My Trimester 1 end-term exams at SPJIMR ended a last week. Having spent a few months studying management at SPJIMR, I was reflecting over my engineering education experience and how it compares to my current academic experience.

The management education at SPJIMR largely revolves around understanding – most of the tests are open book/open laptop, and don’t require any rote learning. The Mumbai University exams were an altogether different experience: “mugging up” was an absolute necessity, a vast majority of the student ‘projects’ were farce, and the syllabus was completely outdated.

Today, I was going through an article by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, which speaks about two initiatives taken by the Government to tackle the primary challenges being faced by the Indian education system: (1) revamping an outdated curriculum and (2) upgrading the faculty.

While making the curriculum up-to-date and ‘upgrading’ the existing faculty are necessary, I believe that the primary challenges are two other inter-related issues:

1. Ensuring good quality of education amid the exponential increase in the number of educational institutes
2. Attracting bright minds to the teaching profession

With incompetent regulatory bodies like AICTE (which is mired in controversy and corruption) at helm, the increase in the number of educational institutes (esp. MBA and engineering colleges) over the past decade has not resulted in a proportional increase in quality of education. On the contrary, the number of ‘accredited degree mills’ has increased significantly.

There are a number of colleges (esp. MBA institutes) that charge lakhs of rupees as fee, and as a result have excellent infrastructure to showcase. These institutes have great-looking brochures that boast about the quality of education and rich academic experience on the offer. But, the truth is that the academic standards in most of these colleges are pathetic, to say the least. What’s the reason?

First, there is lack of good faculty: teaching, as an occupation, is not the primary choice for vast majority of the bright Indian students. Most of these students prefer taking up MNC jobs, which promise them a good salary and a higher standard of living. Many of those who are interested in teaching end up teaching in coaching classes, which offer them better salaries. Those belonging the academically inclined and research-oriented minority, are forced to limit themselves to the the top Indian institutes or the renowned foreign universities, where they get respect and money for what they do, in addition to good students and a wide range of opportunities.

This has become a vicious cycle: Because the salaries in most colleges are not good, these colleges attract incompetent faculty. Because the faculty is incompetent, the students are incompetent. Because both faculty and students are incompetent, the colleges do not have a sound reputation. Because the students are bad and the colleges are not reputed, the competent academics stay away from these institutes, paving way for incompetent faculty members who are ready to work at low salaries.

Issues like caste-based reservations only add to the problem.

The main challenge that India faces is ensuring that the bright minds in the nation have incentives (monetary or otherwise) to pick up teaching as a profession. This will automatically result in a better education system.