between 50% and 100% of both academic fee and hostel fee, check <a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in/scholarship/" target="_blank">our website</a> for exact rules for scholarships in the first year, and rules for continuation in successive years).</p><p>It may be noted that the current policy of UK government is to allow foreign graduates of UK universities to stay on for two more years after graduation. Of course, these rules keep changing. But the current policy appears to be to attract foreign students to UK by allowing them extra time beyond graduation and also allow work visa to highly qualified individuals.</p><p>JKLU has always believed that exposure to the best in the world is
extremely useful for students in their careers and those who can afford
it should go for it. The future of work is in working with teams across
nations, across cultures and across disciplines and an exposure to
diversity and high quality as a student will prepare you for that
future. For those who cannot afford, we do try to bring in faculty from
different backgrounds, sometimes for full courses and sometimes for
guest lectures. And we are delighted that our engineering students will have an option to
spend a semester (maximum two) at UoB.</p><p>If you are interested in knowing more about this or any other international partnership of JKLU, please write to <a href="mailto:international.affairs@jklu.edu.in">international.affairs@jklu.edu.in</a></p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-8169774416957837382021-07-31T23:03:00.004+05:302021-07-31T23:03:59.439+05:30Examination Cancelled, Results next month<p>Title of this blog is from a headline on 2nd June, the day after CBSE was asked to cancel its 12th class examination. And I wonder if anyone felt that there was something strange about this headline. Result of what, if exams are cancelled.</p><p>No, I am not suggesting that CBSE should have waited indefinitely for situation to improve and then conducted the exams. That would be too stressful and we needed a closure on this batch. But suggesting that we should have an artificial method to guess how many marks a student would have got if the exam was conducted is something I find very strange.</p><p>But this is nothing new. Last year too, we had scores of some subjects been filled as average of other subjects. In many universities, marks of courses done in 3rd year were put as average of previous two years. Nobody thought that assigning marks in history on the basis of marks scored in Hindi was strange.</p><p>Was there an option. Of course, there was. CBSE could say on the 12th class marksheet that no public exam was conducted and the marks are as assigned by schools (with some regulations) and hence cannot be compared. So CBSE would have said that they had the confidence that if a school was declaring a student passed, they too could declare that the student had enough capabilities that they expected from someone passing a 12th class exam. What this would have meant is that CBSE was not commenting on the specific marks assigned by schools and was not recommending that marks assigned by one school be comparable with marks assigned by another school.</p><p>Would this have been acceptable to stakeholders, particularly those who till the month of May were shouting that our system is bad because it considered examinations as sacrosanct. No way. While exams are considered bad, marks are important. How would university admissions take place unless CBSE certifies that marks are comparable.</p><p>But shouldn't that be a problem of the university system. May be they would have still treated marks of different schools as equivalent just like they treat marks of different boards as equivalent today. Or may be this would have forced the universities to come up with a better system of admissions.<br /></p><p>But the nice thing about the whole issue is that no one cares about lying (or certifying marks in one subject based on how student had performed in unrelated subjects two years ago), and no one cares about quality or merit. Universities need a metric, however bad it may be, but which can be used to rank all admission seekers in a serial order and which will not be quashed by the courts. The only value of 12th class marks is to satisfy courts that admissions were done without any favoritism.</p><p>Note that I am not at all suggesting that there should have been exams. I am not at all bothered that everyone seems to have passed with high marks. My only concern is that a Board is certifying those marks which are not based on any exam.