Tamil Nadu home for family-run degree shops

CHENNAI: The Union Human Resources Development Ministry’s recommendation to strip 44 institutions of their “deemed to be university status” will only augur well for students and parents. For, all of them, apart from many more private colleges offering various professional courses, are run only as profit-making ventures, undermining the standards of higher education.
That 16 of the 44 institutions are in Tamil Nadu, which is otherwise considered Mecca of higher education, does not, however, come as a surprise. For, it was also the State that pioneered the trend of commercialising higher education, mainly through the mushrooming of professional colleges, in the mid-1980s.
While it is an open secret that many politicians and slimy businessmen managed to earn the respectable sobriquet of ‘educationalist’ by starting colleges and made money by charging high fees and milking students by collecting ‘fines’ and ‘deposits’, curiously the Periyar Maniamai Institute of Science and Technology in Thanjavur also figures among the blacklisted institutions.
It is ironic that an institution named after DK founder EV Ramasamy and his wife Maniamai has been classified as one that fleeces students because Periyar was a vocal advocate of free education, insisting that the State should provide higher education to the poor and underprivileged.
A college started by K Veeramani, who inherited Periyar’s mantle, has now been found guilty of being run as a family fiefdom — Veeramani’s son was recently brought into the Dravidar Kazhagam and is also part of the institute’s management — and commercialising education.
All such blacklisted deemed universities — they even managed to do away with the ‘deemed to be’ tag in course of time — in Tamil Nadu managed to get the university status not because they wanted to provide quality education but because it gave them ample scope to sell all seats.
Had the institutions been affiliated to Anna University, they would have had to give a large chunk of the seats to students selected through the counselling process. In contrast, a deemed university can fill all seats on its own.
In fact, most of the erring universities had been admitting as many students as possible in courses that were in high demand.
Even the fee structure was fixed by them and they had a free run with many people from rural areas admitting their wards in those ‘universities’ without even knowing that they were not affiliated to Anna University.