The emergence of higher education education in the hands of non-state players has transformed the educational environment in the country. In today’s world, the higher educational landscape contains many service providers, the least of which is commercialized whereas the greatest is devoted to solving public matters exclusively. Most colleges and universities can be likened to corporates while others are independent entities and others are chains of the same managerial ownership.
All factors such as courses, designs of educational environments, costs, location, who is a student, and where and who are staff members have altered. The utmost concentration of private participants in the higher education market concerns its professional segments and thus any education transmission ecology remains dominated with the for-profit private players.
There are at times however in the ‘for-profit’ sub sector also a few ‘higher-grades’ self-managed and self-regulated institutions cluttered at least one has hopes shoes electrons always on ethical and educational values exemplifying global standing expectations for its institutions or schools. They are facing fierce competition to maintain high quality education in an accountable way whom they recruited the best in the world. Academicians in technology, management, legal studies, medicine, computational sciences amongst others.
Ironically enough, on the contrary, a considerable mass of service suppliers operates on the forces propelled by business and political motives and looking to make a quick dollar. Unfair practices that they engage in have been rampant according to the media. The phenomenon of private profits and public costs internalized in the workings of capital however bring about the need for a control apparatus particularly in the provision of education services where the information gap between the service producer and the consumer is usually wide.
A flawed policy
In the year 2010, the Government of Punjab notified the Punjab Private University Policy Paper (PPUP). This policy set out the steps to be taken to incorporate self-financing private universities in the State through enabling laws to be passed by the State Legislature for every such university individually while within the general scope of the policy. According to the provisions of the clause (7, 8 and 9) of the guidelines PPUP, the private universities are given unfettered discretion to come up with any program, impose any fee and establish their own appeal processes to the students. They are free to undertake all such issues including the recruitment and working conditions of their staff. Such universities have been described as ‘self-governing’ bodies in the PPUP document (clause 7.3) thus enabling them to deal with any major academic and management matters restricted to institutions. Rather, the PPUP gave the opportunity and authority to the private universities to control the higher education system in Punjab according to their vision and action plan.
According to the University Grants Commission UGC, Punjab now has to pace up 35 universities out of which regarding Central University, there is 1, regarding State universities 14 are there, 18 private universities and 2 deemed universities all together. Such self-regulatory bodies, a phrase used in the context of PPUP, is underpinned by the functional autonomy provided to the private universities and as a result, there is bound to be an understandable inclination among many of these institutions to focus rather more on those sets of professional programs which are high on profit margin ones.
This goes nowhere, and the result is that, over the last year or so, many private universities have been taking in students without seeing any limit (maximum number of students for each course is an awfully meaningless concept) willing to study the most popular Computer Science and Engineering CSE branch. If so is the practice what is likely to develop in the future is a shortage of receipts of operators or engineers of various branches of engineering which are basic in nature.
Such market-oriented tendencies might also generate a skills disparity characterized by excess qualified professionals alongside a shortage or surplus of defined skills which are subsequently paradoxically rendered useless. Experience has shown that when in a course areas there is an increase in market demand, most of the institutions do not impose any cut-off guidelines and they increase the admission in that course. The contraction in demand for that course or courses in a subsequent period affects the employment of faculty hired on a temporary basis during the expansion phase.
It would seem that universities have done away with the establishment, expansion, or contraction of academic programmes for the purposes of making money, which depresses the primary function of a university as a profit making organization. There has been anxiety that, without a legal provision, these private universities grow up to be nothing more than coaching centers with poor integration of education with research.
This policy has the real potential of alienating the economically weaker sections from the higher education. To a very large extent, private universities do not put in the public domain, using the internet, all the details of the courses offered – the number of seats available along with the fee structure, details of the qualified regular and other faculty, their salary structure, recruitments and balances and so on, though they are so mandated by the national level regulatory bodies like the UGC and the AICTE. The very conduct of the private players in this manner drastically undermines the aspirations of higher education of the students of the state. This, in turn, has a negative effect on the state universities which are supposed to comply with all the rules and regulations set up by the authorities.
Unfulfilled promise
In the manifesto, the Congress party vowed to replace existing structures in higher education by creating a Higher Education Regulatory Authority (HERA) in the State during the Assembly elections of 2017. Late in 2017, a cabinet sub-committee was composed consisting of the then Medical Education Minister, Brahm Mohindra and Technical Education and the Higher Education Minister Aruna Chaudhary. In October 2017, this committee had its first meeting with private and state universities’ chancellors and vice chancellors to solicit written comments or objections from the stakeholders on the proposed bill.
Later the print media published that there was a break in the efforts of Punjab Government to have a higher education regulator for private institutions as there were issues due to some strong private players. Even after the passage of more than six years, the answer to these facts has not come out and this remains silent.
It is worth noting that the establishment of Higher Education Regulatory Authorities has also taken place in the neighboring states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and not only nine more states: Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Uttarakhand. The reason behind the formation of these bodies has been to provide accountability while ensuring optimal standards both in the protection of all the parties’ interests, and in their academic and administrative activities.
In light of the degree scandals that have surfaced in Himachal Pradesh and other States, the need for the establishment of a regulatory authority is becoming increasingly more pressing. Ominous violations in nursing and other courses were uncovered in Punjab last year, and many cases were filed by law enforcement after student protests.
It is noteworthy, that clause 13 of the PPUP, gives power to Punjab Government, to enact State legislation to set up a regulatory authority for the reform of higher education system in Punjab. What pothers senitnes the creation of the HERA in Punjab is the extreme need to control low quality provision by unscrupulous practices. A comprehensive reform is required- one that is informed by a recognized governance model which provides for transparency, quality and beneficial representation.
