E-governance can ease admission travails

: Along with the announcement of high-school results these days, college admissions are ‘hot’ too. With the seats in colleges being just a fraction of school enrolment (about 8-10% in India compared to 25-50% in many countries), there is a huge demand-supply mismatch.

The plethora of managements—private, public, university, autonomous colleges, affiliated colleges, aided institutions, unaided institutions and minority institutions—and bewildering variety of options—business, engineering, medicine, dental, social science, arts, law, veterinary, mathematical/computing sciences, technology, architecture, mass communications, literature, home science, environment and philosophy—can confuse anyone, let alone teenagers dreaming of a long professional career.

There are hundreds of universities and thousands of colleges, each with dozens of options. Till recently, youngsters would go by ‘established practices’. Boys would choose mechanical engineering, girls medicine. This is changing. People opt out of engineering to pursue fashion design and culinary arts; career decisions are no longer influenced solely by parents.

Against such a complex backdrop is the ‘administration’ of college admissions. We have a plethora of ‘entrance examinations’—Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for admission to the IITs, a Common Entrance Test (CET) of various hues in every state and an AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Examination). The examinations are not coordinated, leading to clash of dates. The results are out on different dates and different colleges use the results very differently.

The CET in Karnataka is considered one of the better-administered systems. At least till the 90s, Karnataka was the only state with the largest number of seats, thanks to the liberal government policy allowing the private sector to set up institutions. And the state had the foresight to think ‘pan-India’ with 50% of the seats for ‘out-of-state’ candidates. CET in Karnataka was completely computerised, followed transparent norms, was efficient and generally on time. Of late, things have not been going well with it—dates are not kept, processes are cumbersome and there is too much confusion in ‘policy’.

With so much happening in IT, one would look at a system that is completely online, super-efficient, available 24x7 all the 52 weeks, inexpensive and user-friendly. The Universities & College Admission Service (UCAS) in the UK is a system worth emulating.