Careers360 World-class universities: What can India learn? | Page 12

Northwestern
University

The University
of Edinburgh

Duke University

University
college of
London

The University
of Tokyo

4.36

4.37

4.48

4.71

5.55

University of
British Columbia

5.67

University of
michigan-ann
arbor

5.79

University of
Illinois at UrbanaChampaign

The University of
Manchester

The University
of Edinburgh

University
of Oxford

Columbia
University

New York
University

Swiss Federal
Institute of
Technology Zurich

9,407

9,128

8,639

8400

8150

6971

6579

Interview | Prof Sukhadeo Thorat

Autonomy is very important in
making a university world class
Q. What ails the higher education

Q. What according to you is a world
class university?

A. You measure the quality of any
university by measuring the research
work that the university produces. You
measure its quality by the teaching and
learning processes it has adopted and
the type of good quality students it is
producing.

Q. What role does autonomy play in

making a university world class?
A. Autonomy is very important in making a university world class, there should
be least political interference and autonomy should be given to education institutions. What’s important is that along
with autonomy you need accountability.

sector presently?
A. First of all is the issue of gross enrollment ratio in higher education, which
is very low. It is just around 18 percent
while in other countries it is not less
than 30.
The second major problem is the disparity on caste line, inter-religious disparity, rural and urban disparity, gender
disparity as girls are lagging behind, the
poor are lacking behind. Privatization
of education has played a very important role in creating this disparity in the
society.
The third issue is the quality of universities in India, which gives a university its
position in any ranking. The university’s
quality depends on its infrastructure,
availability of academic programmes;
examination system, which should provide more opportunity to the students
for creativity, and not memorizing.

43

Careers

360

January 2014

The universities which are good universities are the ones that have done
experiments with the examination
system. In India one such university
is JNU, which has done so, as written
test constitutes only 50% of the marks,
rest of it is term paper, essay, review,
etc. It gives a student opportunity to be
creative and also enriches the academic
programme.
The critical problem with the higher
education system