Archive for July 2011
New UK visa plan for exceptionally talented Indian scholars
Britain has announced a new visa category to facilitate the immigration for exceptionally talented people from India and other non-EU countries in the fields of Science, Humanities, Engineering and the Arts. The new Tier 1 (Exceptional Talent) category will open on 9 August 2011, and will have 1000 places in the first year of operation, official sources here said. The new category will facilitate not only those who have already been recognised but also those with the potential to be recognised as leaders in their respective fields, the sources added.
There will be 500 places available between the 9 August and 30 November and a further 500 places available from the 1 December to 31 March 2012. The number of places will be reviewed at the end of March 2012. The immigration category will be overseen by four ‘competent bodies’, which will advise the UK Border Agency on these ‘exceptionally talented’ migrants to ensure that they are the brightest and best in their field.
The bodies are: the Royal Society, a fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists, will be able to nominate up to 300 places; the Arts Council England, the national development agency for the arts, will also be able to nominate up to 300 places; the Royal Academy of Engineering, Britain’s national academy for engineering, will have up to 200 places to nominate; and the British Academy, the national academy for the humanities and social sciences will be able to nominate up to 200 places.
Immigration Minister Damian Green said: “The UK is a global leader in science, humanities and engineering and we are a cultural centre for the arts: we will continue to welcome those who have the most to offer and contribute to our society and economy”. Migrants seeking entry to the UK under this category will not need to be sponsored by an employer, but will need to be recommended by one of the competent bodies. While the government has allotted a number of places to each body, it will be open to the bodies to transfer additional places to those with more demand if this becomes necessary, the sources added.
Those admitted under the category will initially be granted permission to stay for 3 years and 4 months. They will then be able to extend their stay for a further 2 years, and settlement may be available after 5 years’ residence in the UK. Alan Davey, Chief Executive of Arts Council England, said: “We welcome the launch of this special visa scheme, which will enable the very best artists of international standing to live and work in the UK”. It will be for each competent body to select those who will qualify for recommendation, and we have also published the criteria for their endorsement.
The President of the British Academy, Sir Adam Roberts, said: “The Humanities and Social Sciences are flourishing in the UK and attract many excellent scholars from overseas. The British Academy is ready to play its part in identifying those outstanding scholars for whom Tier 1 is the appropriate visa category.”
New-look GRE braces innovation
Shed the crammers tag and move beyond mugging up text books to merely score big, instead understand the subject and come up with something innovative. Realising the significance of out-of-the box thinking, Educational Testing Service (ETS), the developer and administrator of the Graduation Record Examination (GRE), has decided to get rid of the ‘Chaturs’ – of the 3 Idiots fame – and have opened the doors for the Ranchos.
ETS believes the new test will be more user friendly and flexible providing the test takers the freedom to use more of their own test-taking style and strategies. “This is the most significant change the test is going through. Test takers will find new types of questions and more real-life scenarios that mirror the kind of thinking they will do with graduate-level work. It will be more focused on skills students will need for admission to graduate and business schools,” says Dawn S. Piacentino, Director – Communications & Services, GRE programme.
The new format of the computer-based GRE general test will allow students to move back and forth throughout an entire section to change or edit responses, even skip questions and attempt them later — a feature not available earlier. “The emp
hasis is on complex reasoning skills. We are removing antonyms and analogies from the test and adding more text-based material. We are also adding some new question types and some new computer-enabled tests.”
But, what made ETS change the format?
In 2006, Graduate Management Admission council (GMAC), the administrators of the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT), severed its decade-long partnership with ETS and joined hands with a new testing administrator, Pearson VUE.
Soon after, ETS entered the B-school market selling the product as an alternative to GMAT, as it no longer had to abide by a non-compete clause with its former partner. When ETS approached B-schools, the management institutions wanted GRE to be along the lines of an an MBA aptitude test. “The earlier format tested the memory of the student more than their capability of reasoning. That is when GRE must have thought of bringing about the changes,” says Ashish Sinha, Course Director, TIME, Hyderabad.
With MBA programmes across the world looking for a diverse and excellent pool of candidates, B-schools have begun accepting GRE scores too. GRE was traditionally required to pursue Master of Science degrees in the US, and graduate and fellowship programmes across the globe. “We believe using GRE scores allows us to tap into a market of students who already plan to take the GRE and may see the GMAT as a hindrance four or five years after graduating from college,” says Christine E. Sneva, Acting Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.
