What's going on?

They mostly make news because of negative reasons, and when they run advertisements announcing the courses, but seldom mentioning the teaching staff they have, and never the fees they would charge.

The long simmering discontent that erupted violently in and around Stamford and Darul Ihsan universities on Saturday brought into a shocking realisation of how some private universities are having a field day shortchanging the students without feeling answerable to any authority whatsoever. Stamford students have been complaining of exorbitant fees, frequent increases in charges, compress-ing four-month semester into two months, offering course without UGC approval and lack of accreditation in case of the Pharmacy course with the Pharmacy Council, but these were not heeded by the authority in good time to avert the violent crisis. There could be inherently many others like them.

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Who is in charge of private universities? Out of 54 pri-vate universities, 30 have no vice chancellors. The UGC had quite a while ago categorised them in terms of qual-ity and viability taking stock of the quality of teaching staff, teacher-student ratio, laboratory and library facili-ties, classroom accommodation and some basic ameni-ties. Evaluated against the high fees charged, most of the so-called universities proved to be running solely for profit rather than to meet any social or educational pur-pose. Why have they not been closed down? There has been talk of bringing uniformity in the curricula and ex-amination systems. What has happened to this? Surpris-ingly, we do not even have a law to guide the private uni-versities.

There was basically no reason for all this to happen. There is a huge demand for higher private education, thanks to limited number of public sector universities topped off by sessions jam and the prohibitive cost of pursuing it abroad. There is thus a stupendous rush for higher studies in private sector. The huge potential needs to be cashed in on the right way through competition for imparting quality education in affordable prices rather than that for money making.