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"A major problem, which we face is the quality of higher education that our institutions impart. Unfortunately, most of them produce pass-outs, who are nowhere near international standards," Singh said today, while addressing a gathering at a special convocation of Panjab University here after receiving an honorary doctorate degree in law.
He said that the issue of quality would not get addressed by itself, even if the country meet its targets of higher access and enrolment, spends huge amounts on higher education and opens a large number of new institutions.
"In fact, one dimension of quality deficit is the difficulty being faced in recruiting top class faculty for the new IIMs, IITs, central universities and other such institutions that the Government has decided to establish in the last five years," he said.
He said that the Government had a mammoth task ahead in pursuing its goal of providing access to good education to every citizen of the country. On the current state of higher education, he said, "At present, in any year, only about 12 per cent of students, who complete secondary education enrol for higher education."
"This does not at all compare well with the figure of about 70 per cent in some developed countries. It is also much lower than the figure of about 20 per cent in some South East Asian countries," the Prime Minister said adding, "We must increase this proportion."
Laying stress on addressing existing imbalances in higher education system, Singh said that today nearly half of the institutions of higher learning existed in only five states, while nearly 70 per cent of the total intake capacity for professional courses exists in another five states.
"There is a large gender gap in enrolments for higher education and there are large intra-state imbalances too. We must address these deficiencies," he said.
The PM said that in last five years, Centre had made unprecedented efforts for expanding and improving educational facilities at all levels and added, "In fact, I often refer to the 11th five-year plan as an education plan."
Singh said that to address these problems required structural reforms in higher education system for which the UPA Government was fully committed.
He said that reports of National Knowledge Commission and the Committee to advise on renovation and rejuvenation of higher education under the chairmanship of Professor Yashpal would provide the basis for a series of reforms that the Government intended to undertake in the coming months. Besides, the Centre had already taken several steps, including introduction of semester system, choice based credit system, merit based admission, procedures and continuous internal evaluations.
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The teaching methodologies should inculcate creative thinking in our students and casual approach to Higher Education should be replaced by more serious approach in the sense that there can be better evaluating methods to evaluate our students that will lead to improving overall standards of our students. Unless we set ourselves higher benchmarks in our quest to become thorough professionals there cannot be improvement in the quality of higher education that is being imparted to our students. Our faculties should concentrate more in research oriented work with the government proactively encouraging such research work by incoporating such scientific findings in the system after duly acknowledging such findings. Research oriented work should be the guiding factor in our teaching methodology of our faculties as well as for our students to make them thorough professionals of tomarrow.