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How novel teacher recruitment strategies can re-energise Kerala’s HEIs
How novel teacher recruitment strategies can re-energise Kerala’s HEIs
This year, only one student sought admission for B.Sc. Physics and two for Chemistry in a premier government aided college in Kerala. The situation is even more dismal in social science and language subjects. This is not the situation of just one college. The same condition prevails throughout the state.
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As student enrolment in fundamental sciences and social sciences declined, majority of government-aided colleges introduced emerging employment oriented programmes under the self-financing model. While permanent teachers handling liberal arts and sciences are concerned about job security, contract teachers are being appointed for new self-financing programmes. If this trend continues, will Kerala’s public higher education system eventually depend almost entirely on temporary teachers?
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Kerala’s higher education sector is undergoing structural changes. The decline in the Gross Enrolment Ratio (according to the latest AISHE report, from 43.2% in 2020–21 to 41.32% in 2021–22), the migration of students to other states and abroad, the excessive preference for professional courses, and the neglect of traditional programmes are the major trends currently visible in Kerala’s higher education sector.
All emerging employment oriented programmes, such as Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, Digital Media, and Business Analytics, and others are in the self-financing stream of Government aided HEIs. Since these programmes require students to pay higher fees, gaining admission to them is difficult for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Not just, Government aided colleges, the state universities have found self-financing programmes as a good source of income. State funded Universities have many demanding tech and new generation programmes in self-financing mode in Kerala, a unique phenomenon of ‘percolating privatisation through public system’.
When public HEIs offer programmes with better employment prospects only through the self-financing stream, a denial of social justice occurs. In acquiring modern skills and knowledge, the economic status of parents becomes a more important criterion than academic merit. While financially privileged students choose employment-oriented programmes under the self-financing stream, students facing economic hardship often end their education after Plus Two. Ironically, while faculty members are divided by their employment status, students are divided by their ability to pay. HEIs in Kerala are increasingly polarised: excess permanent teachers in declining programmes and temporary teachers in expanding new generation programmes.
Since there is no certainty regarding the long-term sustainability of employability oriented programmes, permanent teachers cannot be appointed to these programmes either. The question of how permanent teachers can continue to be appointed in Liberal arts and sciences when student enrolment is steadily declining is a rational question.
Even if permission is granted to appoint teachers for new-generation disciplines, there is no assurance that these programmes will sustain for a long time. Rapid technological changes continually reshape academic demands. When a permanent teacher is appointed, the expected service period is generally between twenty and thirty years. However, within that very period, these new academic programmes themselves may vanish. Therefore, it is reasonable to question whether these new fields of study are capable of attracting students for at least the next thirty years.
It is under these circumstances that new-generation academic departments have been established under the self-financing model and teachers are appointed only on a contract or temporary basis. At the same time, campuses populated by students who remain only for a fixed period and by temporary teachers may ultimately be reduced to nothing more than transient academic communities. Without stable academic communities HEIs will not be able to build research culture, Intellectual ecosystem, and mentor prospective scholars.
The fundamental issue lies in the way teaching posts are sanctioned. Following the twentieth century model, Kerala still sanctions vacancies department by department at collegiate level. Contemporary academia increasingly functions across disciplines rather than within the narrowly defined boundaries of disciplines. Consequently, the very existence of individual academic departments in HEIs is being questioned.
Therefore, Kerala has reached a stage where it must formulate an entirely new policy for teacher recruitment. HEIs need to move away from the concept of highly specialised and narrowly defined departments towards interdisciplinary academic domains, without posing any threat to teachers’ job security. This would effectively modernise the recruitment system, without sacrificing permanent teaching positions and public nature of the government supported HEIs.
Such changes would also help correct prevailing perceptions regarding liberal arts and science programmes. Declining admissions are often confused as declining relevance of the subject. However, mathematics is the language of artificial intelligence. Physics forms the foundation of semiconductor technology. Public policy depends upon Economics, while environmental science and International Relations are equally indispensable. The sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities do not compete with one another; rather, they supplement one another. The basic issue is not the obsolete disciplines, but the obsolete academic structure prevailing in the state.
Another important reform is to move away from allocating teaching vacancies to individual colleges and instead establish a state-level pool of teachers. This would facilitate the redeployment of teachers according to vacancies. Since aided colleges in Kerala function under different managements, the state could alternatively consider creating teacher pools under corporate managements. A dynamic pool of teachers would help the system to respond effectively to the changing enrolment patterns, without leaving emerging disciplines to self-financing streams and the underutilisation of the ‘excess’ permanent teachers.
In fact the higher education system of Kerala is not suffering from an excess of teachers, it suffers from an outdated recruitment system. Filling the existing vacancies without revamping the system would only procrastinate the crisis. Therefore, the question that policymakers should ask is not merely whether teaching vacancies should be filled or not. Rather, the real policy question is how higher education can be advanced in a manner that accommodates the changing realities of the academia while remaining firmly grounded in the principles of social justice.
(Amruth G. Kumar is Professor, Central University of Kerala)
Published - July 21, 2026 08:15 am IST
education / Kerala
Source: TheHindu
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