There is a general awareness that contemporary education is a totally different ball game from what it was earlier. Increasing inroads into students’ minds by the broadcast media day in and day out, vastly differential lifestyles and severe peer pressure have very disturbing consequences and implications. In academia too, new courses make headlines everyday, focusing on currently fashionable professional and personal profile skills, each carrying a more fanciful designation than the other! Typically students are attracted to these state-of-the-art designations since they are driven by the natural desire for peer acceptance and acclamation, and wish to be in tune with current mores and fashions.

If we analyse these processes and their symptoms carefully, it becomes evident that students, particularly those in the twilight zone between adolescence and adulthood are to a great extent driven by a strong need for personality differentiation. One can relate this need of youth to an extrapolation of what can be categorised as ‘self esteem needs’, to borrow from Maslow’s hierarchy of ‘esteem needs’. Perhaps a better and more communicative term would be ‘differentiation needs’. This stems from the basic premise that each individual is different, looks different, talks, walks, dresses, thinks and acts differently. It is these highly individualised differentiation needs which drive youth to actively participate in virtual or real group activities that repeatedly satisfy their different needs either in thought or in action and attach them by a needs-driven umbilical chord to be part of the pace-setting differentiated crowd.

In the Bangalore-based Jain Group of Institutions (JGI) we are keenly aware of, and committed to helping our students to ‘make a difference’ in terms of meeting their aspirations, through a combination of empowerment and enablement. In our scheme of things, powered by our chairman Sri Chenraj Jain’s vision, we believe that contemporary, latter day students need to be encouraged and motivated to achieve their aspirations by giving them “empowered education leading to enhanced employability”. To this end, we have addressed each sector of the education-employment continuum in a bottom-up step-wise manner, starting with:

• A binary model of school education for the haves (Jain International Residential School) and the have-nots (Jain Vidyaniketan)

• Vocationalised education (Jain Institute of Vocational & Advanced Studies)

• Graduate education (Sri Bhagawan Mahaveer Jain College)

• Postgraduate education (MATS School of Business)

• Entrepreneurship/incubatory education

Our experience has been that while vocational education and employment are complementary and directly proportional to each other up to a point in terms of entry level jobs, vocational education has its limitations in being only a ‘job enabler’ rather than a ‘career enabler’. Also, in our considered view, it is at the undergraduate level that we need to be different, to address students who aspire to be different, so that together we can help them to differentiate themselves.

From an early stage we were aware that if we were to meet students’ differentiation needs it would not be enough just to ‘run a race’; what was actually required was a focus and drive to run a perpetual ‘relay race’, with our unique ‘education-employability baton’ being carried up and down across all the segments mentioned above by all stakeholders. This collective feeling in JGI emanates from a unique sense of our pioneering mission and ownership given to us by our chairman and has led to the establishment of a full-fledged School of Graduate Studies under the aegis of Sri Bhagawan Mahaveer Jain College, where we are launching a slew of innovative value-adding diploma/degree courses. Among them: Financial & accounting management; Banking and financial services; Marketing and sales management; Entrepreneurship & family business management; Retailing & customer relationship management; Human resources management; Insurance & risk management; Logistics & supply chain management and Biotechnology & bioinformatics.

These unique and carefully designed programmes will run concurrently with our regular B.Com and B.Sc courses based on the syllabuses of Bangalore University. The creation of the programme structure and content required valuable inputs from industry professionals and academic experts conversant with the latest developments in their respective functional areas.

The approach adopted differs from conventional academic programmes in that it is “outside-in”, pedagogy used to bring a real world essence to the course content, as against the usual “inside-out” approach. To that extent, these programmes offer empowered education, leading to enhanced employability.

Additionally, students are given a two-month internship in industry to practise their chosen specialisation and supplement academic knowledge with practical exposure. Under this system they are also awarded a certificate of competence for their internship which opens up employment opportunities and career paths for our students. We believe this uniquely packaged two-in-one university programme combined with a certified internship, effectively addresses the ‘differentiation needs’ of students and equips them with the requisite personal and professional skills which make them brand ambassadors for our pioneering educational programmes.

 

(I.V. Ranga Rao is head of the business development strategic education unit, Jain Group of Institutions)