<br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-22494744944624277162021-06-17T10:21:00.000+05:302021-06-17T10:21:05.523+05:30LSE Foundation makes MS from UMass affordable<p>Two years ago, <a href="https://www.lse.foundation/">Lakshmipat Singhania Education (LSE) Foundation</a> had an agreement with <a href="https://www.umass.edu/">University of Massachusetts Amherst</a> regarding making selected <a href="https://www.umass.edu/sbs/graduate-programs/lsef-umass-scholarship">masters programs of UMass accessible to Indian students</a> who otherwise cannot afford them. The agreement made it possible through two mechanisms. </p><p>First, since the MS programs accept students from diverse backgrounds and they need to do many basic courses before they can take up advanced courses, LSE Foundation took the responsibility of ensuring that those basic courses will be completed in India. This reduces the cost substantially as the student can complete the required advanced credits specific to that MS program within just one year in US.<br /></p><p>Second, all students who go through LSE Foundation will be provided a <a href="https://www.lse.foundation/lsef-umass-scholarship">scholarship</a> to pay for a little over 50% of the tuition costs at UMass when the student is there. So you pay less than 50% of the usual tuition at UMass for the period you are on their campus.<br /></p><p></p><p>This scheme has other advantages as well. University of Mass. requires 16 years of education for admission to its Masters programs (12 years of schooling and 4 years of college). This normally means that students who have done a 3-year bachelors program in India cannot be admitted to Masters programs there. But in this agreement, since the students will do one additional year of college in India (to complete all those basic courses), they are eligible to get admission to MS. UMass will process applications and may have a personal interview and if they find the student suitable, offer admission subject to completing this one year in India successfully.</p><p>The other advantage is that they waive the requirement of GRE/TOEFL for students coming through this route.</p><p>UMass faculty will keep in touch with these students throughout the year by means of special lectures/seminars, etc. Also, since this is a regular MS program, you get the permission for work after this Masters as Practical Training like any other MS from any US university.<br /></p><p>There are three MS programs at UMass where admission is possible through this route. They are:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><a href="https://www.umass.edu/sbs/data-analytics-and-computational-social-science-program">MS in </a><a href="https://www.umass.edu/sbs/data-analytics-and-computational-social-science-program">Data Analytics and Computational Social Science</a></li><li><a href="https://www.umass.edu/resec/graduate-program/programs">MS in Resource Economics</a> </li><li><a href="https://www.umass.edu/spp/academics/graduate-degree-programs/master-public-policy">Masters in Public Policy</a></li></ul><p>These are very well regarded programs of UMass. The first two MS programs (Data Analytics and Resource Economics) are classified as STEM program and hence eligible for additional OPT benefits.<br /></p><p>Why am I writing about this. First, because I find this a very exciting opportunity to study in a top university in the world. If there was a program of interest to my daughter, I would have encouraged her to apply. Second, because LSE Foundation has chosen JKLU to conduct those common courses for all students selected for this program. So we run the academic part of this program.</p><p>The academic content that has been prepared in consultation with UMass is so interesting that we were reached out by some students early on in 2019 asking if they could do just that part and not necessarily seek admission to MS in UMass. So the LSE Foundation decided that we should offer a one-year Diploma that we call "<a href="https://www.lse.foundation/pg-diploma-analysis-research">Post Graduate Diploma in Analysis and Research</a>" to all students irrespective of whether they go on to UMass or not.</p><p>The faculty for this program is carefully selected and several of them are visiting faculty from top institutions of India.</p><p>Currently, the admission for this year's <a href="https://www.lse.foundation/pg-diploma-analysis-research">PGDAR</a> program is open. (These will go to UMass in Fall 2022.)<br /></p><p>I would be happy to answer any questions or point to the right person who can answer your questions on these programs.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-37927848781283865322021-06-01T00:14:00.000+05:302021-06-01T00:14:22.081+05:30BTech@JKLU: Can high quality education be free of cost?<p>Is your JEE Mains performance in the year 2020 or Jan/Feb 2021 higher than 80 percentile. Do you know someone who meets this criteria and is looking for admissions to engineering programs. Then this blog post is for you.</p><p>I am only explaining the scholarship policy for BTech admission this year. A small blurb about the program is written below. But I would be happy to answer any questions on the program itself. Please write them as comments below or send me an email.