Subsidy on MTech programs to be reduced

Last week, IIT Council has taken a series of very important decisions. One of the most important decision was to reduce the subsidy on MTech programs in IITs. It was decided that over the next three years, the tuition fee will be increased to make it same as that for BTech program, which is currently, Rs. 2 lakhs per annum. The current tuition fee is Rs. 50,000 per annum. However, students who are getting an assistantship (which is almost all the students), pay only Rs. 10,000 per annum. So, for all practical purposes, the tuition fee is being hiked 20 times over the next three years. The reduction of subsidy does not stop there. It is also proposed that the financial assistance of Rs. 12,400 per month that is given to all those students who have qualified in GATE (which means pretty much all the students in IITs) will also be stopped. Of course, IITs can provide support to some students by recruiting them as Teaching Assistants, Research Project staff, etc.

When I saw the news, I thought it was a step in the right direction with some minor caveats about a proper implementation strategy. However, over the next couple of days, media quoted three IIT Directors regarding their reasons for reduction of subsidy (all three had identical reason), and I was aghast, to say the least.

They argued that a lot of people join MTech programs and then leave when they get a job. That leaves a large number of vacancies in their MTech programs which could have been used to train other interested students. And that this increase in tuition and removal of assistantship will discourage those students who are not serious about the MTech program.

Really! This is only to discourage non-serious students. Would this not discourage serious students.

Let us look at the issue of students dropping out. Most of the students drop out in the first couple of months, because of PSU jobs being offered in the months of August/September timeframe. What is the extra cost for non-serious students: Rs. 95,000 extra in tuition, and Rs. 24,800 in not getting assistantship for two months. That is roughly Rs. 1.2 lakhs. Now, let us look at serious students. They pay Rs. 95,000 extra for all four semesters, and do not get Rs. 12,400 for all 24 months. Their penalty is about Rs. 6.8 lakhs. So in order to discourage non-serious students, you put a penalty of Rs. 1.2 lakhs on non-serious students and a penalty of Rs. 6.8 lakhs on serious students. How wonderful their logic is.

Could there be other ways to handle the non-serious students. If Rs. 1.2 lakhs is all it takes to dissuade a non-serious MTech student, what about taking a deposit of Rs. 1.2 lakhs from all students, and returning the money to those who graduate in time. Make it Rs. 1.5 lakhs, if your data shows that people leave after 3-4 months.

There are other possible solutions. If you want to admit 50 students, and historically you are seeing 40% attrition, and only 30 remain, why not admit 70-80 students. Yes, some years in some departments you might end up with more than 50 students, but in a large system some small perturbations can be handled easily. This is something that I have suggested dozens of times in different meetings, social media, in my blogs, over the last decade.

There is yet another solution. Shift GATE exam. Currently, the result comes out in the second half of March. PSUs despite being requested repeatedly take their own time to recruit. What if the result was out in January or December. PSUs would have enough time to complete their recruitment before July. In most universities, the core part of the program is completed by 3rd year, and 4th year is mainly electives and projects. So holding GATE at the end of 7th semester or even in the middle of 7th semester or even at the end of 6th semester is fine. In fact, holding GATE early would help a lot of things to be done well in time. It will help PMRF recruitment, your MTech/PhD recruitment, and also many students who are confused between industry and higher studies will move towards higher studies if they get a good GATE score before they get a job.

I wonder if any of these options were considered by IIT Directors.

A reader of this blog is bound to ask me this question. If the logic of IIT Directors is so flawed, then why did I welcome this reduction of subsidy on the first day. So here are my reasons for the same (some of them were informally discussed in a meeting of Deans of Academic Affairs of various IITs more than 5 years ago):

Long time (a couple of decades) ago, the PhD programs in India were very small, particularly in Engineering. MTech students were the primary research manpower we had access to, and creating new knowledge, solving problems is important to any society. Therefore, it was important to attract the best graduates to MTech programs. The best students would not want to be dependent on their parents after completing a college degree. Hence they needed large subsidies, both in terms of reduced or no tuition, and supporting them with a stipend. Today, the times have changed. Most engineering departments have a fair number of PhD students and PhD applicants every semester.

