Placement & Education: Wake up Call …

“The purpose of a B-school is to impart learning and not just to place a student. But come placement season and students’ attention is taken away from learning,”

........K Mamkoottam, new dean of Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), Delhi University.

This is true and valid for each institute may it be the Engineering college or a management institute. This is a catch 22 situation for all. On one side their admissions depend on the placement record and placement record depends on the quality of education and students. Many institutes are doing many things to build the placement record leaving the academic side of education aside.

I have seen institutes using their entire female student force to make calls to various corporate houses just to invite them for placements and the male student force to drop placement brochures. I remember I received 30 or more calls from the same institute and 12 brochures. The entire last six months starting from the mid of the 3rd sem is focussed on placement. This is a story of a B-/ C grade institute which takes more than 1000 students in different institutes (under the same group). Students are promised a placement with god knows what figures of past placements. Ultimately the placement record is dismal. The average salary of whatever mentioned at the time of placement is nowhere there and the numbers are bad. I guess this the same story across.

I sympathise with Mr. Mamkoottam, but i sympathise more with the students who keep a blind faith on the HUGE color adverts of the institutes for admissions.

Unfortunately our education systems hasn't got it yet. There seems to be no or limited linkage of academics to the job/occupation and a career. Outcome of education is just shelved under the carpet and shown as degrees earned and not employment. Very few institutes do talk occupations, careers, employment, life long learning in real sense. Its not understood by student what waiting for them at the end of their education. Educational institute have become a degree churning factories. By the way they also agree.

Why are we unable to do anything. Today's news was a sad one. Over 100 students of the Air Hostess Academy (AHA) gathered in front of the institute office on JM road, Pune on Monday protesting against the management for not providing them employment and certificates on completion of the course. Large number of police guarded the premises of the academy to avoid any untoward incident. Meanwhile, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) also came to the academy and demanded action against the management. Parents of students, also present on the spot, demanded action.

I guess this shouldn't happen to the so called management institutes/engineering colleges who charge in lakhs luring students on their displayed placement percentage. We calculated the investment of a student for MBA, its turns out to be anywhere between 10 lakhs to 16 lakhs. I am sure one day parents are going to questions, if not parents the students would certainly question. Also this will take a POLITICAL turn and will get into a complicated mess if don't tackle it NOW. Last time MNS took a huge political mileage in Pune by saying that there's no marathi manoos in the MBA institutes.. now it will be for no placements.

Sometime back we wrote about how admissions are done in Pune, people are waiting in queues to get their kids admitted with even paying below the table money. Institutes boast of people waiting in queue for admissions, but this may not be for long. Thanks to my favourite Mr.Kapil Sibal, theres going to be a flurry of institutes and central universities lined up to increase access for education all over India. Tomorrow if its IIT Ranchi Vs Sinhagad engineering college, it will obviously be the choice of IIT Ranchi than any xyz college in Pune.

Wake up institutes.Take these actions before its too late. Build Career Development Programs: Its important to build career planning and development programs as a part of curriculum. Build employability capabilities among students: Help students build employability capabilities so that job search and employment looks easy. Link Education to Outcome: Its important for the institute to help the students internalise their academic efforts to what career they plan to pursue.

LiveJournal Tags: Dheya,Employability,Placement,Management Institutes,Protests,FMS,Engineering Colleges

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Diwali & stories..

May this Diwali bring loads happiness, growth and success. Wish you and your family a HAPPY DIWALI. Have a safe and pollution free Diwali.Here is something about the origin of Diwali. Enjoy Reading..

The Origin of Diwali.

The origins of Diwali lie in ancient India as a festival celebrated after an important harvest. It was a good time for the cultivators to celebrate. The granaries were full at the end of a long monsoon, and winter was still to come. They paid off their debts, celebrated and started afresh.

