As more and more people are discovering that Education is a lucrative business, the number of colleges offering professional courses has burgeoned in the last ten odd years. And just as Engineering discovered a world beyond the IIT, Medicine ventured into the districts and Law looked at alternatives to NALSAR. Even the IIMs were not spared and every college and its cousin began to offer MBA or PGDBM courses with gay abandon.

With the options available and the similarity of price tags one would have expected a certain ease to influence the selection process. Merit became a wayside formality in many of these institutions and only the fat fees and donations that they could pay, allowed them to take up prestigious courses in colleges with false promises and huge pretensions.

But as the marketplace got overcrowded, advertising dynamics came into play. And the game rules changed.

Colleges had to invest in branding themselves. From the established giants like St. Stephen’s and Loyola, from Xavier’s to Presidency…to unknown fledglings like Amity, Symbiosis, IIPM, Aurora and several others, branding became key to survival.

Some brands were built around heritage…so many years in the education sector. Some were built around their facilities…latest equipment, real life simulation, air conditioned hostels and so on. Some were slowly built on a yardstick called placement. Some called upon foreign collaborations and tie-ups, accreditations etc. to do the trick.

And then some colleges and institutions cashed in on the image of their founders or founding families. But strangely they kept away from their core strengths…the faculty.

The reason, as I found out in my years of dealing with educational institutions, stemmed mainly from the fact that loyalty was an iffy issue in most of these cases. Would the Professor who was claimed to be an asset still be there for the next few days or was he ready to jump ship at the slightest hint of a better offer?

This insecurity on the part of most colleges meant that the professors and lecturers who by themselves could have added huge value to the brand, were systematically side-lined. And due recognition and publicity, promotion etc. was denied to them.

So unlike the West, where I hear of students who want to go to a certain college just because a particular legend is attached to that college…the situation here is that most colleges don’t know who is going to be on board even on the first day of college. Student. And teacher.

That is indeed a pity. But that is reality. So I must admit that in the last few instances where I have been asked to work with a few institutions I have categorically suggested that they do not use faculty as a prime motivator in the case of admissions. Some people have agreed. Some have vehemently disagreed.

Institutions like IIPM for instance have decided to lay their bets on one single face. Some of the industrial houses that are getting into education are betting on in-house employment opportunities or even foreign collaborations.

But the problem that they all face is a severe faculty crunch. There is hardly a discipline where there are true heroes easily available for hire. As a result, most establishments land up compromising with one star and a hundred mediocre light weights.

There was a time when departments were sought after simply because they were headed by individuals who walked tall. Today the legend is more the exception than the rule. So expecting students to look up to their teachers with awe is unreal. And the teachers themselves, well most of them anyway, fail to stand up to scrutiny by their students.

When are things going to change? When are people going to look for the translatable benefits of a college and not just the tangential ones?