Teach to Employment

 

Teach to Employment

I came across two newspaper articles on November 29^th that send out diametrically opposite messages on education. They are titled, UGC approves guidelines on flexible duration degrees for undergraduate students and Economic historian Amiya Kumar Bagchi passes away.

University Grants Commission (UGC) said that it had formulated guidelines to universities. These offer directions as to how their undergraduate syllabus, academic content, assessment methods and any other aspect of undergraduate studies could be tailored to accommodate the duelling requirements of the fast-tracked (ADP – Accelerated Degree Programmes) and the slow-poke programmes (EDP – Extended Degree Programmes) to be offered at a university.

In this post, I will voice my opinions on what such guidelines should cover. As these are going to be put in the public domain “soon”, I am pre-empting UGC, sort of putting the cart before the horse. So be it.

I may also show how bracketing someone through her specialization is poisonous, to the individual as well as to the society.

First, the extent of these guidelines: must be in multiple volumes, articles (or, schedules, like in Indian Constitution), books, chapters and verses. Why? Because there are so many more varied disciplines, and more are in the horizon (How many imagined AI even three or four decades ago? That time it was all about Expert Systems, but without AI! I was a practitioner in those times), that have to be addressed catering to at least two different levels of competencies that are pace-dependent. One size cannot fit all.

Second, when it is generally acknowledged among the cognoscenti that grades in examinations (regular or competitive) alone are not sufficient to mark anyone as on the brilliant side of the scale and so also on the other side, how would you differentiate between candidates sitting on the fence on either edge?

If, as suggested that 10% be marked off for ADP, why not for EDP (the article does not mention about EDP in this regard)? Is it because you would not like to brand someone as laggard for the rest of their lives? Then, how are you justified in branding ADPs likewise, of course, on the positive side?  When a job prospect opens up, please be honest, whom would you opt among two candidates, one ADP and the other EDP? Is there any advantage to society if a few of them can carry out a task faster? I would say insignificant, as there is no guarantee these students will continue to outpace the others in their professions. Haste makes waste, someone said some time ago. This is the third poser to UGC.

Fourthly, who does UGC really think influences a final year high school student in their choice of the stream – medicine, commerce/finance/IT/engineering? Wake up and smell the coffee, it is the parents! Which parent would admit that their progeny is slow on the uptake? “Not mine!” the universal, shrill and loud response.

At the age of eighteen high school students are ill equipped to think beyond what is the “in” thing amongst their friends. I know what it was in my time, electrical engineering, particularly electronics and the discipline coming next? Chemical engineering.

 By the time our class graduated, there were not many more that had job offers in chemical engineering as compared to in civil engineering, perhaps with a marginally higher pay. Neither the students nor their parents saw this situation on the horizon five years earlier.  Of course, many more of the ChE stream went abroad, to the US. This was also not foreseen either by the students or by the parents.

Only a few minutes earlier, I finished reading a long article in The Atlantic that said, “[T]he thrill that comes from truth and beauty” in the context of what the students, some if not all, hunger for and find in humanities, which  they chose as their choice of study.

Hear what Richard Feynman had to say about how he lost enjoying that (from subjects tagged ‘humanities’) kind of beauty only to emphasize that science too offers that kind of beauty. In his view when it comes to beauty, he seems to subscribe to the proverb, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”. Feynman, contrary to his earlier stance that denied beauty in anything other than science, found it in studies in humanities.

My question to UGC, can you be neutral in implicitly directing students to their field of interest, at their age, eighteen years? In more prosaic terms, can you hide this societal bias and change its feeding habits, “only STEM on my plate...”? STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

About the other article I mentioned at the start. Professor Amiya Kumar Bagchi is described as a public intellectual. As I have a problem putting my finger on this categorization (an upcoming blog post) I desist from commenting on that. But, I will say he was an institution builder, The Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata. This was in the later part of his life. What was he in his earlier days?

A Game Theorist, a highly mathematical, data driven and specialized field of economics when he started out on his Ph.D work in Cambridge University, but ended up being an economic historian of a particular hue, covering macro economics and historical data.   The shift was on the basis of advice from one of his mentors.

UGC, will you allow just such a shift in UG programmes? You would, rather, slot a student for her life, I think. You may respond by noting that in Prof. Bagchi’s case the shift happened during his Ph.D.

It is unfortunate you fell into a trap that I set deliberately for you!

I know someone who graduated from Yale University, majoring in Economics, took, I think, one year of remedial course to catch up on basics of engineering, and finished his Ph.D in, you cannot guess, Mechanical Engineering!

Another friend, graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Anna University, went to the US, grudgingly got his M.S., and then shifted to Mass Communications, and must even now be teaching in a university in the city of New York.

Could these people have had a chance to change horses in midstream and follow their passions under your ADPs and EDPs? I think not.

Take these as my comments that I do not even deign to put them up in the official space that would come up “soon”.