Gradually, the cultivators became landowners and traders and Diwali became a time for them to change their annual accounting books. Their new year started with Diwali. This is the reason why Diwali is also the festival of Goddess Lakshmi, who personifies prosperity and wealth. Lakshmi pujas are held in most Hindu homes, especially in the north…

The legend of Dhanavantari: physician of gods

According to mythology he was the physician of the gods who is believed to have emerged with a pot of 'amrit' (nectar) during the 'samudra manthan' or the churning of the ocean, when the gods and the demons fought with each other. It is also believed that Lakshmi emerged from the churning of the ocean and, therefore, her worship forms a big part of the Diwali celebrations.

South India:

the myth of Narasimha In South India, the story linked to Diwali is that of Narasimha, the man-lion incarnation of Vishnu, who is known as the God of Preservation among the Hindu Trinity that is made up of Brahma (the God of Creation) and Shiva (the God of Destruction).

According to legend, Vishnu incarnates himself as Narasimha (man-lion) to rid the earth of an evil king Hiranyakshipu. The king had received a boon from Brahma that he could not be conquered by either god or human for the simple reason that he could be killed neither by beast nor man, neither inside nor outside, neither during the day nor at night.

When Hiranyakshipu's atrocities became unbearable, the gods turned to Vishnu for help. Vishnu reincarnated himself as Narasimha, half man and half lion and, therefore, neither man nor beast.

 

As Narasimha, he killed Hiranyakshipu with his claws at the threshold (which is neither inside nor outside), and just before daybreak (a time when it is neither day nor night). That way he managed to get around the boon given to the king.
Source: Pitara.com

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2,600 Seats Lying Vacant In Orissa’s Pvt Engg Colleges

Financial Express – 4th August 09.

This makes me wonder, if we really need a JEE. I guess JEE is creating a great barrier for aspirants. I guess its a competitive exam to define grading of students abilities. However there has been no proven correlation to the students career success and such grading. The solution to this is each institute conducting their own short entrance approval test using more psychometric testing tools. At the same time working on their own branding with a positive display of academic and placement successes.

Bhubaneswar: : Chaos and uncertainty have proved disastrous for the promoters of private engineering colleges in Orissa. With the tussle going on between the newly formed Biju Patnaik University of Technology (BPUT) and Orissa Private Engineering College Association (OPECA) during admission time over seat quotas and fee fixation, students and their parents have become more cautious about admissions t his year.

As many as 2,600 seats in private engineering colleges are lying vacant as students who qualified in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) refused to take admission. While about 21,000 students were called for counselling, only 6,176 students turned up. Besides this, 1,500 students have taken admission under the management quota.

With the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) increasing 1,500 seats in engineering colleges this year, the number of seats in 37 engineering colleges in the state has gone up to 10,500.

The tussle between BUPT and OPECA started when the latter resolved to conduct separate entrance tests for admission into management seats. However, BPUT insisted that no merit list, except JEE, would be entertained for admission into the colleges.

This led to confusion and thus marred the admission prospects of these private engineering colleges. Moreover, the fee hike this year in private colleges has also made students rethink about taking admission. “The students are shying away from engineering courses because there are not enough job opportunities and the overall expenses have gone up” admits state industries minister, KV Singhdeo, who is also the chairman of the JEE Board.

He, however, said that seats lying vacant was not a new trend in the state. About 2,000 seats were vacant in engineering colleges last year.

This year, the worst hit are colleges imparting Master in Computer Application (MCA) courses. The uncertainty in information technology job market has reflected the mood in during the admission season. Only 650 of the 2,622 seats in the engineering and MCA colleges in the state were filled up this year.

Meanwhile, looking at the seat vacancy position, OPECA has urged the state government to allow it to admit students outside the JEE list.

The government and BPUT should relax the JEE guidelines to take more and more students in the professional courses, says OPECA president Kaminikanta Patnaik. “If the admission norms can be relaxed for MCA, why can’t the same be done for all other engineering subjects”, he adds.

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Set the campus free

by Ila Patnaik

Kapil Sibal, the new minister for human resource development, has his first task cut out for him. He acquires a portfolio so ill-served by his predecessors and one that has such a critical bearing on India realising its social and political aspirations that he must hit the ground running.