Also, for admission to PhD programs in Engineering, most universities required an MTech degree and hence keeping that pipeline full of best students was important. No longer. Most good places today would admit students after their under-graduate degrees to the PhD program.

Whether we like it or not, MTech programs in India are not considered "higher" than BTech programs. That is, it is hugely unlikely that a BTech from an IIT will join MTech program in the same (or similar era) IIT. You mostly find BTechs from Tier 2 institutions join MTech programs in Tier 1 institutions since they want to become equal to BTechs of Tier 1 institutions. Or BTechs from Tier 3 institutions will join MTech programs in Tier 2 institutions for the same reason. This has huge value addition for them which is reflected in their placement in the job market. Since it is only a 2-year program and as a result, the costs are lower, and there is a better predictability in terms of value addition, it is easy to take an educational loan and repay it, which is not so in case of under-graduate programs. Please note that educational loans were not all that prevalent 20-30 years ago, but they are now more easily available.

Further, as of now, since all MTech students are paid a stipend, most faculty members in IITs recruit non-students as their project staff who may leave as soon as they get a job. In fact, that uncertainty is far more detrimental to our research efforts. Now, I would hope that most faculty members would like to recruit MTech students as project employees. So anyone who does not want to take a loan or be dependent on their parents and have genuine interest and capability to do research would get recruited as a project staff (except that he would have to pay all the first semester charges anyway). So even if one wanted to consider MTech as a source of research manpower, their support should have depended on the quality of their research and not be without any performance criteria. This decision will improve research projects output in IITs.

If we do not consider MTech as primary research manpower, then the obvious question is whether under-graduate education is a more important public good, or post-graduate education is more important public good. I am sure there is no doubt that first degree is more of a public good than 2nd degree and hence the subsidy should be higher for 1st degree than 2nd degree.

Of course, any service provided by a public institution should be accessible to people on the basis of their merit, and hence appropriate steps need to be taken to support those few who may come from financially weak background and are unable to afford the new tuition. How will that structure work is yet to be seen, but I am confident that IITs will come up with some model.

So I am in favor of the decision but not for the reason that IITs seem to have done it.

Added on 9/10/19

Received an anonymous email giving an interesting reason why subsidy at the current high levels should continue for MTech programs. 

Only IIT under-graduate students get really high level of subsidy. Till now, for someone who got a few marks less in JEE, there was a second chance to get similar high quality of education with high level of subsidy. Now that chance is being taken away. Should India only support those students who do well in JEE, or should others get a second chance is an important question.

My reply:

It is an important question, and certainly students in India either should have access to quality education in very large numbers, or should get multiple chances to get access to quality education if the quality is going to remain limited. But we need to look at the details of how individual IITs would implement this. In any case, the maximum tuition will be same as UG tuition. So the same level of subsidy (in fact, higher, since MTech courses may require more specialized labs) will be granted by having same tuition. The way it is likely to pan out is that one may have to bear the first semester costs without financial assistance (except that tuition waivers for SC/ST/PD and BPL families will be there, as for UG students) but from second semester onward, most students will get either TAship or RAship, which may include some stipend and tuition amount. I recall that limiting the budget drastically for financial assistance was tried in IIT Kanpur (perhaps all IITs) around late 90s. I was responsible in CSE department for raising financial support for MTech students from external sources. We raised enough sponsored projects from industry that there was not a reduction of even one student in CSE department. So I believe that students doing well in Tier 2 institutions will continue to get a reasonable chance at a low enough cost to study in Tier 1 institutions even after this.

Compulsory Attendance at Indian Universities

The college life in India is considered as an extension of school life, not by students themselves, but by elders, including parents and teachers. One of the ways in which this manifests itself is the attendance policy in Indian universities. A large number of universities would insist that attendance be marked of every student coming to a class in every class of every course, including labs and tutorials. There is a certain minimum requirement of attendance, mostly 75 percent.

