Improving Indian Academic Research and Teaching: Have Separate Research-Intensive Universities and Teaching-Intensive Universities

Last updated on 8th February 2014

Today's The Hindu has an article titled, Paralysis in science policies, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/paralysis-in-science-policies/article5661263.ece. Its lead paragraph states, "Neglect of research in higher education has led to very low research intensity. Ninety per cent of our universities end up as teaching institutes where research is given a low priority for lack of funds"

A few days ago, The Hindu carried an article about the poor employability of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu engineering graduates, http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/ap-fares-poorly-in-employability-of-engineers/article5639970.ece. I think the article clearly shows that there is a serious teaching, and so graduate employability, crisis in engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. I believe this crisis, to some extent, extends to other streams of education besides engineering, and to other states in India too.

What should universities do now - focus on improving teaching/learning outcomes and so improve employability of graduates and post-graduates (students doing masters' degrees) or focus on improving research? I think there is a conflict between teaching and research in many parts of Indian academia today.

One solution to this conflict/dilemma may be to have separate research-intensive universities and teaching-intensive universities. The teaching and non-research workload of academics in research-intensive universities must be low so that they get enough time to focus on research. The UGC/AICTE regulations for appointment and promotion of such academics must give high weightage to research output of such academics. [Please note that I am excluding the elite higher education institutions like IITs and IISc (and also medical education institutions).] Usually such research-intensive universities would be far more expensive to run than teaching-intensive universities.

The teaching-intensive universities would have high workload of teaching for its academics with some (less) time made available for research too. The UGC/AICTE regulations for appointment and promotion of such academics must give high weightage to learning outcomes for and employability of students taught by such academics. These kind of universities would be less expensive to run.

Of course, there should be migration paths for academics to move from one type of university to the other.

Today, I believe, we have only one set of UGC/AICTE regulations for appointment and promotion of academics of any type of university (research-intensive or teaching-intensive). That leads to situations where academics are denied promotion due to lack of suitable research publication output. Loading an academic with three to four courses of teaching load per semester and additional non-research work, and then upbraiding him/her for lack of good impact factor research publication output, and thereby denying him/her promotion, is not just being unfair, but being exploitative of the poor academic.

It also, unfortunately, in some institutions at least, creates an unhealthy environment for Masters students where they are expected/induced to choose project work that contributes to the academic's/department's research work even when UGC/AICTE regulations, I believe, permit a Masters student to do non-research project work. As an example, a software development project of suitable complexity and size is, I believe, permitted by AICTE regulations/norms (written/unwritten) to be considered as an M.Tech. Computer Science or Information Technology final year project. [Please note that many M.Tech. Computer Science or Information Technology students come from a different stream previous degree background like Production Engg., Electrical Engg., Physics or Mathematics.] Such work would enhance software industry employability prospects of the student. But a research publication output obsession among academics may result in students being advised against doing such software development projects as their M.Tech. project and instead encouraged to do a research project that fits in the area of research done by academics in the department. The latter would contribute to academic research but may not necessarily be what the student needs and/or wants.

Having separate teaching-intensive and research-intensive universities who clearly inform students about their focus may help students choose the right type of university based on their needs and interests and their economic status. The lead paragraph of The Hindu article (Paralysis in science policies) looks down upon universities that "end up as teaching institutes". However, students, especially from poor rural and semi-urban areas, who are desperate for education that makes them employable may find such teaching-intensive universities to be a great blessing, and also find the tuition fees of such less-expensive-to-run universities more affordable. The academic research needs of the country can be primarily met by research-intensive universities who may be given the lion's share of tax payer money for academic research and who may then also be expected to deliver suitable results.

Will HealthCare.gov wake up the world to the urgent need for professionalism and accountability in software development?

HealthCare.gov can’t handle appeals of enrollment errors, http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/healthcaregov-cant-handle-appeals-of-enrollment-errors/2014/02/02/bbf5280c-89e2-11e3-916e-e01534b1e132_story.html, is a very scary report of problems in the US govt. website healthcare.gov which seems to be the primary mechanism for the new health insurance 'marketplace'/'exchange' system in the USA.

Some notes and comments:

The report mentions tens of thousands of appeals having been filed related to supposed overcharging, being steered into wrong insurance programs or being denied coverage by healthcare.gov website. [Ravi: What a stressful thing it would be for such users! Medical costs in the USA are said to be very high due to which most people barring the super-rich have to have a health insurance plan. Otherwise, as I understand it, they simply may not be able to undergo medical care involving operations.]

It gives the case of a lady who was not given the right amount of subsidy by the website due to which she was advised to pay full price for insurance cover (she was due for surgery) and then appeal.

