Colleges and universities in India have the potential to do a lot more in terms of enhancing students’ overall experience, and it’s not that difficult. Here are a few pointers on what can be done.
- Skill Development: Most employers complain that fresh college graduates lack industry oriented skills as well as interpersonal skills such as business writing and problem solving. Colleges can introduce programs over and above the curriculum to upgrade students’ knowledge and skills.
- Revamp teaching methodologies: it’s high time that colleges revamp their teaching methodologies and use online training tools more effectively. Classrooms can be used a discussion forum with the teacher as a facilitator, rather than the teacher spending the entire lecture making an effort to teach and students pretending to learn.
- Create opportunities for overall personality development: This could be done through a combination of programs such as introducing more case and team based learning methodologies, monitoring students’ participation in college events and festivals, introducing leadership development programs, encouraging students to participate in community based/social projects, and a many more such initiatives.
- Further educational and career planning: While some colleges have placements happening on campus, there is hardly any career planning that happens. Colleges that do have ‘placements’ are just happy when most of their students get jobs before graduation. Career planning is mostly absent.
- Make processes student friendly: Be it s simple process such as requesting a duplicate copy of a marksheet, or paying tuition, or any other administrative process – make it easy and friendly for students.
- Cross departmental learning: Most colleges do not have any provisions for cross departmental learning. For instance, a student from the Physics department cannot take a class from the Accounting or Marketing department. While I understand that most colleges are governed by syllabi that is defined by the university, introducing cross learning opportunities could still be possible, at least for the autonomous colleges & universities.
- Collaborative learning: Colleges could introduce learning modules where students from different departments participate thus fostering a collaborative learning environment.
- Encourage Entrepreneurship: Starting an entrepreneurship development program on campus in college is not only easy but also a tremendous fun based learning opportunity for students and faculty alike. Even if one may not churn out entrepreneurs straight out of college, it would definitely help inculcate an entrepreneurial mindset amongst students and faculty.
- Assign a mentor: Students need a ‘mentor’ or a ‘go-to’ person to discuss their academic as well as non academic challenges.
- Alumni support: Create an alumni network and a support system for ex-students to revisit and contribute.
Hoping to see some positive changes in the way colleges and universities function, in the coming decade.
In 2005 Jay Rege, along with his wife Jothsna Rege, co-founded Academy One, a career guidance and study abroad counseling venture. Prior to co-founding Academy One, he worked as a software developer with HCL Technologies. He holds a computer engineering degree from Mumbai University and a MBA from the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, USA. He has also been a visiting faculty at a few colleges where he teaches topics related to entrepreneurship.