If a student attends less classes than that, there is a severe consequence, usually not allowed to take the final exam and given a fail grade in the course. In many universities, a fail grade would amount to a student being marked as a "backlogger" and no company coming for placement would touch him by a 10 feet pole. So the student not only has to repeat the course, which sometimes may mean spending a semester extra in the system, paying extra tuition, delaying earnings from a job, but it may also mean that there is no job through campus placement. Basically, the punishment for missing a few boring classes is very harsh with no consequence whatsoever to the teacher who delivered those boring lectures. After all, all teachers hired through proper selection procedures must be assumed to be great, and all students missing a class must be bad students.

Over the last 25 years of my academic career, I have had discussions on attendance in several forums and with a large number of colleagues in different institutes, and frankly, I still haven't figured out the genesis of capital punishment for missing classes. Here are the reasons that I have heard so far.

If students attend classes. they learn better. Let us assume this to be true. Well, if they don't attend and consequently don't learn, shouldn't the grades or marks reflect their learning. As a teacher, I want my students to learn, and if they don't attend my class and are not performing well, I can counsel them, and if they still don't learn, I must assign them the grade that reflects their learning. How many faculty members would take the pains of counseling students. How many faculty members would give a Fail grade to someone who has not learnt. If you don't want to do either of these two things, then forcing attendance is not for helping students, but for helping yourself.

Also note that many faculty members will also argue that if someone was ill, or if someone had a family member die during the semester or had other "genuine reasons", then we could be lenient with them. These people are not realizing (or perhaps they are realizing and still believe that it is the right thing to do) that they are asking for grades to be based on sympathy or "genuine reasons" and not academic learning. Consider two students. Both have attended 70% classes. Both have identical marks in all exams, quizzes, projects, etc. One had his father die during the semester and submits death certificate. The other had his father ill and submits medical certificates of his father. What would we do. We can't question the death certificate. (I am deliberately taking the most extreme reason to make a point.) But all medical certificates, particularly from a private doctor, are assumed to be fake. So, one students is barred from taking the final exam and is awarded a Fail grade. The other student is allowed to take the final exam, and passes the course. What have we done. Between two identical students, we have given fail grade to one, and pass grade to the other, simply because we had sympathy with one and not the other.

There are aspects of learning that happens by attending classes which cannot be evaluated. This could be true for some courses and may not be true for all courses. Can we have attendance requirements in some courses and not the others. And even in courses where some learning happens in classroom which cannot be evaluated, may be such learning can be quantified in terms of fraction of the grade. So just like we have in our mind various learning outcomes and we evaluate learning of those learning outcomes through exams, quizzes, projects, presentations, assignments, and so on, and assign some weight to learning of each of those outcomes, we could similarly assign some weight to learning of those outcomes which cannot be evaluated through traditional means. So if that weight is 10% or 20%, then absence can be penalized in proportion of those weights. Why award a capital punishment when a small deduction of marks will take care of matching learning and grades.

What is very interesting is that lately the regulatory bodies are almost forcing the universities to give students credit for online courses offered through Swayam portal. In such courses, the student studies online from wherever s/he wants, whenever s/he wants. That is, there are no classes. In some instances, there may be some discussion sessions at best. So one can learn well without attending a single class in 20% of the courses. But in the other 80% of the courses, one can only learn if one attends at least 75% of the classes. At the very least, this is an acceptance of the principle that in some courses, attendance is not required for learning. Once we accept this, shouldn't we then consider each course carefully to decide whether attendance is necessary for learning in that course.

There are non-academic learning which are important for careers. For example, you learn to discuss, communicate, dress up, pay respect to your elders (teachers) and what not. Let us assume that all these are indeed important for career growth, and we want to encourage them to learn these during their college days. Why not just put a small monetary fine. Students from poorer background will find it difficult to bunk classes. And rich kids, you don't have to worry about their careers. Their rich parents will take care of that. Let them pay fine and get away with it. May be the fine can be exponentially increasing with every course in which there is lack of attendance.

It is the discipline, stupid! The most commonly heard complaint is that if attendance is not forced then campus romance will flourish. After all, what will they do with all the free time. And that is somehow bad. And that, of course, will rise to indiscipline. Empty mind is devil's workshop or something like that. Again, let us assume that this is a genuine concern. But can we avoid this indiscipline by having a smaller penalty. Should capital punishment be the only penalty for missing some classes (and causing indiscipline in campus).

