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Journalism of Courage
Trying to become an undergraduate at the University of Delhi has traditionally required you to slog through what seems like a blizzard of forms,stand in snaking queues in hot June weather and dash from campus to campus checking lists of names.
It is a frazzling experience,and requires students and parents to conduct optimisation exercises complex enough to exhaust economic professors and many wind up applying for courses which they arent interested in,purely in order to have safety options,which greatly increases the load both on them and on the overworked teachers scrutinising admissions forms. Sometimes,according to the principal of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya College,colleges had over a lakh applications to go through and it is quite possible that only a fraction of those students were genuinely interested.
The larger point,which universities like DU should not lose sight of,is that they must be able to streamline processes. The vast expansion in higher education that will be necessary to deal with
Indias expanding and aspirational population will need to be accommodated and that will not happen if we do not take a good hard look at outdated and archaic hoops that young people have to jump through in order to get an education. Nor can we continue with procedures that get exponentially harder to maintain as numbers expand. Money must be spent on teachers and resources,not on processing paperwork.
