The Common University Entrance Test (CUET) has caused great distress among parents. Apart from having to help their wards fill up the convoluted forms online they also find that all colleges don’t have the subjects that are listed in the form such as Psychology. The students themselves feel they have had to go through so much due to Covid which has unsettled their lives and now in a short while they will also have to writing the CUET in order to be admitted to the undergraduate courses. While parents in the city of Shillong are tearing their hair apart because they fear their kids might not make it through CUET, those from the rural areas seem to have given up the idea of ever seeing their children entering the portals of a college. If the Government of Meghalaya remains a spineless onlooker to this injustice done to our youth, the general enrolment ratio (GER) in the undergraduate level which is already very low will further slide and bring with it unintended consequences.
Any reform in the education or admission system has to be done after having created sufficient awareness so that students and parents can clarify matters by seeking clarification. But in this case there was too little time between the announcement of CUET and its implementation. Ironically the North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) convened a meeting of principals and heads of institutions when that should have been the brief of the state government. The NEHU meeting was not a consultation meeting since the dissenting voices of a few heads of institutions were not recorded or paid heed to. It appears that the NEHU Vice Chancellor has been told by Delhi that he should bulldoze the decision to implement CUET and the concerns of citizens across the board have not merited any consideration.
A closer look will show that the market forces have played a critical role here. India is a thriving space for coaching in order to crack the various entrance exams to IITs, IIMs, the NEET for studying medicine and now CUET to enter university. In this ecosystem the poor will be most disadvantaged as they cannot afford to pay for the coaching classes and will simply fade away into the vast unknown where their futures are uncertain. Already the ed-tech space is swarming with offers of coaching classes and mock question papers and year-long packages to help students pass the CUET with higher scores. Most of the coaching institutes are offering crash courses for this year to help students crack the Language and General Aptitude part of the CUET at a reduced cost ranging between Rs 10,000 to Rs 30,000. This is what education is reduced to.