I hope someone can come up with a rational argument in favor of compulsory attendance, one which explains why online courses are fine, why missing classes due to some reasons is fine, and why a smaller punishment than failing the course and barring the student from campus placement will not work.

Academic Advising

The college life is very different from school life. In schools, most of the decisions are taken for you by teachers and/or parents. In any case, there are few academic decisions to be taken. Except at the beginning of 11th class, most of the courses are fixed for you. And that makes transitioning to a college harder.

Academic advising involves a trained staff or a faculty member guiding the student on the choice of courses (in case of electives), what courses can be done in any given semester (given the issue of pre-requisites, and graduation requirements of the program), etc. This becomes even more important if the student has failed a few courses and may not be satisfying the pre-requisites of many advanced courses. Besides, universities sometimes offer choice of second major, minor, dual-degree and other flexibility in the programs. Students are not just confused about the rules around them, but also whether they are consistent with the educational goals of the student. There could also be issues regarding whether to take a break and do a semester long internship, and finally what should they be doing after graduation. Should they go for higher studies or a job or something else. Which place to study. What kind of job, and so on.

As should be clear from above, the academic advising becomes important when a student has options but if left alone may not exercise those options in the best self interest. For a long time, Indian institutions did not give many options to students. You got admitted to a specific program - so you don't need help in choosing your major. You had a fixed curriculum, with fixed courses to be done every semester. So no choice there. May be you had an elective where only 2-3 courses will be offered and one had to take one course. There was no flexibility of second major, minor, etc., so no decisions to be taken. In such a system, only those students needed advise who had failed some courses and needed to restructure their programs. Academic advising in India, therefore, has traditionally been limited to handling academically deficient students.

Over the last two decades, things have changed quite a bit. With UGC and AICTE prescribing choice based credit systems for all academic programs, students have many decisions to take every semester. But the systems for providing this help have not been developed. In good colleges (like IITs), not only there are a lot of electives and they can do courses in which ever order they want, but there are options like minor, second major, dual degrees, etc. But the students are left to seek advice from their seniors alone. They can advise based on their own experiences and hence cannot really help another student with all options.

The colleges have given up on this extremely important responsibility by stating that the students are adults and ought to know what is best for them. This is quite irresponsible since even adults do not always know what is best for them, and even worse, may not even have all the information to make an informed decision. This becomes even worse in India where the websites are often not updated, and getting the information itself can become a project.

Consider an example. A student had 14 courses to do to complete the graduation requirement. He has been a somewhat academically weak student and has never performed well even with 5 courses in a semester. He planned to do 6 courses in each of the two semesters and two summer courses and thus hoped to graduate in a year. Of course, if he fails even one course in this plan, he will have to stay back for a semester necessarily. If someone had advised him properly and told him that the chance of succeeding in this plan are very slim and hence he should plan for 3 semesters and a summer to complete these. In the alternate plan, he would have done only 4 courses in each of the three semesters ad two courses in summer.  With lower academic load, he was more likely to learn better, with hopefully better grades, and likely better future options. But he registered for 6 courses and failed. So the transcript has more failures. The pass courses have poor grades and his confidence is shattered and he will have to spend that extra semester any way.

So many final year students (even those who have no backlogs) regret their decisions of doing something or not doing something. They wish someone had told them about the options early on. But with advising being so closely linked to poor academic performance, they never did approach anyone for advice.

I recall that when I was Chairman of Senate UnderGraduate Committee (SUGC) at IIT Kanpur, I had organized an advising session for 2nd semester students where faculty members from different departments told them about the excitement and opportunities in their respective disciplines. At the end of the advising session, so many students chose to change their program and unlike the normal behavior where most students apply for change to "more popular" programs, that year a lot of them applied to change to "less popular" programs since they realized that this is more in line with their interest and popularity of a program does not really matter for their career.

Most good universities (and even no so good ones) abroad invest a lot in academic advising. Happier graduates who attain their goals are more likely to be good brand ambassadors and good donors later in life. Early detection of possible academic problems can result in interventions before the problem becomes too serious and the student's program is terminated. I hope we too can invest some more resources into this extremely important service in our universities.