The twin issues of accessibility and affordability combine into a deadly double blow for parents struggling to educate their children.
Especially, for the poor, access to affordable government education is limited due to the absence of requisite physical and soft infrastructure.
At the higher education level, the Centre has targeted to achieve a 30% enrolment level in higher education by 2020.
If one in every three eligible students who have completed high school actually wants to join college, we need to create 40 million university seats.
Despite the spectacular growth in private sector education, we are still millions of seats short of the target.
What happened recently?
Apart from the constitutionally mandated reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, we have all kinds of other quotas at the State level.
Recently, in Tamil Nadu, the State government decreed that as much as 85% of engineering and medical college seats in the State will be reserved for students who had completed the qualifying exam under the State’s own board of secondary education.
The move followed a dismal showing by State-board students in the NEET for admission.
Simultaneously, in Delhi — the Aam Aadmi Party government passed a resolution in the State Assembly demanding that Delhi University reserve 80% of its seats for students from Delhi.
Why employers apply strict filters?
As hundreds of engineering seats are goes-begging, as word gets around that the graduates are proving to be unemployable in the job market.
The trouble is that our education system has never been able to convince stakeholders that it performs its human resource development function of equipping a candidate with the appropriate skills and knowledge.
Hence, employers apply stricter filters to decide on who gets a job offer and who doesn’t.
What could be the way forward?
In our country, a high school degree is just not good enough to become a doctor or engineer, which is why we have exams like NEET, JEE, and so on.
The only workable solution is to ensure uniformity in the quality of education at the school level to start with.
This means, for instance, going for a nationwide CBSE system, instead of State boards of varying quality.
