Up the garden path...

With a view to putting a check on ?shops??read coaching colleges?that promise a ticket to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), the premier engineering institution of the country put in place a new eligibility criteria for students appearing in its entrance exam. Students passing class XII in 2007 can appear in the IIT-JEE only if they secure first division in the board exam. Also, the number of attempts one can make have been reduced to three, besides an age limit.

From promising a gateway to IIT or medical colleges to offering courses in management and fashion design, private institutes and coaching colleges flourish in the city. Rajiv Tiwari tells a story of promises unfulfilled and commercialisation of vocational education.

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With a view to putting a check on ‘shops’—read coaching colleges—that promise a ticket to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), the premier engineering institution of the country put in place a new eligibility criteria for students appearing in its entrance exam. Students passing class XII in 2007 can appear in the IIT-JEE only if they secure first division in the board exam. Also, the number of attempts one can make have been reduced to three, besides an age limit.

“The aim is to check roadside coaching colleges that are often seen playing with the future of young aspirants. This will also hopefully improve the results of the class XII board exam which were often neglected by the students who were so confident of cracking the entrance exam by the virtue of their attending coaching classes,” says retired Head of Department (Physics) IIT Delhi professor OP Agnihotri.

Commercialisation of education has gone to the extent where the syllabi of different courses are available in market in a variety of packages.

Courses, including journalism, fashion designing and training to become call centre executives are widely available in the State capital in different convenient packages. The dream to become a TV journalist in 3 to 6 months, a reporter in 1 year or a journalism graduate in 2 years is what draws wannabes to these courses. All are available in packages costing Rs 50,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh.

Becoming a fashion designing graduate is easy through a convenient diploma course that suits most pockets.

But is it really worth the dough you spend?

“We have wasted Rs 1.5 lakh listening to teachers who have no working knowledge of journalism,” laments Sandeep, who after completing his Mass Communication course from Lucknow two years ago is now working in a BPO in New Delhi. “Institutes hardly have any good teachers and they just rely on visiting faculty to market their course. Such courses lead students nowhere in the competitive arena,” he explains.

It is more or less the same in other professional courses. Courses like Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in different institutes too are caught up in basic problems.

According to some of the students pursuing a BFA course from a private college in the city, the college lacks in all the departments.

“There are no proper teachers in the institute. The college depends on part-time visiting faculty to teach most of the subjects.”

Problem of poor infrastructure in these institutes is common. Some students of fashion design in the same college who are about to finish the course allege that the college had assured them a job after finishing the course but their placement seems like a faraway dream.

“In the name of infrastructure, the college provided five sewing machines and just one drafting table to cater to a total of 60 students! We have hardly learnt anything to compete in the big wide world, full of competitive hands,” said one student.

Similar is the situation with the ever-growing number of management colleges that give more assurances than jobs. More than 10 recognised MBA institutes are running in the capital at present and the average fee in each is Rs 4.5 lakh for the entire programme. On the question of placement, they cut a blank.

Recently, a private college from south India that conducts a distance learning programme in a two-room ‘institute’ in Lucknow was in news when some of its students created ruckus on the ‘campus’.

Students alleged that the college administration was conducting courses that were not even recognised by AICTE, UGC, or Govt of India. Obviously, this realisation had dawned on them too late.