It mentions that the (USA) 2010 Affordable Care Act provides a guarantee for timely hearings for appeals dealing with subsidies or being denied insurance and that legal advocates are looking at the matter. [Ravi: Is this going to be a legal issue? Will somebody also look at the contractual obligations of the software provider and whether such obligations are fair and include accountability?]

It reports that, as of now, the system can only store the appeals and does not have the functionality to permit officials to process these appeals. [Ravi: Not a happy picture.]
...
The system seems to have asked some users to opt for Medicaid as they quality for it but their state Medicaid agency denied that. These users 'loop' back to the federal system and that is not able to fix the error. [Ravi: What a mess! I can imagine the fury and frustration some of these users would be having with the software system.]
...

The article mentions that after undergoing surgery the above mentioned lady checked about resolution of her problem with the website and was told that the system does not have ability to fix a mistake in somebody's account. [Ravi: I am so disappointed that the software system handling such a vital part of the life of US citizens has let down some people so badly.]

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I think steps must be taken to ensure that software dealing with such vital matters ('infrastructure software'), even if they are more of application type of software (as against systems software), go through a more professional software development and test lifecycle before release to users. Further there must be accountability like in so many other professions - civil engineering, medicine etc. with serious failures like these resulting in investigations and some kind of professional action against those software managers, analysts, designers, developers and/or testers found to be at fault.

Some people may feel I am being very harsh especially since I am no longer in the software industry. But I think that it is the lack of accountability and lack of fear of professional action being taken for serious lapses that makes software development a 'Wild West' kind of enterprise. If software development earns people a lot of money then they need to be accountable for what they have developed. Is that not a fair thing to ask? I mean, will we accept going to a medical doctor who is not accountable for the treatment that he/she gives us? Will we live in a house/apartment whose builder and civil engineer are not accountable for the safety and durability of the construction?

2014 National (India) Employability report - Poor Employability of Andhra Pradesh Engineering Graduates

A few days ago, The Hindu had this article, A.P. fares poorly in employability of engineers, http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/ap-fares-poorly-in-employability-of-engineers/article5639970.ece.

I sent the following comment to the letters email of The Hindu (for the print edition):

I am very happy to see the persistent work done by Aspiring Minds to draw attention to the pathetic employability situation for engineering graduates from Indian, especially South Indian, colleges and universities.

I think its CEO, Himanshu Aggarwal, captures the situation perfectly when he says, “States like A.P. and Tamil Nadu, which have the highest number of engineering colleges, continue to have lowest employability. States need to be conscious towards better education quality rather than building more capacity”.

Hopefully the higher education policy makers/regulators and administrators will be able to step in and ensure that suitable career growth incentives are provided to academics who provide good education to students instead of such career growth incentives being focused only on research publications and research projects (with large amount of tax payer grant money). I am not against academic research but the way most academic administrators and regulators seem to focus on research and ignore educating students to become employable is deeply shocking to me. In my humble opinion, the first and foremost duty of an academic should be to teach and teach well - research should be secondary, no matter how much grant money or fame is involved.

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The above comment did not get accepted for publication in the print edition of The Hindu. However, a shorter version of the above comment (due to the limitation of web page comment size to 1000 characters) on the web page of the article (link given above) was accepted by the moderator and is now shown on it (under my name - Ravi S. Iyer).

Yesterday the "Education Plus" supplement of The Hindu carried an article on similar lines, Engg. graduates lack domain skills, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-educationplus/engg-graduates-lack-domain-skills/article5646438.ece. I found the following extract in it to be quite significant:

“It is a fact that majority (of) colleges have totally neglected teaching quality. Some blame shortage of good teachers while others genuinely want to hire good teachers but fail to do so due to their non-availability,” agrees N.V. Ramana Rao, Registrar, JNTU Hyderabad.
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The Registrar of JNTU Hyderabad (an important technical university of Andhra Pradesh) openly acknowledging that majority of (engineering) colleges have totally neglected teaching quality is a vital acknowledgement of a serious teaching crisis in engineering colleges of Andhra Pradesh. Now who can fix the problem? I don't claim to have all the answers for this tough problem. But a no-brainer suggestion to help solve the problem would be to provide career-growth incentive to those academics who are good teachers instead of focusing only on providing career-growth to those who acquire significant project grant money and publish research papers. For this, the UGC/AICTE regulations for promotion of academics must be changed to introduce some measures of teaching quality, even if they are not perfect, and provide career-growth incentive for those academics who achieve appropriate measure of teaching quality even if they do not have research publications. Let us face it, there is a conflict of interest between teaching and research in Indian academia today, and the poor students face the negative effect of this conflict of interest.