Institutional Accreditation in India

Institutional Accreditation in India Anthony Stella Antony Stella is deputy adviser, National Assessment and Accreditation Council, 2/4 Aragini Bhavana, Rajkumar Road, Rajajinagar, Bangalore, India. E-mail: <Stella@india-naac.com>. T Indian higher education system has inherited many regulatory mechanisms from the British legacy of higher education. While the regulatory mechanisms have ensured satisfactory functioning of the system with unprecedented quantitative expansion, raising the standards of higher education could not be achieved. With 259 university-level institutions, more than 10,750 colleges, 8 million students, and 400,000 teachers, India has one of the world’s largest higher education systems. While the numbers may look impressive, they cover only 6 percent of the relevant age group, and 88 percent of student enrollments are in undergraduate education. Ensuring the quality of education provided to this small percentage is vital to the success of the nation. The situation gets further complicated with colleges taking a lead in undergraduate education and the affiliating system that loosely connects the colleges and universities. Most Indian universities are of the affiliating type where the affiliating university legislates on courses of study, holds examinations centrally on common syllabi for its affiliates, and awards degrees to successful candidates. With the larger affiliating universities having more than 400 affiliated colleges, the academic leadership provided to affiliates has come under severe criticism. Many of the preconditions that ensured educational quality, while granting affiliation to colleges, have now been either ignored or softpedaled, with the result that many substandard institutions have come into existence, with the possibility of many more to come. The growth of private initiatives has also increased the concern for quality. To increase access to education, India has encouraged private initiatives. The government-run colleges are few, and privately managed trusts or societies have founded the greater number of colleges—about 70 percent of the total. Most of the private colleges established before the 1980s get more than 95 percent of their financial support from the state government, and they are called grant-in-aid colleges. With limited resources, government could not extend financial support to the private initiatives established after the 1980s. These colleges run on student fees, and they are known as self-financing colleges. Though selffinancing, they have to comply with the rules of the government and the affiliating university. The growth in the number of self-financing colleges adds to the pressure on the affiliating universities. The direct public expenditure on the public-funded institutions, the high fee structure of the self-financing colleges, and the substandard facilities available in some of these institutions have raised the question of “value for money” and hence the need for an effective mechanism for quality assurance. Accreditation by an autonomous body was seen as an appropriate strategy for quality assurance. Consequently, as a part of its responsibility for the maintenance and promotion of standards of education, the University Grants Commission (UGC) established the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) in 1994. The methodology is in line with the international trend—a combination of self-evaluations and peer review based on predetermined criteria for assessment. It is a voluntary process, and the final outcome of the process is an overall grade on a five-point scale and a detailed assessment report, valid for a period of five years. Both the grade and the report are made public. Although the NAAC has the provision to do both institutional and departmental assessment, during the first cycle, institutional accreditation has been promoted consciously. By the end of 2001, the NAAC has assessed around 200 institutions of higher education, and it recently conducted a study to analyze the impact of accreditation on the institutions of higher education.