<br /></p><p>Most universities provide scholarships to some of their students. JKLU also does. Most scholarships are meant to cover a part of the cost and not the entire or even substantial cost. We also did the same. And in many institutions, the criteria for continuing the scholarship is restrictive and as a result, the number of scholarships in successive years are much less than initial offerings. We followed the industry practice. We were always more liberal in providing scholarships than our peers, but we now want to go much further. After all, we are completing 10 years.<br /></p><p>We are making it easier for good students to have free education in all four years, and for a very large number of students, we will make costs very low. This, together with the opportunity to learn with a pedagogy and curriculum designed in collaboration with the best in the world, with international gateways, innovative faculty
and unique inter-disciplinary curriculum, makes it a very special
opportunity.</p><p>Sample this: Male applicants with a JEE Mains score of 91 percentile or higher will get complete waiver of both academic fee and hostel fee. Female applicants get free education at 90 percentile or higher. This means, going by JEE numbers last year, an unprecedented
opportunity of free high-quality engineering education. </p><p>Academic fee includes everything that is normally charged by universities, be it tuition, development fee, exam fee, registration fee, and god knows how many different lines are there in the fee schedule. We have only one number and you get complete waiver of the same. And even the hostel room is free for these students. The only thing you pay for are utilities and mess bill to make it even for day scholars and hostelers. That is it.</p><p></p><p>What is more. You get to keep this 100% free education for all four years if you maintain a CGPA of 8.0. Easy for students who are in the top 10 percent of the country. And by chance, you slip below 8.0. We don't remove scholarships completely. You still get a 75% waiver. So almost free. You can see details at the <a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in/scholarship">scholarship webpage</a>.</p><p>We also have other levels of scholarships. 75 percent waiver for JEE Mains percentile of 89 to 91 (for female students: 87 to 90), 50 percent waiver for JEE Mains percentile of 87 to 89 (for female students: 84 to 87) and a 25 percent waiver for JEE Mains percentile of 83 to 87 (for female students: 79 to 84). We want to encourage female students to go for engineering education and hence the JEE Mains performance required for the same level is significantly lower than male students. Again, please do check out our <a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in/scholarship">scholarship page</a> for details.</p><p>We will consider both the performance in <b>JEE Mains 2020</b> as well as performance in <b>JEE Mains 2021</b> (<b>January and February rounds</b> that have already happened). If you take JEE Mains multiple times, including in both years, we consider the best performance.<br /></p><p>Here is the<a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in/admission"> link for admissions page</a> for more information and application.<br /></p><p>Is there a catch? Of course, there is. Internally, we do have a budget for scholarships which is very liberal this year but not infinite. The current policy is applicable only for applications that we receive <u><i><b>till Monday June 21st, 2021</b></i></u>. We will make admission offers by 25th June, and a small initial payment will be required by 30th June. (For those who are offered 100% fee waiver, the initial deposit will be equivalent to the security deposit that we charge, that is, Rs. 10,000, and for others the initial deposit will be Rs. 25,000 only.)</p><p>An immediate question will arise. What if one changes one's mind and decides to take admission in another institution. We respect your decision. And we will refund your deposit but for a small fee of Rs. 1,000. And we will be quick. Very unlike many other institutions that may take months to refund and deduct 5,000 or even 10,000 rupees.</p><p>Another question: I took JEE in Jan/Feb. I have a percentile score of 89.5 which as per your table makes me eligible for 75% waiver. But what if I take next round of JEE and get a score of higher than 91 percentile. Would I be considered for 100% waiver.</p><p>Answer: Your scholarship depends on the policy as on the date of your application. If you apply before 18th June, we will offer you 75% waiver and if you accept that offer and deposit the initial fee, and later you show us proof of improved JEE score, we will upgrade your offer to 100% waiver. But if you do not apply and do not accept admission by 30th June, the scholarship policy as on the date of application will be applicable.</p><p><i><b><u>About the program:</u></b></i></p><p>JKLU offers BTech programs in Computer Science, Electronics & Communication, Electrical, Mechanical and Civil Engineeringwith exciting areas of specializations. We have a strong Project-based learning pedagogy that has been developed with the help of <a href="https://dsanghi.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-week-in-olin-not-college-but-lab-in.html">Olin College of Engineering</a>, USA ranked among top 3 Engineering undergraduate programs (non
