Archive for November, 2009

After 1950 in India, there are many things that have got remarkable changes like technology, lifestyle, economic growth, finance power of the country and lots more. Among these education is on the top. After ruling period, India education system has showed an outstanding performance. Promoting education state wise was always in the heading since independence. At the time of independence, it was declared by the Indian government to put development of education always on the high priority. At present, promoting an education has now become the responsibility of the different state governments of the nation. Indian government has declared to put emphasis on development of primary, secondary as well as higher education in India.

After 1976, education has become a joint responsibility of the state as well as for central government, where education department of various states and ministry of human resource development along with the Indian government all are representing the status of education in Indian collectively. All these concerned authorities jointly responsible for the formulation of education policy and planning. The Indian education system comprises many stages like primary education system that comprises pre-school, nursery, play school. After this secondary education system comes with secondary as well as higher secondary schools. After secondary education, higher education in India exists that plays an important role in promoting education system of the nation. Higher education system includes colleges and universities in India that offers wide varieties of degree programs at different level like bachelors, masters and at doctoral and PhD level.

Indian government together with different education departments of state wise has launched many education schemes for developing the literacy rate within country. Within the development programs, have opened many new primary schools, secondary high schools, many colleges and universities that are offering variety of courses in all major discipline. The Indian government lays emphasis to primary education system up to the age of fourteen years. Secondary education system covers children from 14 to 18 years of age which covers 88.5 million children according to the Census, 2001.  

Higher education of india comprises many world known and prominent colleges and universities like The Indian Institutes of Technology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Indian Institutes of Management, National Law School Bangalore, Indian School of Business Hyderabad are some of the well known higher education destinations of the country. Besides these, there is an awesome advancement in women’s education in India. At the time of independence women have much lower literacy rate than men. But with help of various types of girl’s education schemes, it got tremendous turn and now both men and women education / literacy rate is almost on the same level. Now the Indian government has launched the Saakshar Bharat Mission for Female Literacy.  This mission aims to bring down female illiteracy by half of its present level.

In corporate marketing, market saturation and consumer desensitization are pitfalls that frequently detract from a successful advertising campaign. To deal with this, savvy advertisers and marketers have come up with strategies that allow them to avoid saturation, improve brand image and increase lead quality.

Although comparatively new, the multi-billion dollar Enrollment Management industry is susceptible to the same problems as the mature corporate marketing industry. One key differentiator between the two industries does exist: schools were not built to make money, they were built to provide an academic service. Building and maintaining a reputation within the academic community is of the utmost importance; some institutions have spent decades and even centuries building and refining a brand. What’s more, in some cases, the brand—academic integrity, excellence—is more important than the profitability of an institution.

This difference makes the task of marketing on behalf of schools particularly difficult. Fortunately, sophisticated marketing methodologies exist that allow enrollment marketers to reach prospective students without sacrificing the “brand” integrity that academic institutions have spent so long building.

Avoiding Market Saturation

Direct Response Enrollment Marketing is a simple multi-step process that initiates contact with prospective students in a meticulous and quantifiable manner. Direct Response Enrollment Marketing uses two primary channels for attracting prospective students: Online and DRTV.

The process works as follows:

1. Marketing materials are distributed across multiple channels.

2. In response to the materials, prospective students call in or fill out a form online.

3. Prior to each call—in order to facilitate successful calls—EM software feeds student information to the contact center representative regarding the advertisement(s) that initiated the prospective students’ interest.

4. Following each inbound or outbound phone call, the Academic Advisors enter information regarding the interest level of the prospective student into the Enrollment Management Software.

5. The Enrollment Management software immediately informs media planning and buying teams which campaigns need more allocation, and which need to be cut.

In comparison with other advertising methodologies, Direct Response Enrollment Marketing is capable of determining which channels and portals offer the highest conversion rates, almost immediately after the campaign is launched. This adds value to the marketing process of colleges and universities in two ways:

1. Schools can cut-out inefficient marketing campaigns immediately, thus saving money for channels that generate more applications and enrollments

2. Schools avoid market saturation. Because colleges and universities know precisely which channels offer the highest rates of return, they do not have to disseminate their marketing materials across channels that may be inappropriate. Placing materials only where they are likely to be viewed by interested students reduces redundancy, and avoids desensitization.

Improving Lead Quality

Lead quality refers to the amount of revenue that a given lead can generate for an advertiser. There is no universal method for measuring the quality of a lead, but some industry benchmarks exist that measure the likelihood that a lead will result in revenue.

In a recent study, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that using content to generate education leads—i.e. “Sign up for a free course catalogue!” makes for the highest quality lead.

In order to improve lead quality—or the amount of revenue that each lead is capable of generating—it is important to eliminate “bad leads” or leads that do not generate revenue.

