Between percentiles and placements

Perhaps it is time to judge colleges by their “hidden curriculum”

- MEENAKSHI GOPINATH

The higher education space in India is extremely heterogeneous. It has over 40,000 colleges of different hues. You have women’s colleges, minority institutions, multidisciplinary institutions, arts and commerce HEIs (higher educational institutions), colleges affiliated to a university, single-discipline colleges, and so on. So, you definitely need a more pluralistic approach in evaluating colleges.

We have nearly 40 million students enrolled in higher education. And nearly 80 per cent of them are in the undergraduate space. This is where the majority of your demographic dividend resides. Up until magazines started doing these rankings, the national discourse used to be about school and then about university education. Colleges remained largely invisibilised. It is only over the past 15 years or so that the conversation shifted to college as a space which is vibrant and fecund—a rite of passage, which offers young people the first taste of freedom beyond the straightjackets of school and family. The first tangible experience of autonomy happens at college. It is a space for new kinds of socialisation.