doctoral) in the US by US News & World Report for 2021 and 2020, and
was named along with MIT, as the top leaders in engineering education
globally. We have close interactions with industry and in fact, it is necessary to spend one semester in industry. We also encourage our students to spend a semester in another fine institution in India or abroad. Our students have been to IIT Gandhinagar, University of Florida, University of Amsterdam and other places. Committed to our students’ entry into and long terms success in their
chosen careers, our Centre for Communication & Critical Thinking
helps them become confident, articulate and independent thinking
professional. Our Director of Engineering, Prof. Sanjay Goel, an alumnus of BITS Pilani and IIT Delhi, is a well known academician with rich experience in leading innovations in engineering education. Similarly, the faculty is mostly with PhDs, and has been recruited from fine institutions.The infrastructure of JKLU is state of the art and we welcome all potential students and parents to visit us (if Covid situation permits) before taking a final decision. When you apply for admission, ask the admissions office that you wish to speak to some faculty member. Get answers to as many questions as you have. The career choices should be decided very carefully.</p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-14123592916437774102021-05-29T23:55:00.000+05:302021-05-29T23:55:49.993+05:30I join JKLU: A small university with big aspirations<p> As people following me on social media know, I have joined a small, young, private university in Jaipur as its next Vice Chancellor. The university is <a href="https://www.jklu.edu.in/"><i><b>J K Lakshmipat University</b></i></a> (JKLU), founded in 2011 by generous support from J K Organization. JKO, as any Indian would know is one of the oldest industrial house in India with businesses in diverse sectors and well known for its philanthropic activities.</p><p>When I announced my decision to seek retirement from IIT Kanpur and join JKLU, many of my friends were surprised. But I was itching to join a university which is open to doing things differently, one that had desire to achieve excellence, where the promoters were willing to invest in the future, and there will be enough autonomy to do all this. After having spent time at multiple institutions, it was becoming clear to me that I would have greater impact in private setting than public setting. I recall that of all the places I enjoyed my stint at LNMIIT Jaipur the most, and I believe that stint was the most impactful of all my leadership roles. Many friends who knew about my yearning for a new role tried to dissuade me. There aren't many such institutions in the country. But I didn't care. I didn't care if there were 100 such institutions or not. I only cared if there was one such institution. (And to be honest, I have come across several private institutions today who will meet this criteria. Higher education in India is changing.)</p><p>I had known about JKLU earlier. On 1st November, 2017, I had met Pramath Sinha and Asheesh Gupta regarding some other educational initiatives and in that meeting they told me about JKLU and wanted me to be advising the university. And so it started. From January 2018 to January 2019, I spent two days a month in most of the months at JKLU. I interacted with all the top leadership and faculty. Participated in their discussions on all academic matters. We had a faculty member from <a href="https://www.olin.edu/">Olin College</a> to help us in designing courses around project-based learning approach. (The <a href="https://dsanghi.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-week-in-olin-not-college-but-lab-in.html">Olin approach</a> is very different from what colleges in India do in the name of project-based-learning.) The University was kind enough to send me to Olin in the summer of 2018 to learn the Olin way of education. I was part of faculty selections and we could recruit faculty from IITs and abroad. A Center for Communication and Critical Thinking was set up to support all academic programs as it was felt that these two skills are extremely important to future proof your education. We setup an office of Dean of R&D which supports faculty members when they submit sponsored research projects and want to file patents. We also created an incubation center. I was quite excited about my limited role and was extremely happy to see the pace at which things were changing. I knew that one day I would come back to this place for a full time role.