So far 600 B-schools are accepting GRE scores, including five Indian B-schools. In 2010, the GRE General Test was taken by around 675,000 candidates from across 230 countries. There has been a 13 per cent increase in GRE General Test volume from 2009, with a very significant growth in number of test takers from India and China.
According to the revised format, the overall testing time is about three hours and 45 minutes. There are six sections in the revised test — one analytica
l writing section with two separately-timed writing tasks; two verbal reasoning sections; two quantitative reasoning sections and one unscored section. The analytical writing section will always appear first, while the other five sections may appear in a random order. Test takers will get a 10-minute break following the third section, and a one-minute break between the remaining sections.
A key change to the quantitative section is that an on-screen calculator will be available to help students with the quantitative reasoning test. “This will reduce the emphasis on computation and focus the test takers attention to quantitative reasoning skills,” adds Piacentino.
The analytical writing section has undergone the least amount of change. Here, the test takers will be asked to provide much more focussed responses against what was the case earlier. There is also a change in the scoring methodology. Both verbal reasoning and quantitative reasoning scores will be reported on a new 130-170 score scale, in one-point increments (against the 200-800 in 10-point increments of the existing GRE General Test).
Source: Business Standard, July 21, 2011
How to price higher education and ensure access
Higher education costs have tended to soar in many parts of the world. In the elite private universities of the US, fees have reached staggering levels not only in the professional courses, such as law, medicine and management, but in undergraduate courses as well. The Economist noted recently that fees at American universities have risen five times as fast as inflation over the past 30 years.
In the UK, the government last year allowed universities to almost triple their fees with effect from September 2012. In India, there is anecdotal evidence of fees having risen sharply in professional courses. In non-professional courses, government institutions still charge only modest fees. However, in professional courses, where private colleges dominate, the total fees, including capitation charges, can be exorbitant. How to price higher education and how to ensure access are among the important policy challenges facing the country. But, first, we need to understand what is causing prices to rise so fast in the first place.
In higher education, we have three choices. One, we can have a government-dominated system where education is subsidised. Two, we can allow private universities and colleges to come up with the freedom to charge whatever the market can bear. Three, we can allow private institutions freer entry but regulate fees and make provisions for subsidising needy students.
In non-professional courses, we still have the first model. In professional education, we have attempted to move towards the third model but have ended up closer to the second one. There is regulation of fees in some areas but this only covers the official fee. The official fee is often only a small component of the overall fee, with a large component being collected under the table.
Several arguments are made for privatisation of higher education and market-driven fees. Investment in higher education has high payoffs and can, therefore, be financed by loans. Needy students can be taken care of through scholarships or interest subsidies. Subsidised education provided by the government imposes huge fiscal costs, which, in turn, come in the way of both creation of fresh capacity and quality. Competition in higher education will help moderate fee levels.
Every one of these propositions is questionable. In India, the student is not an independent entity. He is part of a family unit for which the student loan is one of several loan obligations. An education loan undoubtedly adds to the burden of the family. Funding of scholarships is woefully inadequate. Merely letting fees rise does not lead on to superior quality – quality is poor at most private professional colleges despite the huge fees charged. It is also not true that competition helps moderate fees.
The phenomenon of soaring costs in higher education has been studied. The main explanation, it turns out, is simple enough: institutions keep raising fees because they can get away with it. The demand for higher education keeps growing briskly even in the developed world. Institutions of higher education operate in a sellers’ market, so they lack the incentive to cut costs, improve efficiency or introduce new technologies.
We must accept, therefore, that where higher education is left to the private sector, fees will escalate. That is why the US has a strong network of state universities (some of which are of very high quality) alongside its renowned private universities. In the US, universities are keen to sustain investment in infrastructure and faculty as there is a correlation between investment per student and the university ranking. At least some of the fee increase can thus be ascribed to the pursuit of quality.
That does not hold for India. Most institutions here are simply extracting rents from a scarce product. Higher fees in India merely reflect the commercialisation of education. B-schools are a case in point. The older IIMs [Indian Institutes of Management] have raised their fees substantially in recent years. This, in turn, has triggered large increases in fees at B-schools that do not provide comparable quality. The Anil Kakodkar Committee has proposed that the annual fee for the IITs’ [Indian Institutes of Technology] undergraduate programme be increased from Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 200,000-250,000. If this happens, it is bound to cause fees at lesser engineering colleges to rise.
