Issues in public funding of quality educational institutes
Furqan Qamar | Updated: Sep 18, 2018, 07:15 AM IST
Public funding of higher education has
always been linked, to some extent, with the quality of higher education in
such a way that it should encourage and incentivise quality initiatives in
higher educational institutions to help them attain excellence in due course of
time. Additionally, public funding has also been used as a lever to modify the
growth and development of higher education so as to accomplish national goals.
Until recently, the funding was linked
to the regulatory processes. The University Grants Commission (UGC) Act 1956 as
amended in 1972, still provides that “no grant shall be given by the Central
Government, the Commission, or any other organisation receiving any funds from
the Central Government to a University, unless the Commission has, after
satisfying itself as to such matters as may be prescribed, declared such
University to be fit for receiving such grant”. And this “fitness” is meant to
ensure that only such universities that meet a minimum threshold level of
quality could access public funds.
The 12B universities (and also the
colleges), besides receiving development grants, were also supported under
‘Special Assistance Programmes (SAP)’ which provided financial support on
selective basis to the Departments of Special Assistance (DSA), Departments of
Research Supports (DRS) and to the Centre/Institutes of Advanced Special
Assistance (IASE). Such support enabled select departments to grow on identified
parameters. Lately, the schemes like Colleges with Potential for Excellence
(CPE) and Universities with Potential of Excellence (UPE) sought to provide
enhanced assistance to the identified universities to realise their potential
and emerge as leading centres of excellence in their chosen areas of
specialisation and expertise.
At present, the funding is being increasingly linked to the rankings. This in
turn connects a number of financial assistance schemes and enablement to such
scores, grades and ranks. These include schemes like Graded Autonomy, and
Institutions of Eminence which accord certain special privileges to such higher
educational institutions which have attained certain scores and ranks in the
accreditation, national rankings and global rankings. So is the case with the
Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) which seeks to fund state
universities and their colleges only if they get quality assessed and
accredited. As funds for higher education, relative to the demand, are getting
scarcer, public funding of higher education is getting tilted in favour of
competitive bidding linked to quality.
Looping public funding with quality and
excellence by encouraging competition for quality may be justified on the
ground that scarce resources meant for higher education need to be put to best
use and that there cannot be a better proposition than financing only such
institutions which have track records of proven performance. This sounds good
but suffers from pitfalls with adverse consequences for the overall objectives
of education.
Quality must indeed be encouraged and
excellence rewarded. But, at the same time, we must not lose sight of the fact
that the country presently has a small number of higher educational
institutions that could be considered of respectable quality and that such
institutions account for a minuscule percentage of total enrolment in higher
education. This means, an overwhelming proportion of students are catered to by
a large number of higher educational institutions that are of poor quality.
Promoting a few islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity is not an option.
This must prompt authorities to focus funding on ameliorating the condition of
the dominant majority by mitigating the big quality gap that exists between the
best and the rest. Critically, the quality-connected competitive funding can
work best only when there is a level playing field, but for which the public
funding for higher education shall get monopolised by a few privileged ones.
With the average year of education
crossing 12, coupled with the current demographic structure, the country is
bound to see a surge in demand for higher education and the nation has to be
ready with adequate capacity to accommodate the same. Strategies for expansion,
thus, become an exigent imperative. The required capacity addition need not
come through the establishment of new institutions, though some may still be
needed to address regional imbalances. The best approach could be to encourage
and reward capacity addition in the existing institutions of higher education
by adding more seats and increasing the number of programmes, thereby making
them multi-disciplinary. Such a strategy would improve quality of higher
educational institutions across the board because it is only the institutions
operating at a critical size that are able to benefit the most through reforms
like choice-based credit system and skill development leading to better
research and employability. We need to use public funding to bring about this
change. It is also imperative to focus on making higher education inclusive,
particularly by addressing the affordability barrier, and that would be
possible only if public funding is carefully calibrated to promote access to
hitherto deprived sections of the society.
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