Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 29, 2007
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Online edition of India's National Newspaper Thursday, Nov 29, 2007 ePaper |
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Tamil Nadu
Chennai: Unemployability and skill deficiency among graduating students is the biggest challenge higher education has to deal with, former President A.P.J Abdul Kalam said here on Wednesday. Though a total of 10 million students — graduates, postgraduates and those who have passed Std X and Plus Two — come out of educational institutions every year, and job opportunities continued to soar, only a very small percentage of them was employable, he told a gathering of vice-chancellors on the concluding day of the 82nd annual meeting of the Association of Indian Universities, hosted by Anna University-Chennai. Skill deficiency among youth was a more serious concern than infrastructure deficiency. Only 25 per cent of graduating students were found to be employable. Students were found to be deficient in areas such as strong technical knowledge, English proficiency, process orientation and critical thinking ability, all of which were highly sought after by the IT and IT-enabled services industry and the emerging Knowledge Process Outsourcing sector, Mr. Kalam said. To bridge this gap, an interface needed to be developed between school education and key industries. Universities should transform themselves into centres of excellence with core competence in a specific area and brand themselves, he said. ‘Focus on research’Earlier, inaugurating a national seminar on the Knowledge Commission report, Governor Surjit Singh Barnala said universities should focus not just on teaching, but also on research and development. To ensure quality higher education, constant syllabi upgradation was essential. Refresher courses were also needed to provide state-of-the-art knowledge to teachers. Universities in India were facing challenges such as financial crunch, external interference, fee structure hike and privatisation of education, D. Viswanathan, Vice-Chancellor, Anna University-Chennai, said adding that the higher education system in India was in urgent need of a thorough reformation and reformulation. Y.S. Simhadri and Dayanand Dongaonkar, president and secretary general respectively of AIU, spoke.
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