We should not be surprised at the absence of any link between fee and quality in higher education in the country. The UK too is struggling to establish such a link. The government last year allowed fees to rise from £3,375 to a maximum of £9,000 with effect from September 2012. The idea was that universities would raise fees in keeping with their quality. To its dismay, the government finds that all universities, irrespective of their quality, have veered towards the maximum.
Germany is one country which has sought to buck the trend towards commercialisation of higher education. Many German states have recently opted for free university education. Germany is faulted for not being able to match the excellence of the US in higher education. And yet German education is good enough to produce high quality manufacturing and to power one of Europe’s strongest economies.
The German model holds a lesson for India. For us, access to higher education should be the priority. We have enough experience by now as to the limits to using regulation to ensure access. So, we need to seriously rethink the issue of public provision of higher education.
This article is written by Prof. T.T. Ram Mohan of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), July 21, 2011
Fewer overseas students to get skilled migrant visas in Australia
Fewer overseas students, including from India, will be able to get skilled migrant visas on the basis of their Australia qualifications under tough new migration rules in the country, an education expert has said. Monash University researcher Bob Birrell said there could be just 4000 visas a year as compared to 19,352 visas for this group in 2006-07 and 17,552 in 2007-08, the time during which education was sold as a pathway to migration, ‘The Australian’ reported.
Birrell said the unpublished Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) estimate of 4000 visas was “an unmistakable signal that the industry needs to set its marketing around selling an education that is valuable back in the country of origin. The changes will favour overseas applicants from English-speaking countries who can meet the much tougher English language requirements of the new points test,” Birrell and colleagues said in a report from the Monash Centre for Population and Urban Research.
The report gives new insight into the “stockpiling” of thousands of overseas students by DIAC. These include many students with cookery and hairdressing qualifications who would win visas under the old rules but whose cases have been put off and who are now on bridging visas.
In December last year, there were 29,211 former vocational education students on bridging visas, as well as another 26,309 former higher education students. About 16,000 of these former students had applied for skilled migration visas. In 2009-10, there were 28,126 applications for the graduate skilled bridging visa that is held by many former overseas students caught mid-stream by policy reforms.
The Birrell report predicts some of Bowen’s hypothetical Harvard scientists will have to wait as his department works through this backlog of students with lower skill levels. “Unpublished statistics show tens of thousands of former overseas students will benefit from the transitional arrangements in place,” the report said. Applications for permanent residence from these students will crowd out better qualified applicants for several years.
But a DIAC spokesman said applicants “who demonstrate the skills most needed by the Australian economy” always would be processed first. A series of reforms, including a new skilled migration points test from July 1, have weakened the policy link between education and migration.
Announcing changes last year, then Immigration Minister Chris Evans famously said under the old rules cooks and hairdressers would qualify but not a Harvard environmental scientist. The new regime will favour offshore rather than onshore applications and advanced rather than basic skills.
Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), July 20, 2011
India-US higher education summit in October, 2011
Aiming at more collaborations in higher education, India and the US will host a summit in Washington this October. A statement issued after the talks between US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna said the summit will be held on October 13 to “highlight and emphasize the many avenues through which the higher education communities in the US and India collaborate”.
“The US and India plan to expand its higher education dialogue, to be co-chaired by the US Secretary of State and Indian Minister of Human Resource Development, to convene annually,” the statement said. It said the summit would incorporate private and non-governmental sectors and higher education communities to aid government-to-government discussions.
The US said a special initiative named “Passport to India” has been created to encourage American students to study and intern in India. Over 100,000 Indian students are now studying or interning in America.
The US-India Science and Technology Endowment Board, established by Clinton and Krishna in 2009, plans to award nearly $3 million annually to entrepreneurial projects that commercialize technologies to improve health and empower citizens. “The two sides are strongly encouraged by the response to this initiative, which attracted over 380 joint US-India proposals. The Endowment plans to announce the first set of grantees by September 2011,” the statement said.
The two countries will also focus on strengthening teaching, research and administration of both US and Indian institutions through university linkages and junior faculty development at higher education level.
The statement said the India-US Science and Technology Forum, now in its 10th year, has convened activities that have led to the interaction of nearly 10,000 Indian and US scientists and technologists. As a follow up to the successful US-India Innovation Roundtable held in September 2010 in New Delhi, the two sides agreed to hold another Innovation Roundtable in early 2012.
