NEW DELHI: In a major restructuring of higher education, the government plans to allow all affiliated colleges to become degree-awarding multidisciplinary autonomous institutions by 2035. As per the proposed guidelines a student would also be allowed to pursue dual degrees simultaneously from two different institutions, earn 40% of the credits from outside of the parent university/ college and allow colleges to form clusters or even a larger university to offer multidisciplinary degrees. The policy also proposed institutional collaboration whereby an undergraduate student on completion of his/ her degree need not go through another entrance test but get direct entry in the masters programme of the partner institution.

The new draft “guidelines for transforming higher education institutions into multidisciplinary institutions,” released by the University Grants Commission (UGC) on Friday is out for two weeks for suggestions from different stakeholders before the committee finalizes the guidelines and the Commission completes the regulations by April-May 2022.

The reforms envisaged, as proposed in the National Education Policy 2020, plans to end fragmentation of higher education by transforming higher education institutions (HEIs) into multidisciplinary universities, colleges and clusters, and knowledge hubs. The types of HEIs envisaged are multidisciplinary research-intensive universities (RUs), multidisciplinary teaching-intensive universities (TUs) and degree-awarding multi-disciplinary autonomous colleges (smaller than a university). The multidisciplinary TUs and RUs will be large universities with 3,000 or more students.The idea is to set up large multidisciplinary HEIs in or near every district by 2030, which is one of the most significant recommendations in the NEP 2020, said M Jagadesh Kumar, chairperson, UGC.

Speaking to the TOI, Kumar said: “Today most employers are looking for people with multiple skills. For too long our Indian educational system has worked in silos and within very tight disciplinary boundaries. And we want to remove those disciplinary boundaries. Idea is to facilitate the student’s easy access to different disciplines in a given cluster or any large multi-disciplinary university.”

The policy speaks of a three-pronged strategy. One of which is to establish additional departments which have not been its core area thus far in the existing higher educational institutes. “IITs are focused on technology and a university like JNU is focused on humanities and social sciences. So can we establish additional departments so that the students have access to multidisciplinary education and research? For example, IIT-Delhi can establish departments in different areas of social sciences, in international relations or in national security. Because bringing engineers closer to issues that affect our society is also an important thing,” added Kumar.

Kumar cited the example of Jawaharlal Nehru University, which is intrinsically very strong in humanities and social sciences. He said that in the last five years the university has introduced engineering, management, a school of traditional dance and music making it a comprehensive university providing multidisciplinary education.

The second proposal is to bring together smaller institutions working on focussed areas under one umbrella and convert them into larger universities, while retaining their autonomy with their own management.

“The third plan is to bring autonomous colleges as a cluster. They will have their own board of directors and their own academic council. Students from colleges within the cluster can access each other’s courses and earn credit. So these are the three models that policy talks about,” said Kumar.

Another big plan is to allow all the affiliated colleges to become degree granting autonomous institutions by 2035.

“There are famous autonomous colleges. Many of the people who study here identify themselves as from those institutions and not from the university which is granting the degree. So we want all the affiliated colleges by 2035 to be either degree awarding autonomous institutions or become part of the university so that they have access to other multidisciplinary research and academic programs in the institute,” said Kumar.

One other reform the policy suggests is institutional collaboration. “For example, IIT-Delhi and JNU have their own intrinsic strengths. So by having collaboration between these two institutes, a student who is admitted in a BTech program in the IIT should be able to get admission in JNU in a master’s program without having to go through an entrance examination and other admission process due to the collaboration. This has several advantages. One is that the student doesn’t really have to go through the pressure of writing multiple entrance examinations, because the student knows that once he has joined the undergraduate program in IIT-Delhi, if he wishes, he can go to a master’s programme in JNU.”