On 15 May 2024, the University Grants Commission approved the policy of allowing HEIS to admit students twice a year, in July/August and January/February. What are your views on this?
This is an excellent, well-thought-out bold move. It ensures that we slowly and steadily create our ecosystems wherein students can join twice a year. In that sense, it gives flexibility to people from remote locations or people with difficult work-life issues, people with certain commitments or constraints which they might be having; let’s say a medical exigency or a family issue or something else or a certain liability, they can take care of that and then jump into the coming year. It also forces organisations and higher education institutes to think afresh, be innovative and be on their foot. It allows students to not feel blacked out. It ensures that they get another chance within the next just four to five months, flat. This is an extremely positive move. It was much needed, much awaited and people were eagerly looking forward to it and I think this is a fantastic move. Kudos and congratulations to UGC for taking this up. I wish and pray that every institute adopts this, embraces it with happiness and moves on towards an organisational culture that is twice a year. It also demystifies or moves away from the certain, what you can call as a coaching centre-driven culture that possibly exists wherein for one full year, the candidates would essentially be loitering around or wasting their time or preparing or hanging on for another full year. So, there are many advantages but as I see, I think this breaks people from their silos and it also permits people to be far more positive. It also ensures a system of coming and going. The current culture is like in a year you have only one admission, you have only one exit so there is a culture that when will the students go. Now with this happening every six months, it ensures a certain amount of continuity.
How according to you, is this step going to impact the higher education landscape?
As I mentioned, it will immensely create dynamism in the higher education landscape. It makes life much more comfortable and less stressful for the parents and the next generation of students. It also ensures that a faculty and staff can be more active in the classroom. This is a very important aspect of the culture for a faculty or anyone else, to not hang up their shoes once they have taught something once a year. It ensures that there are multiple opportunities for them to face students and they also should be ready for what they are going to do.
How challenging the implementation part is going to be? What are the other issues?
The systems and processes that are there in the existing colleges and the wiring that is there in the administration that in a year there is only one month or two months wherein they would be taking care of admissions, that has to be done away with. Colleges will have to be far more welcoming of these aspects. They will have to adapt and embrace these changes that are there. It is not a very big challenge as long as the admissions office and a few key parts of the administration are tweaked a little bit. I don’t see this being an extremely big challenge.
Any predictions for the post-implementation phase?
This will be a runaway success and the early movers will be valorised and will have a fantastic first-mover advantage. The early movers will grab some attention and potentially they would be looked at very differently by the community around them.
