Dr G D Agrawal | A Noted Environmentalist
His bio
He also was my teacher at IITK. I had the honor of taking two of his courses: Microbiology and Environmental Engineering.
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His bio
He also was my teacher at IITK. I had the honor of taking two of his courses: Microbiology and Environmental Engineering.
Although for-profit schools enroll about 10 percent of the nation's college population, 45 percent of students who defaulted on their loans attended such institutions.
Some of the most striking statistics in Thursday's report dealt with the amount of money institutions spent on teaching students. On average, for-profit schools spent $2,659 per student on instructional costs during the 2008-09 school year, compared with $9,418 per student at public universities and $15,289 per student at private non-profit colleges.
A high-level public row has broken out between two cabinet ministers over the quality of India's premier institutions, the Indian Institutes of Technology, and particularly their research capability, which is seen as lagging behind other countries.
The spat was sparked when Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh (pictured), a mechanical engineering graduate from IIT-Mumbai, said last week that hardly any worthwhile research was done at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). He blamed academics for the poor quality of research.
"There is hardly any worthwhile research from our IITs. The faculty in IITs is not world-class. It is the students in IITs who are world-class. So the IITs and IIMs are excellent because of the quality of students not because of quality of research or faculty," Ramesh said.
India has 14 IITs, seven of them established in the last three years. Competition for seats is cutthroat, with 470,000 students taking the IIT joint entrance examination in 2010 and only 13,104 qualifying. That year some 241,000 students applied for roughly 2,400 IIM seats.
Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal flamed the fires of the controversy by saying that the country's most prestigious institutions were lagging in world-class standards. "Is even one of our institutions world class? If it is world-class it must be in the top 100 to 150 institutions in the world, [but] that is not evident."
Later in the week, Sibal backtracked.
The IITs had "not gained critical mass to change global scientific discourse" but the problem did not relate to their faculty, he said, adding that India spent less than a third of the money the United States did on research and this was "not the fault of faculty".
Marco Boer VP of IT Strategies warns that digital printing statistics can often be misleading and that the digital tipping point may not be here quite yet.
