Indian Higher Ed: "Keep 'Em Here Until They've Lost Their Idealism"

I was talking with one of the faculty in the guest house (not in the theatre department) about her work at the university. More specifically, she was talking to me. She was complaining that standards in higher education have fallen; that students are less prepared; that attempts to increase access to students from all economic (and caste) backgrounds only serve to weaken the educational outcomes for all students, since allowing students to attend university "who might not have been able to get in otherwise" forced faculty to spend a greater percentage of their time on remedial instruction, thus lessening the amount of focused study and information that could be distributed to the other students in the classroom.

To turn the discussion away from caste, I said that this "ill-preparedness" probably came as much from poor primary- and secondary-school education as it did anything else.

She agreed. The primary- and secondary-school education for the majority of incoming students at the university was abominable. They didn't know how to write, read, figure, etc.

I said that a similar problem seemed to exist in the U.S., but we hadn't yet found a useful method of solving it, and No Child Left Behind certainly hasn't been the answer.

"I know how it could be solved," she said. She proposed that at least half of the money currently being used on university scholarships be funneled into primary-school education, particularly in under-performing localities.

"But I also know why they don't do that," she said. And then she explained something that I thought was very interesting.

She said that there were no jobs for young people in India, even after they earned their BA. Thus it was in the Indian government's best interest to keep students in universities for as long as possible, encouraging them to earn MAs and PhDs, even if it meant admitting and retaining (and offering scholarships to) students who were not capable of handling the work.

She said that if students truly understood that their BA degrees were worthless, they would riot. Particularly, she claimed, the Dalit students, who had been lured into the system with promises of a better life.

"And after they get these additional degrees, then do they get jobs?" I asked.

"No," she said. "There still aren't any good jobs. But there's a difference."

I instantly understood. "By the time they get their PhDs," I said, "they're almost 30 years old."

"Or older," she agreed. "And they're tired. And their families are pressuring them to marry and settle down."

"And when you're 22 with a BA," I said, "you want the best job, the one you think you've been trained to do. When you're thirty, with no assets, you know you have to take what you can get."

Fascinating. Do you think it's true, or just an elegant conspiracy theory?