Sanjay Negi's thoughts on Current Affairs and Information Technology Directions.

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Saturday, September 09, 2006

Nursery School Admissions in Delhi

A lively debate has been going on in Delhi whether kids and their wards need to be subjected to screening tests and interviews during the admissions rituals that take place every year. Schools say that the number of kids seeking admissions far outnumbers the available number of seats and therefore some method of screening would have to be adopted in any case. Parents, conscience keepers and social organizations maintain that interviews and screening tests for such young aspirants cannot really test anything and may indeed leave rejection scars on the psyche of kids at any early age.

Both sides are convinced about the objective fairness of their respective stands and have therefore together landed up to face the wise men of the judiciary to help them find a solution. As is usually the case, the legal system is good at issueing "fatwas" without taking the pain of analyzing the basics. So the courts have banned all screening and testing processes for the forthcoming admissions season and nobody is the wiser as to how the admissions would be conducted with the limited seats for a flood of applications which are sure to ensue.

Public memory may be short but there was a time in the not too distant past when there were no screening tests and admissions would be decided on a first come first serve basis. This resulted in long queues in front of school gates on the first day of admissions and for some covetted schools people would even start forming the queues from the night before with family members and even retainers splitting up on days where opening dates clashed for more than one school. Often nerves frayed and scuffles broke out under the stressful environment and in some cases the police had to resort to lathi charge to settle the arguments. Screening tests and interviews were supposed to provide a relief as people could collect the application forms at their convenience and would then be scheduled systematically for the entire sophisticated multi-tiered selection processes which no doubt were designed with great care to bring as much objectivity and fairplay as possible into the system.

As the city grew, the admission seekers to the well regarded institutions also multiplied even though the number of schools kept getting added with the horizontal expansion of the metropolis. Existing schools also tried to chip in by building more infrastructure, having more students per section and even adding sections to their classes. The admissions season sees hectic activity with parents buying admission forms which are by no means inexpensive, for dozens of schools and then going through the screening drill from school to school in a monotonous parade. The better schools no doubt spend a lot of their energy during this rigmarole, but perhaps many of them see this as an annual revenue raising exercise as well through the sale of forms and other means.

It is not that all schools in the city get full and there are kids left behind who have to be packed of to other towns or have to be left unlettered. In fact there are many more seats than admission seekers. It is just that most parents would like to see their children getting into the better branded schools even if it means more commuting time and other hassles. It is not that the academics of these so called better schools are superior to the lesser known ones and in fact some of them may be at a disadvantage here as volumes do affect quality in most cases. It is just fashionable for the parents to have their children carry a known lable.

As parents are not sure of the results for a long period of time, some of them do ensure certainty by precipitating matters by offering donations to the institutions with or without prompting or coercion. No doubt with the demand supply equation shifting so much in favour of the schools several managements have found this a good opportunity to fill up the institutional coffers for addition of facilities, infrastructure and even expansion to other locations.

It must be stressed that the demand supply mismatch is more imagined than real. If anything, the supply of reasonable education objectively outstrips demand in most localities. In some pockets supply may marginally fall short but this is easily addressed by adding capacity though multi shift working as they do in Japan for example or several other strategems like adding a storey to existing school buildings, working on weekends, introduction of co-ed to unisex schools etc. This would however have to be resorted to only in very rare cases and by and large the city being well provisioned would manage with existing infrastructure.

What then is the problem? As we all know all markets work best when information about demand and supply is widely known. The more the opacity in information flow the more the distortion in the markets and more often than not is the suppliers who benefit from the lack of knowledge of the demand and supply status in real time. This it seems is exactly happening with the school admissions.

Exploiting the latest Internet technologies, let us attempt to design a hypothetical system and see if can be made workable. The aim is to make the system transparent with a view to giving full play to the laws of demand and supply. Let there be a common admissions system administered by an independent body and accessible by all over the net. All schools in the city would update their available seats information into the system at the start of the admissions season. This would be visible to anyone visiting the admissions site and hyperlinks would connect people to the school websites in case they wish to look at more information about the school such as staff, facilities, infrastructure, academic results, exact location and so on. The admissions site would also give basic information on fee structure to help people make quick choices based on their budget slabs.

Once the parents decide to apply for admission to a particular school, they would be able to fill up an applications form giving the necessary details including unique identifiers and proof of residence like PAN card number, driving license number, ration card number or election I-Card number. A verification process would follow to establish the eligibility for admission. A small fee could be collected to keep out the non-serious cases as well as cover the costs of verification and other processing. Once the verification is completed, the final lists would be collated for each applicant. There are bound to be people who would apply for several schools and hence the applications would have to provide for indicating ranked choices for each school right in the beginning.

At this stage we have a complete list of all aspirants with their ranked choices of schools as well as their duly verified places of residences. With this information it is possible to frame simple algorithms to start offering seats in schools to each case which would be clearly visible over the net. The offers would valid till a given date subject to commercial transactions being completed and a real time status update would keep the whole process fully transparent.

All the above is not rocket science and even the payments can be made over the net through designated payment gateways. Therefore there are no technical showstoppers for this uncomplicated process to get executed in quick time at negligible costs while saving enormously on the time, energy, effort and costs for the parents as well as the institutions.

But it is not likely to happen because of a few reasons. Almost all the so called better schools collect a significant part of their revenues during the admissions process and are therefore critically dependent upon maintaining the opacity in the admissions process. As often happens with any opaque process, accounting by definition is difficult to administer and most transactions are done in cash. This creates opportunities for the institution staff to divert some of the collections for their private gains and therefore senior school staff would stoutly resist and even not hesitate to sabotage any attempt at such reforms.

Therefore the starting point has to be the school managements who must be brought on board by devising ways to protect or better still enhance their revenues under the older opaque systems. Once again robust market principles of supply and demand can come to the rescue. Assuming that some schools are more in demand than others, albeit for frivolous reasons, there would be many affluent parents willing and capable of paying large sums to see their wards in these schools. Some patterns would emerge immediately after the collation of all eligible applications. A certain healthy percentage of seats could be auctioned to the highest bidder over the net and the whole process could be transparently and objectively administered by a common body. The remaining seats could then be allocated based on algorithms which give weights to factors like parents’ choice ranks and distance of home from school. The fees could be fixed such that there is no net revenue loss to the school compared to the present hush-hush model.

It is important to recognize schools’ need for ample revenue streams as long as they are accounted for transparently and move away from hypocrisy where we publicly condemn the use of money power to buy better education but privately queue up to exercise whatever advantages we can gain by fair or foul means.

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

While choosing a nursery school for your child, make sure that the teacher-child ratio is balanced.

School Admission Mumbai

5:09 AM

 

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