Collaboration with Indian institutions

 A few days ago, someone sent me the link to a news item, Cluster system to be initiated in nine Hyderabad colleges. 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.

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.

 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

JKLU Partners with University of Birmingham

This week we announced a partnership with University of Birmingham in UK. We are very excited about it since UoB is a top 100 university in the world 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.

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.

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.

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 our website for exact rules for scholarships in the first year, and rules for continuation in successive years).

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.

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.

If you are interested in knowing more about this or any other international partnership of JKLU, please write to international.affairs@jklu.edu.in