</p><p>After joining PEC in 2019, I stopped going to JKLU. But they kept sending me their newsletter and I kept on learning of all their new initiatives. In 2019, they started their third major discipline - Design. (The first two were Engineering and Management.) They had recruited a truly exceptional faculty for Design and it could claim to provide education at par or better than the best design schools in India. There is a push to internationalization of education. We would like as many of our students to spend a semester in a good university abroad as possible and have a few agreements to support this. We have a very interesting program with Univ of Massachusetts, Amherst where the first year is done at JKLU and the second year at UMass with a very large scholarship provided by JK Organization to reduce the cost of education in US. We also support our students going to top Indian institutions, including IITs, for a semester exchange. </p><p>We believe that the future lies with multi-disciplinarity. And as New Education Policy (NEP 2020) also mandates, we will be growing in other disciplines including basic sciences and liberal arts over the next few years.<br /></p><p>We are tiny as the universities go. We do want to make an impact on the society and we understand that we need a critical mass to do that. We are growing in all three areas: Engineering, Management and Design. I am going to write a separate article on them soon. This one was just to introduce JKLU to my readers.<br /></p><p><br /></p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4273139713770751485.post-56538455507076111222020-10-12T11:25:00.002+05:302020-10-12T11:25:41.686+05:30Should we try to retain students going abroad for higher education<p> Recently there were media reports pointing out that the <a href="https://www.livemint.com/education/news/jee-advanced-result-iit-exam-topper-chirag-falor-wants-to-stick-to-mit-11601897849689.html">top ranker in JEE Advanced has joined MIT</a> (though still in India due to online classes). Stories have also come out that <a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/education/jee-advanced-2020-air-4-muhender-raj-to-opt-for-mit-for-job-opportunities-jeeadv-ac-in-6704223/">4th ranker has joined UCLA</a>. This caused the social media to react. Some of them criticizing them to leave India for US. I too poked my nose into it, and wrote on FaceBook that it was their personal choice and instead of worrying about 2 of them studying abroad, we should worry about more than 100,000 going abroad every year for under-graduate alone. Yes, every year, 100,000 students are going abroad for higher education, and the number is increasing every year.</p><p>I suggested that we can retain a lot of them in India if we could have high quality educational institutions in India. Since high quality institutions require a lot of expenditure, it is unrealistic to expect government to put in that kind of money. And, let us not forget, they have expanded IIT, NIT, AIIMS, IISER and other high quality institutions in the last decade, but government will have its limits. So, one will have to set these up in private sector, and that will happen only if the private sector can charge high tuition. And therefore, we must allow private sector to charge high tuition particularly when they have invested initial money and proven themselves to be of high quality. In particular, I suggested that a private institution with a similar NIRF rank as an average NIT should be able to charge about Rs. 5 lakhs per student per year, which is similar to the cost that is incurred at an NIT. (May be slightly less than that since it is assumed that private sector will be more efficient than government sector in managing expenses.) And a private sector institution having an NIRF ranking similar to an IIT, could charge Rs. 10 lakhs per student per year.</p><p>Why the number of students seeking foreign degrees increasing at a fast pace. I think as we integrate with global economy and more of us travel around, our aspirations are going up. As our economy becomes larger (ignoring covid related downturn in this trend), the ability to afford foreign education is going up. With ease of travel, ease of connectivity through video calls, and increasing numbers of Indian students on various campuses globally, the resistance to sending an 18 year old in foreign land is reducing. And as online education becomes mainstream, I suspect that many students in India will go for programs which allow him/her to spend may be 2 years in India at lower cost and 2 years on the campus abroad as that becomes easily affordable. So my prediction is that within 2 years of post-Covid times (say, 2023 Fall admission), there will be 200,000 Indians enrolled in foreign degrees (including those online from India).