Maharashtra: More seats but many shortlisted candidates give BEd course a miss

“January is already ending and just one round of admission has been held. The academic year will begin only in March. Ideally, the academic year should begin in July-August. Many candidates prefer to go ahead with other higher education options,” said Dr Jayashree Inbaraj, Principal of Kapila Khandwala College of Education.

Colleges said that while there is a major demand for teachers, there has also been a rise in online education platforms, which do not ask for BEd degrees. This allows many postgraduates to opt for such teaching jobs.

Dr Arundhati Chavan, academic dean at Swayam Siddhi College of Education, said, “After BEd, one has to clear Teachers Eligibility Test (TET) for a government job, which will give good salary. But the multiple online education platforms that are growing amid the pandemic and are also lucrative do not insist on such degrees.”

Educationists from the BEd colleges pointed out that like other professional courses, only a few colleges offering quality education are preferred while many others lack good faculty support.

Prof Mythili Ramchand from the Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, said: “While on one hand, we do have far more trained teachers than the number of available jobs — if we compare TET qualified teachers with those who actually have got jobs — it is also true that there is no data available on the demand-supply curve for teachers.”

“There is no information that shows which areas or subjects lack adequate number of teachers. We can see what happened to engineering courses in the past… with rising demand, the number of seats started increasing… However, soon vacancies started rising as only few a colleges are in demand.”