Author Archives: Soumya Mishra

Affiliation: Weakest Link in South Asian University System?

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In the past few decades, universities in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh have adapted the college affiliation system they inherited from United Kingdom and allowed an increasing number of private colleges to open under the academic control of public universities. Under the affiliation system, a public university sets the academic standards (including a standard curriculum, examination papers and student evaluations) and grants private colleges permission to operate as long as they follow these standards. This arrangement allowed the governments to meet the increasing higher education demand without investing in new universities and still exercising quality control. The reason this system causes concern is that most colleges have no academic autonomy or flexibility under this system; resource starved universities often don’t have the wherewithal to update curriculum, conduct continuous evaluations or conduct examinations on time. The rigidity and sheer scale of these university systems makes them insensitive to labour market demands and difficult to reform.
  

The table above shows some of the largest universities in different South Asian countries in terms of enrollments and number of affiliated colleges. It illustrates the magnitude of the problem in the four countries and just how big the universities can get. Though American university systems can be comparable, the key difference is that every campus, department and faculty member in these universities enjoys much more academic autonomy and discretion than their counterparts in South Asia. Also, one large American system usually serves the whole state, while Indian states can have up to 6 or 7 such universities per state,Pakistani provinces can have 2 or 3 such universities, and Bangladesh affiliates all its undergraduate colleges through one university.

If you wish to read more about the affiliation system and it’s impact on quality of higher educaion, this report is a great place to start with: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/127201468294337164/Affiliated-colleges-in-South-Asia-is-quality-expansion-possible

Higher Education and Unemployment : East Asia

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As we begin to delve deeper into higher education in East Asian countries, our group would like to present some data on an economic aspect that is closely related to higher education, but isn’t always discussed in relation with it: Unemployment among the educated. We came across an interesting article (http://theconversation.com/massive-expansion-of-universities-in-asia-raises-tough-questions-on-social-mobility-54680) which talks about the high growth rate of higher education enrollments in East Asia and the statistics on lack of employment opportunities for those with college degrees. Following is a comparison of statistics from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea in the year 2014. China seems to be an outlier with the highest unemployment rates among recent graduates. The article raises an important question that has been discussed in many forms in our class: What is the point of more higher education when an economy cannot gainfully absorb all the graduates? And what are the consequences if these conditions persist over a long period of time?

Note: The unemployment statistics from the article have not been checked by us. We are assuming that the usual definition of unemployment applies here: The percentage of people in a group (such as undergraduates or graduates) that are looking for employment and are not yet employed. 

Quality of Higher Education in South Asia

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Last week we looked at some indicators of Higher Education access across South Asian countries that elicited some very interesting discussion. This week, we mined some more data from UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics on higher education quality across the South Asian countries. Coincidentally, it ties it neatly with this week’s News post on the newly released Times HE Rankings! Below are some infographics on the student-instructor ratios, public HE expenditure per student and academic rankings across South Asian countries.

Quality of higher education is tough to measure and these indicators are far from perfect. What other information would you like to have on HE quality in other countries? Do you think that it is fair to apply the same normative criteria of ‘good quality’ for developed nations and for developing economies? What are the the benefits for South Asian nations in chasing these quality targets?

Source: Higher Education in Asia: Expanding Out, Expanding Up (http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/higher-education-asia-graduate-university-research-2014-en.pdf)