Govt plans to make affiliated colleges ‘degree-awarding multidisciplinary autonomous institutions’ by 2035

NEW DELHI: In a major restructuring of higher education in India, the government plans to allow all its affiliated colleges to become ‘degree-awarding multidisciplinary autonomous institutions’ by 2035.

According to the proposed guidelines, students would also be allowed to simultaneously pursue dual degrees from two different institutions, earn 40% of credits from outside the parent university/college, and allow colleges to form clusters or even a larger university to offer multidisciplinary degrees.

The policy also proposed institutional collaboration whereby an undergraduate student, upon completion of his/her degree course, need not have to take another entrance test but would get direct entry in a masters programme of a partner institution.

The new draft ‘Guidelines for Transforming Higher Education Institutions into Multidisciplinary Institutions’ as released on Friday by the University Grants Commission (UGC). For the next two weeks, the UGC is seeking suggestions from different stakeholders before its committee finalises the guidelines. The UGC will finalise the regulations by April-May 2022.

Notably, the reforms proposed in the National Education Policy 2020 plans to end fragmentation of higher education by transforming higher education institutions (HEIs) into multidisciplinary universities, colleges and clusters, and knowledge hubs. The idea is to set up large multidisciplinary HEIs in or near every district by 2030, which is one of the most significant recommendations made in the NEP 2020, said UGC chairman M Jagadesh Kumar.

“Today most employers are looking for people with multiple skills. For too long our Indian educational system has worked in silos and within very tight disciplinary boundaries. And we want to remove those disciplinary boundaries. Idea is to facilitate the student’s easy access to different disciplines in a given cluster or any large multi-disciplinary university,” Kumar told TOI.

The policy speaks of a three-pronged strategy. One of which is to establish additional departments, which have not been the core areas thus far of existing higher educational institutes. “IITs are focused on technology and a university like JNU is focused on humanities and social sciences. So, can we establish additional departments so that the students have access to multidisciplinary education and research? For example, IIT-Delhi can establish departments in different areas of social sciences, international relations or national security… because bringing engineers closer to issues that affect our society is also important,” he added.

Kumar cited the example of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, which is intrinsically very strong in humanities and social sciences. He said that in the last five years JNU has introduced engineering, management, a school of traditional dance and musicm making it a comprehensive university providing multidisciplinary education.

The second proposal is to bring together smaller institutions working on focussed areas under one umbrella and convert them into larger universities, while retaining their autonomy with their own management. “The third plan is to bring autonomous colleges as a cluster. They will have their own board of directors and their own academic council. Students from colleges within the cluster can access each other’s courses and earn credit. So these are the three models that policy talks about,” said Kumar.

Another big plan is to allow all the affiliated colleges to become degree granting autonomous institutions by 2035. “There are famous autonomous colleges. Many of the people who study here identify themselves as from those institutions and not from the university which is granting the degree. So we want all the affiliated colleges by 2035 to be either degree awarding autonomous institutions or become part of the university so that they have access to other multidisciplinary research and academic programs in the institute,” the UGC chairman said.

One other reform the policy suggests is institutional collaboration. “For example, IIT-Delhi and JNU have their own intrinsic strengths. So by having collaboration between these two institutes, a student who is admitted in a BTech program in the IIT should be able to get admission in JNU in a master’s program without having to go through an entrance examination and other admission process due to the collaboration. This has several advantages. One is that the student doesn’t really have to go through the pressure of writing multiple entrance examinations, because the student knows that once he has joined the undergraduate program in IIT-Delhi, if he wishes, he can go to a master’s programme in JNU,” Kumar said.