Education is a great equaliser, but is Higher Education Commission of India up to the task?
How about eating some stats and facts. Just some food for thought, I promise.
By 2030, the inequality, in terms of disparity in income and so living standards, will be at its lowest since the mid-19th century. Let’s go back in time to the period post-1980 when it all began.
The developed world i.e. the “West” grew at 1.5% per annum and the developing countries saw a growth rate of 3%; implying about 350 million poor in India and 650 million poor in China increased their incomes by 700% in a span of 36 years. No mean feat considering both the countries account for 40% of the world population and so rise in their respective growth rates can cause tectonic shifts on the world stage.
What caused this growth?
In one word: Education. In two words: human capital. In a sentence: Catch-up of the “East” with the West in terms of education, therefore acquiring the required set of skills, seeing a rise in income and finally causing improvement in world inequality.
India realises very well that the way to the top is education.
Tightening the screws on higher education is only going to reap benefits that go on to shape the future of our nation. On June 28th, 2018 the government announced that the University Grants Commission (UGC) will be dissolved and in its place will come the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI). What this institution hopes to do by being the sole regulator of education standards is to ensure quality in education imparted by setting benchmarks of academic performance. The HECI will keep a constant check on institutions will full autonomy to pull strings, in case violation of standards takes place.
I am glad to learn that the government, though in its last leg of term, realises that the overhauling of education will have to be done from bettering the standards of bodies that govern it, rather than omitting and editing chapters in NCERT books and constantly proving history wrong.
The HECI Act is expected to be tabled in the Parliament’s Monsoon Session. How effectively it is implemented and whether the benefits it announces actually take shape remains to be seen.
This is the advent of education as the great equaliser and hence reformer.
The East understood that acquisition of education is acquisition of wealth. It was widely understood that the twin emotive issues of poverty and inequality can only be undone by investing in education. Of course, there are many other factors than just education contributing to the rise in the developing world. But the factor of education alone is such an important one that it towers over rest. It equips one with the ability to improve life’s circumstances and increase possibilities. And that has happened.
The magnitude of middleclass and college-attendees in the East has quadrupled. And the two enjoy a mutually rewarding relationship. Expansion of college education has directly led to expansion of the middle class. Here comes another fallout of global education — the change in control and gradual shift in power. This is shift is from the Westernised upper class elite to the domestic middleclass elite of the east.
Not to forget, the West has provided us with some help too.
There was a time when America’s growth rates and markets skyrocketed — from 1986 to 2000 — defying all warnings. What we are witnessing now is reversal of fortunes: the ever-increasing rise in college dropouts in the US and also those who graduate do not turn up for jobs too often. It’s the classic case of stagnation and misfortune of the college-educated western worker. They do not attain skills and so their wages remain stuck at a constant minimum subsistence level. Here comes in the educated skilled worker from the east and swoops the job away.
Advantage education.
The world has also witnessed a steady rise in the number of billionaires in the East. This is can be explained by two factors. First, the average per capita incomes have increased threefold in the East since 1980, when all the reform based initiatives came in. Second, simply put, size. When China and India alone match the populations of 174 countries, the cupboard of growth can be understood very well if the remaining members of the east are to be added. Even a small but constant percentage increase in this group can lead to a large increase in the overall world number.
The crucial role education has played by helping the poor countries move towards convergence with the rich countries is its most valuable gift to the world. 15 years from now the two largest economies will be India and China. And we come back to 2030, with the year we began.
So is the story of great reformation, that by 2030 the average per capita income of India and China clubbed, is likely to be somewhere near $23,000 mark. With a size of about 40% of the world population, if the steep rise in education, income, growth and fortune is to be added to it, it becomes one of the greatest transformations of all time.
The transformation of rapid decline in poverty, with rapid increase in the incomes of developing countries, coupled by stagnation of the West; Look no further than the East!
Coming back to HECI and the current government’s plan to repeal the University Grants Commission (UGC) Act, alarming dimensions to it have emerged. The recent feedback on HECI does not look too bright. On studying its clauses closely, facets of license raj are brought back to memory.
For starters, the legislation seeks to empower the Centre even more and that at the expense of states and Universities diminishing their autonomy and reducing them to mere puppet institutions solely at the helm of the Centre.
In countries like USA, Australia and China that harbour students from all over the world and boast of world class education and university life, higher education is primarily handled by and is the responsibility of the states. Blunders like clubbing universities and colleges in the same bracket as “higher educational institutions” and applying common rules, setting up an advisory council chaired by the Union Minister as proposed by section 24 of the bill, thereby mixing education with politics, are ominous signs of things to come. Not only does it violate the principles of governance but also severely damages the ideals on which good education stand.
It is time to build a human economy that does not benefit just a privileged few, and is not controlled by an authoritarian charge at the Centre that keeps all powers vested within itself. As John Rawls rightly said: “All social primary goods — liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and bases of self-respect — are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured.”