Dr Kripa Shankar,
Vice Chancellor, Gautam Buddh Technical University

Higher education cannot flower without there being a solid base of lower levels of education

First of all, we need to understand the meaning of higher education. Higher education normally refers to a degree that is above the  usual crop of Bachelor degrees. The focus has to be on Master’s degrees and PhD’s. Today we are having a rather vibrant display of  bachelor’s degree, the case can certainly be made that commercialization has crept into the under graduate programmes.
Our under graduate education has become a business like affair. We do have access to private universities, online education and ICT  applications, but this does not match the purpose and scope of higher education. In under graduate programmes, creative thinking is  in the form of online lectures and notes prepared by someone else. The higher education programmes have to be more innovative to  keep pace with the graduate programmes. The scenario for employability of students after higher education is quite lacklustre. Efforts  have to be made to bring about an improvement.
The higher education space needs lot of fresh thinking. We can’t have students spending another 5 or 10 years of their life in education,  when they have already been studying for years.
A good higher education programme will naturally demand the fundamental revision of the education from the elementary level  onwards. Higher education cannot flower without there being a solid base of lower levels of education.
Higher education must not be conducted only with the aim of getting better jobs. Higher education should not be left in private hands;  it has to be supported by the government, as building higher education institutions is a capital intensive activity. Perhaps we need to  have a national policy on higher education that is funded by the public money.