Chandigarh, Nov 1, 2010: Was it financial crunch or under-utilization of the teaching staff that forced the Punjab government to allow colleges to re-introduce senior secondary (science groups) classes?
The decision may be good for reviving the fiscal health of colleges but it has failed to enthuse boys for higher education. The Tribune survey reveals that the number of boy students in government colleges in particular has been dropping alarmingly over the years.
While girls’ colleges face no such problems, the situation is quite alarming in boys’ colleges especially in science classes. Contrary to the adverse sex ratio, 60 to 70 per cent of total students in all colleges, including private colleges, are girls.
For the past some years, because of the shrinking student strength, almost every Government College for Boys in the state started admitting girl students. The situation has come to a stage where the girl students have out-numbered boy students in colleges that were initially meant only for boys.
There were some colleges, including Government College, Ludhiana, and Government College, Hoshiarpur, where there were co-education facilities only in post-graduate classes.
The decision to re-introduce plus one classes in colleges last year came a little late. The response was poor to moderate as the number of students admitted in the science stream in the plus one class did not even touch the double-figure mark.
In the only dedicated science college at Jagraon, 70 students took admission in the plus one class this year. “There has been a visible revival of interest in basic sciences as reflected from the number of students opting for B.Sc. (non-medical), says Principal Jaswinder Singh. Interestingly, the response to B.Sc. (Medical) courses has been negligible.”
Here is a classic example of girls’ domination. The Jalandhar Government College of Education has 235 students, of which 221 are girl students. In all there are four government colleges of education in the state. While private colleges charge anything between ` 50,000 and ` 80,000 as fees for the BEd course, Government College charges only ` 8,000, says Parwinder Sachdeva, Principal of the Jalandhar BEd College.
In spite of this huge difference in fee, boys have been avoiding Government Colleges.
In Fatehgarh Sahib, there is neither any boys’ college nor any co-educational institution for higher education. The only girls college run by the government has 311 students. Till 1976, it was a private college. In Bathinda, Government Rajindra College has 1,206 girl students out of 2,819 students.
(With inputs from Neeraj Bagga, Kusum Arora, Mahesh Sharma, Kulwinder Sandhu, Chander Parkash, Rajay Deep, Gagan K Teja, Gurdeep Mann and Megha Mann.)
(To be concluded)