HECI: Will it improve academic standards?

The draft Higher Education Commission of India (Repeal of University Grants Commission Act) Act, 2018 (hereafter, HECI Act), when enacted, will abolish UGC and establish HECI, as the regulator for higher education. The HECI will not subsume the All India Council for Technical Education and the National Council for Teacher Education. 

Unlike UGC, HECI will not have that role of allocating funds to universities and colleges. The government will allocate funds directly. This is a welcome move. HECI will be able to focus solely on academics. Often, the criticism against UGC is that it has turned into a funding agency. This might be an exaggeration, but surely UGC’s focus on academics has been blurred because of the administrative fund giving function. Some have expressed apprehension that the change will result in bias and favouritism in allocating funds. The apprehension is based on the assumption that UGC functions independently without any direct or indirect influence of the government. This assumption is not valid. In India, none of the institutions enjoys the level of independence that we expect. The level of independence varies from institutions to institutions. UGC cannot be bracketed with institutions that enjoy a high level of independence. Therefore, shifting the funding function to the government will not bring any significant change, positive or negative, in the efficiency and effectiveness in allocating funds. The effectiveness will improve if the government creates another institution for allocating funds and brings transparency to the process. 

If HECI carries out some of its functions specified in the HECI Act effectively, the standard of higher education will improve. Examples of such functions are: laying down norms and standards for performance-based incentivisation to the faculty, and institutions and universities; winding up of colleges and universities, which are unable to achieve desired academic standards; and recommending appropriate faculty-centric governance structure. The effectiveness will depend on the independence that it will enjoy and the quality of people who will be appointed to govern and manage HECI. If political affiliation of individuals is considered as an important criterion in selecting chairperson and others, HECI will fail. 

The goal of HECI will be to ‘promote the autonomy of higher educational institutions’ and also to regulate academic standards. The government has recently announced a number of reforms in higher education with ‘autonomy’ at the centre. For example, it has granted autonomy to IIMs and 62 institutions of higher learning. The assumption is that autonomy to higher educational institutions will foster innovation and enhance academic standards. But this does not happen in reality, as is evident from the fact the education standards in most private institutions of higher education are below par. The possibility is that in the garb of innovative courses and programme, universities and colleges will offer trash to gullible students for squeezing money. Over the years the number of PhDs has gone up, but the quality is abysmal. Autonomy will not improve the quality PhD, because the reasons for significant dilution of PhD are many and lack of autonomy is not one of those reasons. 

Autonomy to government-funded institutions should be avoided, as the pitfalls of granting autonomy are many. Many institutions of higher learning are founded by parochial leaders and those are governed with a focus on pa­ro­chial interest. Auto­no­my to those institutions will provide an opportunity to develop and deliver courses that are aligned with the objective of furthering the parochial interest. This has the danger of dividing the society further in terms of cast, creed etc. HECI will find it difficult to stop institutions from offering such courses, as HECI should not and will not involve in micromanagement. 

The immediate consequence of granting financial autonomy will be an increase in fees. Education, even higher education, empowers the youth to participate in the development process and share the benefits of economic growth. Education bridges the socio-economical gaps. Increase in fees will deprive meritorious students, who belong to marginalised sections of the society and lower-middle class families, from accessing higher education. This will increase the socio-economical gaps. Dividing the society further in terms of cast, creed etc. and increasing socio-economical gaps will break the social harmony and hurt the economic and social development. Overall, effective functioning of HECI will improve academic standards, provided it is allowed to function independently and granting autonomy to institutions does not become the sole agenda. The government should find ways for allocating more funds from public exchequer to education. The target of investing 6 per cent of gross national product (GNP) on education, based on the recommendation of the Kothari Commission (1966), remained elusive.
 

The writer is director,  Institute of Management Technology Ghaziabad