Draft report of

10.2 Parameters evolved
There is need to examine the relevance of higher education in a conceptual framework for the long term, medium term and short term goals, in terms of jobs and career, specific challenges in life consisting of event management or crisis management, etc. and with regard to societal values, individual values, cultural aspects and situations of non neutrality of individual values, societal values and national values.
Relevance shall be considered as a dynamic concept and a multi faceted concept. In this sense, the issue of relevance of higher education needs to be considered in a rolling plan framework and under a multidisciplinary perspective. Care should be taken to ensure that the contents of Higher Education have continuity with the contents of previous levels of education so that students are not confronted with the jerks in their pursuit of education. Efforts shall be made to establish mechanisms for considering the issues of inter- stage continuity, through regular interactions with apex organizations dealing with secondary and higher secondary stages of education. Care should also be taken to ensure inter stream continuity so that there is no ad-hocism in taking particular courses and subjects in the conventional stream, which may lead to wastage and stagnation in higher education, as job compulsions for students might lead to ad-hocism in adoption of streams and courses by them. Care also needs to be taken to ensure that this would not affect flexibility of students to opt any type of combination of conventional stream with the add on career oriented courses. A mechanism for testing a student’s aptitudes should be evolved so that the chosen higher education streams are not irrelevant to students’ own inherent capabilities. Such an approach would help reducing the extent of wastage and stagnation in higher education. Special initiatives are required to link higher education and its contents with the challenges of globalization.