Remodel higher education: Just fixing exams won’t help

livemint.com:

The challenge of creating economic opportunities for hundreds of millions of young people has come to the fore this year. As I wrote in my previous column, on the employment front, India must create 20 million jobs per year. The ongoing public outcry over the National Testing Agency’s (NTA) mismanagement of NEET-UG, NEET-PG and UGC-NET examinations highlights a related concern: of meeting the career aspirations of tens of millions of young people seeking quality higher education.

With half the population of the country—or around 700 million Indians—below the age of 28, our youthful demographic profile is demanding its dividend. Just as in creating jobs, we need dramatically different thinking in higher education. The current model—where millions of candidates compete for a few thousand seats—has run its course.

Yet, political compulsions and policy realism have led to just incremental adjustments. To be fair, increasing the number of seats by 10% every year, as India has done for medical education since 2019, would be an admirable feat in any country. But India is not any country.

We need to scale up at a different level to satisfy swelling aspirations. While an expert committee investigates the NTA’s lapses in conducting examinations, the locus of policy change should be the supply of higher education. Not only have we created an academic elite—IITs, NITs, IIMs, AIIMSs and established medical colleges in states—we risk replicating this across the university system.