Friday, February 27, 2009

Consulting in Education Space

This idea came to me while reading the book "Imagining India" by Nandan Nilekani. I was shocked to find that only ~20% of all graduates who pass every year are employable. This essentially means there is a huge opportunity to develop the quality of education. 

In an idealistic world the idea should be to develop the qualiy bottom-up, ie start from school. But by looking at the current situation where India is treated as a young nation compared to the developed economy, we can't afford to let go the opportunities that are coming our way. We need to make more and more people employable. And it has to be imminent. This essentially means the immediate focus should be to develop the quality in Engineering/MBA space and then go top-down. We can't afford to wait till the time government do something. That will probably be a fatalistic approach. 

Well at this moment, we can't afford to have a static curriculum in our system. To keep in pace with current economy, the current curriculum has to be dynamic and more practical in nature. It requires somebody to continuously keep track of recent developments and ensure that the curriculum reflects those changes atleast on a yearly basis. Secondly there has to be more autonomy given to the colleges so that they can choose their curriculum. I am essentially indicating at the idea of setting up a consulting team for educational space who will guide the instituions to design better curriculum year after year.

I am looking for more ideas in this space so that we can take this figure of 20% to atleast 60% in next 3-4 years!!!

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