Study on the Higher Education in India and the Need for a Paradigm Shift

Higher education has experienced a rapid spurt in development over the past two decades, which can be extrapolated to be primarily driven due to measures initiated by the private sector. These measures are suspect however and there exist genuine and legitimate concerns that these initiatives are half cooked, substandard and exploitative and have only served to send the standards of research in a downward spiral and lower the overall academic merit. Some of the problems of the Indian higher education, such as the unwieldy affiliating system, inflexible academic structure, uneven capacity across various subjects, eroding autonomy of academic institutions, and the low level of public funding are well known. These problems were the primary motivation the topic “Study on the higher education in India and the need for a paradigm shift” was selected for the study. The objective of the study is to analyse the effect various facets of higher education in India and to study the various steps required to address genuine concerns in the Indian higher education on a long-term basis and uses the experiences of other countries to suggest measures to tackle its various systemic deficiencies. The study has been conducted on a sample of 118 respondents through the circulation of a questionnaire and information gained from secondary data. The respondents consisted mainly of students and teachers. It was found that most of them agreed that India has an average level of existing infrastructure of higher education in India and also the fact that majority of the respondents felt that the education standard in India is behind that of developed nations. The results of the study indicates that the higher education did not meet the expected standard and revision of syllabus and implementation of pedagogy is needed to bring it up to par with western education.