The problem with falling enrolment in colleges is not because of inadequacies in higher education but in secondary education, as per senior education officials. This is because there is a large gap between the number of students in the age group that Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) calculates, and the number of students actually eligible for the calculation.
GER has served as a measure to calculate access to education. The draft National Education Policy aims to increase GER from its current 26.3 percent to over 50 percent by 2035. Experts are pushing for a change in the measure to check enrolment at the college level — from the traditional GER to a new Eligible Enrolment Ratio (EER). GER is a simple mechanism that has been used widely even in the West for decades, and does not account for those who are ineligible to attain a college degree such as school dropouts, a senior UGC official told The New Indian Express. Enrolling in a college requires students to complete their 12th grade.
Read also: A Brief View of Montessori Teaching Course
This dropout level impacts the indicator at the higher education level, “hence focussing on the expansion of higher education to increase GER is misplaced,” experts say. As per the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2019, India has 3.7 million students in 993 universities, 39,931 colleges and 20,275 standalone institutions. Yet, GER — at 26.3 pc — paints a dull picture, placing India below the global average of 29 pc.
In a research published in the Economics and Political Weekly, Pankaj Mittal of Association of Indian Universities, and Bhushan Patwardhan from University Grants Commission, and others checked for completion ratio of 10 countries including India. The measure checks how many people in the relevant age group have completed the last grade of a given level of education (in our case, class 12). Using UNESCO Institute of Statistics data and a forecasting tool, for 2013-2017, UK, Germany, USA, France had over 77 of 100 students eligible for higher education, whereas, in India, just 42.3 percent were eligible. When extrapolating this information, they found that developing countries fared better on EER values in comparison to GER values.
Loophole in GER
GER, or Gross Enrolment Ratio, is a simple mechanism that has been used widely even in Western countries for decades, and does not account for those who are ineligible — school dropouts, for instance — to attain a college degree
Courtesy: The New Indian Express
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.