</p><p>Is this a good thing for India. An exodus because of poor quality of education cannot be a good thing for any country. Spending a massive 15 billion USD in foreign destinations instead of Indian campuses is depriving our economy of that much boost. Our economy desperately needs to reduce import and increase exports. And this is an avoidable import of service. Having high quality educational institutions in India would also attract foreign students (so we not only decrease import of service, but increase export of service). As these high quality institutions will not just be for these 1-2 lakh students, but for everyone else, we will also have a better trained manpower which is desperately needed by our industry. Many high tech companies are finding it difficult to recruit high quality personnel and the growth is slow because of that.</p><p>Seems like a win-win situation for everyone. And, of course, government has been talking about greater autonomy, including in setting up fees, attracting foreign students, becoming Vishwa Guru. The system of "Institutes of Excellence" and "Graded Autonomy" were started with these goals in mind.</p><p>But surprisingly, I found a lot of opposition to the idea. The arguments were primarily these:</p><p>1. These 100,000 are mostly going out because they want to emigrate and setting up high quality institutions in India would not stop them. A lot of them are any way low merit students (couldn't get high rank in JEE), and going to low quality institutions abroad. We shouldn't worry about them.</p><p>2. Even if somehow we can retain these 100,000 in India for the UG education, they will leave for jobs/higher education abroad. So our industry/society will not benefit from them. It is best they leave early, particularly the few meritorious ones in this group, because they would waste a good seat in India by leaving India after graduation.<br /></p><p>3. High tuition will cause inequity. It is better to have everyone get poor quality education (except a few colleges like IITs which the government can afford to subsidize), than to have some colleges with poor quality education and some colleges with high quality education. The assumption here is that there can be no model of financing a high quality education in private sector, and hence private sector cannot be allowed to set up a high quality educational institution.</p><p>Let me answer these objections. The 2nd one is the easiest to handle. Would you want to have a car component factory in India if they are only exporting their products to a car manufacturer outside India. Of course, yes. Whatever economic activity we can do in India helps out economy. If a substantial portion of that 15 billion dollar can be spent in India, it is good for our economy.</p><p>As far as 1st objection is concerned, there is really no data. Everyone has different anecdotal experience. The argument that hardly anyone will stay back if there were high quality private institutions in India does not sound right because of my anecdotal experiences. When I talk to students at Ashoka University, for example, I do find many of them saying that they were considering universities abroad. Not only that, once we have something like Ashoka, we are able to attract a lot of foreign students. So even if only a few of these 100,000 will stay back in India, the high quality institutions will be good for economy by bringing in foreign students.</p><p>How about equity. I strongly believe that it is possible to come up with a model which allows people from financially weak families to study in expensive universities. For example, why can't and why shouldn't government say that anyone from a weak background will get a voucher to study and they can take that voucher to any of the good quality institutions, whether government or private. Already many of the schemes for SC/ST students allow studying in private institutions, we could extend that for EWS as well. So that pays for a significant part of the cost. The universities can get philanthropic funds to provide some scholarships. Some part of the cost can be taken care of through bank loans. There could be newer models like income sharing agreements. When we compare 100% poor quality versus 90% poor quality and 10% good quality, the latter is bad only if these 10% are all from privileged backgrounds and would cause the gap to only expand. But if we can find ways to ensure that there is representation of under-privileges students in this 10%, then it is definitely better for the country to have more well educated citizens.</p><p>Thankfully, despite the objections listed above, the government is going ahead with its policy to attract good quality private institutions even by allowing higher tuition. Some states have started allowing high quality institutions to charge high fees. And states which are rigid on this issue will not attract quality institutions and their residents will suffer. Remember quality institutions not only provide high quality education, but also do research, their alums tend to setup companies in the neighborhood of the college.</p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Dheeraj Sanghihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367519409840642182noreply@blogger.com2