The HRD minister needs to bring about a new policy framework for higher education in India. Thousands of young Indians, unable to find a decent university education in India, are flocking to universities abroad. Of the multitude of students coming out of schools, a substantial fraction want a university education. The license raj in university education has stalled the growth in university seats of even a minimum acceptable quality. The affluent struggle to find the money to send their children to study abroad, and the poor struggle to access the 10,000 seats at the Indian Institutes of Technology. Sibal’s focus must be to create a policy framework whereby a large number of high quality universities spring up.



The existing framework for running universities in India has been tried for many decades, and has been shown to have failed. In striking contrast, China has been able to get far ahead of India in building universities. If progress has to be made in India, every assumption of the HRD ministry now needs to be questioned. In addition to removing entry barriers against new private or foreign universities, the four new ideas that need to be brought in are: autonomy of universities (including on budget); reduced core funding combined with more competitive research grants; a flexible salary structure; end of government interference in recruitment of staff and students.


The best universities in India, those that we are particularly proud of, are not well rated by international standards. The Times of London’s Higher Education Supplement ranks universities around the world. In 2008, their data showed IIT Delhi at rank 154 and IIT Bombay at rank 174 globally. No other university in India made this top 200 list. By way of comparison, China has universities at ranks 50, 56, 113, 141, 143 and 144. In other words, China has six universities which are superior to IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay.


Last week, the NBER Digest carried an article by Linda Gorman summarising a research paper by Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Caroline M. Hoxby, Andreu Mas-Colell and Andre Sapir which investigates the sources of success in building universities. The paper is immensely useful in thinking about how to build universities in India; it should be on the top of Kapil Sibal’s reading list.


The paper finds that the first element that pulls down the rank of a university is the process of budgetary approval from the government. The average European university that sets its own budget has a rank of 200 while the average European university that needs approval from the government has a rank of 316. In other words, giving a university autonomy to set its own budget on average yields an improvement of 116 ranks. The message for India: in order to obtain high-quality universities, we need to give universities autonomy.


The second important feature is the role of government in funding universities. They find that each percentage point of the university’s budget that comes from core government funds reduces the rank of the university by 3.2 points. The message for India: in order to obtain high-quality universities, we need to give them less money through core funding from the government.


The third issue is inequality in wages. European universities which pay the same wages to all faculty of the same seniority and rank have an average rank of 322. Universities which vary wages for each faculty member and pay different salaries to two people of the same seniority and rank, have an average rank of 213. In other words, flexible HR policies yield an improvement of 109 ranks. The message for India: freeing up HR policies is essential to building high-quality universities.


The fourth issue is the recruitment process for students. Universities which are free to recruit undergraduate students as they like have a rank 156 points higher than those where the government determines the composition of students. The message for India: universities should have full freedom to recruit students as they like, without interference from the government.


The fifth issue is competition. Each percentage point of a university’s budget that comes from a competitive research grants process yields an improvement in its ranking by 6.5. The message for India: the “core funding” money that is taken away from universities should be turned into a competitive process through which a panel of Nobel laureates choose which universities are the most deserving for getting research funding. Defence, space and atomic energy contracts are also ideal sources of meritocratic research funding, because these customers care about results and will not throw money towards a process of political patronage.


Variation across state governments in the United States shows that the best universities come up in states which allow more autonomy, such as independent purchasing systems, no state approval of the university budget, and complete control of personnel hiring and pay.


There is only one university in India which has autonomy on budget setting, recruits its own students, has flexible HR policies, etc., and this is the Indian School of Business. It is perhaps logical that, in 2008, ISB was ranked the 20th best MBA programme by The Financial Times, and in 2009 this rank was improved to 15. None of the IIMs feature anywhere. This is a striking contrast between enormous state expenditures on the IIMs failing to yield measurable results when compared with an alternative which has landed India in the top rankings of the world.


Universities will not be built overnight. But the framework that can lay the foundations for this change can be laid under UPA II over the next 100 days.



The writer is a senior fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, Delhi express@expressindia.com

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