TN Guv for aligning higher education with needs of current age

Chennai, June 5 (IANS) Tamil Nadu Governor R.N. Ravi on Monday said that the higher education system in the state needs to be aligned with needs of current age.

While speaking at the conference of 'Vice Chancellors of State and Private Universities of Tamil Nadu' at the Udhagamandalam Raj Bhavan, Governor Ravi said that the conference was extremely important to deliberate upon how to impart appropriate time-bound education.

He said that time-bound education means education that meets the demands and needs of the current time and stated that this was the time of Artificial Intelligence which was making an impact on agriculture, industry, processing, production and marketing.

The Tamil Nadu Governor, however, said that since the time of former Chief Minister, K. Kamaraj, all governments of Tamil Nadu have focused on policies aimed at ensuring maximum accessibility to basic education. He said that the spread of basic education is not enough to meet the needs of the job markets of the day and added that higher education needs to have requirements of job markets in mind.

The Governor said that graduates are not able to do jobs commensurate to their basic qualifications and added that several business leaders with whom he had spoken to have informed him that polytechnic students from Industrial Training Institutes have better prospects in job markets than engineering graduates.

He said that even though the state of Tamil Nadu was much better than many other states in terms of education and development, there has been a decline and pointed out the state falling into fifth, sixth or seventh place in many key indicators.

It is to be noted that the conference of Vice Chancellors was organised in Udhagamandalam on deliberations regarding translation of textbooks of higher education institutions into Tamil. He said that in countries like China and Japan, doctors, engineers and scientists speak and study in their native languages.

The Tamil Nadu Governor said that many students who wanted to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses had a mental block in studying these subjects as they were not proficient in English language. He said that if the textbooks in higher education institutions are available in Tamil and other regional languages, more students would opt for STEM courses.

He also called upon the Vice Chancellors of government and private universities to work together and collaborate to produce students to meet the needs and demands of modern industry and entrepreneurship. He added that the culture of private and public institutions working in isolation have to end, and called upon them to work in collaboration.