IITs have lost old sheen, says Narayana Murthy
Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are no longer the quality institutions they were in the 1960s and 70s, said chief mentor of Infosys N R Narayana Murthy while speaking at IIT-Gandhinagar. Murthy encouraged students to become strategic learners and restore the lost glory of the IITs.
Murthy said very few world-class researches came out of IITs and IIMs in the last decade. “In 2004, China produced 2,652 PhDs in computer science and in that year the figure was 24 in our country,” he said. “This is truly worrisome. Focus on researches has diminished in the IITs and they have become just a teaching institution and we all know that it is not the way to go about it,” he added.
“In the last 15 to 20 years, IITs have lost all the sheen that they had once upon a time. In 1967, at the electrical engineering department of IIT-Kanpur there were about 60 to 70 students registered for PhD. But today, at the same department if there are five PhD students joining in a year, that would be fantastic,” said Murthy.
He said that even gold medalists from IITs were at a loss when they pursue researches in institutes like MIT and Harvard. “The primary difference that I have found between the system of education in India and other countries, particularly the US, is that they focus on problem solving and relating theories to reality around them. These two things are lacking in the education system in India,” Murthy said.
According to Murthy, the decline of the quality of IITs is also the result of coaching classes for joint entrance examinations. “Today, students prepare hard for a year solving sample questions for IIT-JEE (Joint Entrance Exam). One of these samples matches in the entrance examination and they crack the test,” he said.
Inspiring the students to become a strategic learner, Murthy told them to inculcate the qualities of independent thinking, connecting what is learnt in the classrooms with what is happening in the outside world and finding appropriate solutions to problems around.
Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), July 20, 2011
Government seeks more clarity on education loans
The Ministry of Finance wants state-owned banks to define the terms and conditions for sanctioning education loans in an effort to reduce arbitrary decisions by bank officials. In draft guidelines circulated to the banks last week, the government has suggested steps to make the process of sanctioning and disbursing education loans more transparent, customer friendly and standardized.
A finance ministry official who did not want to be identified said the current system is heavily dependant on the discretion of the branch manager of the bank. The ministry wants “approval conditions” defined so as to reduce this discretion, this person added. Bankers said the government also wants to ensure students understand the terms of the loan contract. “It is clearly in banks’ interests also if the student understands the terms and conditions well. It will help banks reduce the NPAs (non-performing assets) in this segment,” said Vivek Mhatre, General Manager in-charge of retail banking at Union Bank of India.
The education loan portfolio of public sector banks stood at Rs. 43,074 crore (Rs. 430.74 billion) on 31 March. Bankers say defaults in this segment are 2-5% of the portfolio. Defaults are higher in loans of less than Rs. 400,000, where banks cannot ask for collateral or personal guarantees.
The ministry has proposed that banks give loan applicants the name of a bank executive they can approach to track the status of their application. It has also asked banks to tell applicants how much money they can borrow to meet additional expenses besides the tuition fee.
Students generally take a student loan to pay tuition fees and meet additional expenses such as hostel fees, books, laptops and field visits. Banks transfer the tuition fees directly to the institutes but release the additional expenditure to the students.
“They (banks) can clearly state that the additional expenses ceiling will be a certain percentage of the tuition fees, say 50%,” the ministry official said. “At present, it is left to the discretion of every bank manager who may sometimes feel that the student is overstating the additional expenses. Each bank can decide its own limit.”
The ministry has suggested that bank branches compile the placement track record of institutes in their area and consider that as the basis for approving student loans.
“A bank branch can compile the placement data of colleges in that particular area to determine the loan paying capacity of the borrower. This will ensure that there is no discrimination between students from the same college—where one is given a loan and the other is not,” the ministry official said. “This is particularly so in loan applications below Rs.4 lakh, where the borrower does not need to give any collateral.”
The ministry has also asked banks to clearly state that a loan taken during the so-called moratorium period will be classified as a second education loan. Banks typically let students complete their course and take a year to get a job before they start repaying the loan—this is known as the moratorium period.
Currently, a second loan is defined as a loan taken immediately after the first loan, but the ministry official said the interpretation of “immediately” can vary depending on the discretion of a bank official.
