Higher Education Commission should ensure employability, job creation: Dharmendra Pradhan

Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan has asked the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) to ensure employability and job creation for Indian students while inculcating a global outlook in them towards their career.

Pradhan chaired a meeting of the HECI on May 9. It was proposed in the meeting that HECI may function as an overarching umbrella for guidance of all the higher education institutions of the country.

As per the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, a single regulatory body will be guiding higher education in India. The regulatory body will have four verticals to deal with different functions of higher education.

The first vertical is National Higher Education Regulatory Council (NHERC) which will function as the common and sole regulator for the higher education sector including teacher education. But it excludes medical and legal education.

The second vertical is the National Accreditation Council (NAC), a ‘meta-accrediting body’ that will be focused primarily on basic norms, public self-disclosure, good governance, and outcomes. It will be carried out by independent accrediting institutions supervised and overseen by NAAC.

The third vertical of HECI is the Higher Education Grants Council (HEGC) that will look into funding and financing of colleges and universities.

The fourth vertical will be the General Education Council (GEC). It will frame expected learning outcomes for higher education programmes, also known as ‘graduate attributes’. GEC will formulate a National Higher Education Qualification Framework (NHEQF).

Later in the day, the minister took to microblogging platform Twitter and wrote that important recommendations of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 will be one of the many steps in the direction of decolonisation of education system of the country.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) had introduced the Higher Education Commission of India Bill in 2018 for repealing the University Grants Commission (UGC) Act and setting up Higher Education Commission of India (HECI). The HECI was formed to promote the quality of academic instruction, maintenance of academic standards and autonomy of higher educational institutions for free pursuit of knowledge, innovation, incubation, skills and entrepreneurship, and for facilitating access, inclusion and opportunities to all, and providing for comprehensive and holistic growth of higher education and research in a competitive global environment.