Indian Academic Ecosystem: Merits and Challenges of emerging professional undergraduate degree programmes

Indian education system is evolving rapidly along with the demand of the industry. Employability is emerging as the biggest factor behind selecting any higher education course even at the bachelor degree level. Beside the tradtional professional degrees like Medicine, Engineering or Law; a bunch of new professional degree courses are available for the students at undergraduate level. Courses such as Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Bachelor of Computer Applications (BCA), Bachelor degree in Hotel or Hospital Management and Bachelors in Media Sciences/Mass Communication are some of them. Students are showing tremendous interest in these courses andnumber of new colleges are emerging as the specialized education institutes for those professional courses.

The paper attempts to focus on the increasing demand for job oriented degree programmes across the academic sphere and understanding the nature of the same among the students. The objective of this study was to find out whether we are moving towards developing quality Human Resources with the significant rise in these professional degree courses at undergraduate level as compared to the traditional courses like BA, B.com or B. Sc. The study was done partly on the basis of secondary information collected from various literatures and partly based on a primary study done on 200 undergraduate students from 4 different colleges of Siliguri, West Bengal. They participated in a questionnaire based survey which attempts to evaluate the reason for selecting such courses, their expectations and also the outcome they have received till now.

However the results reveal that probability of securing an early job is the prominent reason for opting these professional courses, however the expectations are not being sufficiently adhered to at some areas where lot of work still needs to be done for a more comprehensive development of a learner.