The ministry’s move follows a report submitted by a committee constituted by Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) to suggest modifications in the model education loan scheme launched in 2001-02.
The committee, headed by Indian Bank chairman and managing director T.M. Bhasin, has recommended the creation of a credit guarantee fund financed by the banks and the government. Banks can use this fund to recover losses from bad education loans.
The ministry official quoted above said the government is open to the creation of a credit guarantee fund and has asked IBA for a detailed proposal.
Source: Mint, July 20, 2011
3 more IIMs set to get autonomy
After the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), three others have succeeded in getting autonomy for themselves. Their memoranda of association (MoAs) have been approved by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and sent to the Law Ministry for opinion, after which they will be ratified and the institutes notified. Now only IIMs in Kolkata and Lucknow remain to get autonomy. “We are discussing it with our faculty and other members of the society,” said an official from IIM-Calcutta.
As per the new amendments in the MoA in case of the four IIMs — Ahmedabad, Indore, Bangalore and Kozhikode — these can set up overseas campuses as they are now allowed to buy and sell property. But in doing so, they can’t use public funds or the money they raise by selling membership of the societies, according to MHRD sources.
The MoA with the government with the amendments allowing them to select their own directors and allowing corporate houses to be part of the society membership for a sponsorship cost are nothing new. The autonomy to shortlist own director existed until 2001. When Murli Manohar Joshi took over the MHRD in 2002, he said the directors would be appointed by the government. Currently, a search-cum-selection committee set up by the government selects the directors. The amended MoA reduces the role of the government.
Among the various amendments allowing for greater autonomy, one says in case a legislation allows institutes to award degrees in the future, IIMs won’t have to ask for another amendment. The last time amendments were made to the MoAs was more than a decade ago.
Source: The Indian Express, July 20, 2011
Common medical entrance exam from next year
The Ministry of Health, Medical Council of India (MCI) and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) have agreed to conduct a common all-India entrance test for admission to all medical colleges across the country from next year. The CBSE will conduct the proposed common medical entrance test for entry to all private and government medical colleges in India (close to 300 colleges of which about 180 are private) from 2012.
Almost 800,000 students take undergraduate medical entrance tests annually but at present they sit for different tests, including various state-level medical entrance tests and the All India PMT (Pre Medical Test) which the CBSE conducts. The decision now is that the CBSE will just hold one test for medical aspirants. It has the experience of conducting the largest entrance test in India – AIEEE for engineering entrance which close to 1.1 million students take every year.
A common test will ensure uniformity in undergraduate medical education across states where private colleges are in the practice of charging exorbitant sums for admitting students. It will also ensure quality students entering medical education because states would be obliged to fill seats in their respective jurisdictions with students who figure in the All-India merit list. They would be free to prefer students from their areas but they won’t be able to compromise on merit.
MCI board member Dr. Purushottam Lal said that the MCI will prepare the course structure for the test and put it on the website for comments of people. He also added that the decision came in the wake of the Supreme Court orders to the MCI to go ahead with one test for undergraduate medical admissions to avoid stress to students.
Tamil Nadu had earlier opposed the move and secured a stay on it from the High Court. The Health Ministry subsequently asked the MCI to withdraw the common entrance test notification but the Supreme Court told the MCI to go ahead. At the latest meeting which Health Secretary attended, the view was that state governments would be roped in to build a consensus on the matter.
From 2012, medical CET in English, Hindi
The new board of Medical Council of India (MCI) and the Union Health Ministry have decided to start Common Entrance Test (CET) for undergraduates and postgraduate medical courses from next year in two languages — English and Hindi.
The proposal to start CET had sparked off a fight between the ministry and the previous MCI board after the latter issued a notification on National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) in December 2010. The ministry had declared invalid the notification issued without its approval.
Putting to rest this controversy, in a meeting chaired by Health Secretary K. Chandramouli on Monday, it was decided that the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) would conduct the exam from next year. The meeting was attended by senior officials from the CBSE and the MCI.
“The states had been conducting entrance examinations in regional languages till now. But we have now decided to conduct the exam in two languages on the lines of engineering entrances,” said Dr. Purushottam Lal, a member of the MCI board. The MCI is working on the uniform curriculum that will be soon put on the website. “We are discussing all the implications. The CBSE conducts all exams, so we are taking their help,” Chandramouli told The Indian Express.
Source: The Indian Express, July 20, 2011
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