A few days ago, The Hindu had this article, A.P. fares poorly in employability of engineers, http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/ap-fares-poorly-in-employability-of-engineers/article5639970.ece.
I sent the following comment to the letters email of The Hindu (for the print edition):
I am very happy to see the persistent work done by Aspiring Minds to draw attention to the pathetic employability situation for engineering graduates from Indian, especially South Indian, colleges and universities.
I think its CEO, Himanshu Aggarwal, captures the situation perfectly when he says, “States like A.P. and Tamil Nadu, which have the highest number of engineering colleges, continue to have lowest employability. States need to be conscious towards better education quality rather than building more capacity”.
Hopefully the higher education policy makers/regulators and administrators will be able to step in and ensure that suitable career growth incentives are provided to academics who provide good education to students instead of such career growth incentives being focused only on research publications and research projects (with large amount of tax payer grant money). I am not against academic research but the way most academic administrators and regulators seem to focus on research and ignore educating students to become employable is deeply shocking to me. In my humble opinion, the first and foremost duty of an academic should be to teach and teach well - research should be secondary, no matter how much grant money or fame is involved.
--- end comment ---
The above comment did not get accepted for publication in the print edition of The Hindu. However, a shorter version of the above comment (due to the limitation of web page comment size to 1000 characters) on the web page of the article (link given above) was accepted by the moderator and is now shown on it (under my name - Ravi S. Iyer).
Yesterday the "Education Plus" supplement of The Hindu carried an article on similar lines, Engg. graduates lack domain skills, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-educationplus/engg-graduates-lack-domain-skills/article5646438.ece. I found the following extract in it to be quite significant:
“It is a fact that majority (of) colleges have totally neglected teaching quality. Some blame shortage of good teachers while others genuinely want to hire good teachers but fail to do so due to their non-availability,” agrees N.V. Ramana Rao, Registrar, JNTU Hyderabad.
--- end extract ---
The Registrar of JNTU Hyderabad (an important technical university of Andhra Pradesh) openly acknowledging that majority of (engineering) colleges have totally neglected teaching quality is a vital acknowledgement of a serious teaching crisis in engineering colleges of Andhra Pradesh. Now who can fix the problem? I don't claim to have all the answers for this tough problem. But a no-brainer suggestion to help solve the problem would be to provide career-growth incentive to those academics who are good teachers instead of focusing only on providing career-growth to those who acquire significant project grant money and publish research papers. For this, the UGC/AICTE regulations for promotion of academics must be changed to introduce some measures of teaching quality, even if they are not perfect, and provide career-growth incentive for those academics who achieve appropriate measure of teaching quality even if they do not have research publications. Let us face it, there is a conflict of interest between teaching and research in Indian academia today, and the poor students face the negative effect of this conflict of interest.
I sent the following comment to the letters email of The Hindu (for the print edition):
I am very happy to see the persistent work done by Aspiring Minds to draw attention to the pathetic employability situation for engineering graduates from Indian, especially South Indian, colleges and universities.
I think its CEO, Himanshu Aggarwal, captures the situation perfectly when he says, “States like A.P. and Tamil Nadu, which have the highest number of engineering colleges, continue to have lowest employability. States need to be conscious towards better education quality rather than building more capacity”.
Hopefully the higher education policy makers/regulators and administrators will be able to step in and ensure that suitable career growth incentives are provided to academics who provide good education to students instead of such career growth incentives being focused only on research publications and research projects (with large amount of tax payer grant money). I am not against academic research but the way most academic administrators and regulators seem to focus on research and ignore educating students to become employable is deeply shocking to me. In my humble opinion, the first and foremost duty of an academic should be to teach and teach well - research should be secondary, no matter how much grant money or fame is involved.
--- end comment ---
The above comment did not get accepted for publication in the print edition of The Hindu. However, a shorter version of the above comment (due to the limitation of web page comment size to 1000 characters) on the web page of the article (link given above) was accepted by the moderator and is now shown on it (under my name - Ravi S. Iyer).
Yesterday the "Education Plus" supplement of The Hindu carried an article on similar lines, Engg. graduates lack domain skills, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-educationplus/engg-graduates-lack-domain-skills/article5646438.ece. I found the following extract in it to be quite significant:
“It is a fact that majority (of) colleges have totally neglected teaching quality. Some blame shortage of good teachers while others genuinely want to hire good teachers but fail to do so due to their non-availability,” agrees N.V. Ramana Rao, Registrar, JNTU Hyderabad.
--- end extract ---
The Registrar of JNTU Hyderabad (an important technical university of Andhra Pradesh) openly acknowledging that majority of (engineering) colleges have totally neglected teaching quality is a vital acknowledgement of a serious teaching crisis in engineering colleges of Andhra Pradesh. Now who can fix the problem? I don't claim to have all the answers for this tough problem. But a no-brainer suggestion to help solve the problem would be to provide career-growth incentive to those academics who are good teachers instead of focusing only on providing career-growth to those who acquire significant project grant money and publish research papers. For this, the UGC/AICTE regulations for promotion of academics must be changed to introduce some measures of teaching quality, even if they are not perfect, and provide career-growth incentive for those academics who achieve appropriate measure of teaching quality even if they do not have research publications. Let us face it, there is a conflict of interest between teaching and research in Indian academia today, and the poor students face the negative effect of this conflict of interest.
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