This year, Delhi University has pointed to the shape of things to come in higher education. While primary and secondary education remain essentially broken, having failed to adequately serve the majority of the population, they are yet producing enough aspirants to cause a demand crisis in higher education. With cutoff marks at Delhi University slowly tending towards 100 per cent, the system that has served students and institutions for three decades is failing.
It is encouraging students to try their luck overseas, reinvigorating the brain drain precisely when it is being reversed by uncertainties and visa restrictions abroad. It is also urging students to fall back on quotas for extra-curricular activities, though the university system in India does not prioritise them. A promising basketball player in the US will be sought out by leading universities, but this does not happen in India. However, cutoffs are not the problem because the extraordinary pressure on seats would persist even if they were reduced to zero per cent. Cutoffs simply reduce the number of candidates that universities and colleges have to process. The real problem is the widening gap between the demand and supply of higher education.
This gap can be narrowed only by the rapid deployment of hundreds, if not thousands, of new institutions. Teaching shops should be discouraged and standardisation promoted, so they should be rooted in existing educational canons. The government has tried to get up to speed by pushing the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill of 2010. Despite a cabinet nod, it languishes. To bypass the need for legislation, it has also called upon the UGC to formulate guidelines for twinning Indian universities with their peers overseas, a policy that is followed in technical education. However, fresh legislation is necessary for a sweeping change, for which the government must convince Parliament that the now-visible crisis in Delhi University is only a forerunner of a general disaster in higher education.