VIBHA VERMA
PANJIM: Goa University has been perennially facing enrollment problems in a few departments including departments of Portuguese, French, Philosophy and Latin American studies. In the other social science departments too enrollment is a fraction of the admissions in other universities.
The GU officials conceded the teacher-student ratio in these departments is much below the recommended UGC ratio which is 1:10 (one teacher for about 10 students) in science departments and 1:15 in non-science streams. While the university is unwilling to close down these departments, it is under pressure to come up with viable options.
As per the records available with Herald, the teacher-student ratio is as low as 1:3 in Portuguese, 1:7 in French, 1:6 in the Centre for Latin American studies and Philosophy counts at 1:2.3. GU has an average overall ratio of 1:12, which is low by any standards in India.
Established in 1985, the University, has a waiting list of in excess of 100 in few departments. In all, 617 students were on the wait list who would need to find seats either in the master’s programmes offered in some affiliated colleges of the university or will need to go out of Goa.
Faculties of Natural Sciences and Commerce have high demand among the students for admissions. In the department of Chemistry, all 72 seats are filled for the year 2014, 174 students were on the waiting list when the admissions closed. Similarly, MCA had 110 students waiting for admissions and all the 60 seats were filled for the current academic year. Master in Commerce had 140 students on the wait list and all the 60 seats were filled. The ratio for MCom is thus 1:20, outdoing other streams.
GU Vice Chancellor Dr Satish Shetye conceded that lack of interest among students in some faculties has been a concern. “There are a few departments where students are less than what we would like… This raises questions… Should we close them down? But it is difficult to do that. Then should we change the focus? If yes, in what direction should we go? These are questions that need to be examined,” he said. The matter has been discussed with the Goa government as well as in the Executive Council of the university.
In universities such as Kolhapur, Bangalore or Pune the seats in social sciences departments are around 60 on average. The number of students who register for admissions is about 1500. Hence it is alarming that in GU, when the seats are 50 in social science departments not even 25 seats get filled up. Due to this the seats were reduced to 25 in certain department such as history, political science, philosophy, sociology etc. Only the economics department has about 30 seats.
The lack of interest may have to do with many factors, one major factor being the quality of education. The second major factor would be the teaching methods which leads many students to choose universities outside the state.
With the present strength of post graduate students for the current academic year being 1840, excluding around 100 full time PhD students, GU has increased its annual intake by 30 percent in 2013 and 10 percent in 2014. A total of 661 students were admitted in 2012, which rose to 858 in 2013 with the setting up of the new science building. This has further increased to 945 this year.