Savvy marketers have determined that leveraging rich content adds another layer of “filtering” to the education lead generation process: the more information students have before filling out a lead from, the higher the likelihood that they actually want to be contacted.

Leveraging content improves the quality of leads and increases revenue on the front end, while reducing wasted man-hours on the back end—academic advisors spend less time sorting out the good from the bad, and more time converting good leads into revenue.

Empowering the Student

Leveraging rich-content in order to initiate a response from a prospective student is a valuable means for generating revenue via high quality leads. By using content to attract students, Direct Response Enrollment Marketers ensure that each request for follow-up information is genuine. “Empowering the student” refers to the fact that in Direct Response Enrollment Marketing, prospective students initiate contact with universities, rather than the reverse. It is up to the student whether or not to fill out a form or make a phone call. This adds value to schools in two ways:

1. Time is not spent cold-calling or advertising to students that are not interested

2. Lead conversion rates increase because students are making decisions based on facts, images(campus tours) and other types of content

Generating education leads using free information—course catalogues, articles, advice—allows marketers to eliminate the possibility of a “miss-match”, or unsolicited contact.

Direct Response Enrollment Marketing

Follow-up

Interested students react to content by initiating a phone call, or filling out an online form. These forms and phone calls are received by academic advising centers, which are staffed with Enrollment Specialists. The Enrollment Specialists answer questions that each student asks, while helping them to apply or enroll.

By managing both the distribution of media and the follow marketing process, Direct Response Enrollment Marketers are able to track the efficacy of each individual marketing campaign, and piece of creative. They are also able to guarantee the quality of leads, by charging their clients on a per-application basis. Therefore, the risk of buying bad leads is removed.

Further, because channels and materials that do not yield results can immediately be eliminated, Direct Response Enrollment Marketing allows schools to leverage enormous economies of scale to reach prospective students, in a refined and meticulous manner—thereby eliminating the possibility of over-saturating the market.

Summary

Direct Response Enrollment Marketing reduces advertising clutter, empowers students by giving them more information, improves the integrity of the academic lead generation industry and generates more applications for colleges and universities.

Direct Response Enrollment Marketing increases enrollments for schools by: leveraging rich content to attract prospective students; allowing multiple distribution channels to offer the benefit of measurable results; and enabling academic advisors to help students to apply or enroll.

Revitalizing secondary education

By Sadaket Malik

With the central government lobbing its ball to the state governments for the implementation of the several schemes  for the revitalization of the system of the secondary education in the country, the schemes of the access, equity, Mahila Samakhya, and quality in the field of secondary education has lost its very essence. Basic issues of quality, equity and access to secondary education in India still unresolved besides the central legislations by the Ministry of Human Resource development Govt of India. The expert committees were formulated by the Govt. to gauge the system and suggest the measures to universalize the whole system. The central governments own figures indicate that many as two-thirds of those eligible for secondary education remain outside the school system today. A Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) committee estimates that 88,562 additional classrooms will be required in 2007-08 and over 1.3 lakh additional teachers. The CABE is the highest advisory body relating to policy making in education in India. Figures put out by the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s Department of School Education and Literacy indicate that as many as two-thirds of those eligible for secondary and senior secondary education remain outside the school system today. While noting that adequate number of elementary schools is to be found at a reasonable distance from habitations, the ministry admits in its website that this is not the case with regard to secondary schools and colleges. The gross enrolment rate for elementary education in 2003-04 was 85 percent, but for secondary education, the enrolment figure stood at 39 percent.

Pertinently, the CABE report also notes that the benefits of India’s reservation policy in higher education are unlikely to reach those it’s intended for in the absence of a strong secondary education system. A large majority of children and youth belonging to SC and ST community  do not have access to secondary education; less than 10 percent of the girls among SCs and STs have access to the plus two stage. Without secondary or senior secondary education, benefits of reservation to SCs/STs will remain elusive,” the report says. These are questions that the CABE report tries to address. School systems, the report says, should strive for equality and social justice, transcending discrimination that may arise because of gender, economic disparity, societal norms on caste and community, location (urban area or rural), disabilities (physical and mental) and cultural or linguistic differences. However, these inequities seem bound to remain given the current circumstances, where the government involvement in secondary education is much less than what is expected of it. The Committee report says that almost 25 percent of the secondary schools today are private, unaided schools whose clientele comes only from the privileged sections of society. Expert opines that Private education has always played an important role we have different types of private secondary schools, such as private unrecognized, private recognized but unaided schools, and private, recognized and aided schools. In Kerala and West Bengal, it’s common to see private aided schools, which are schools run by private managements that receive government grants. Going by the Sixth All India Survey Data, the CABE report notes that private aided schools account for over 46 percent of all secondary school students. The overwhelming participation of the private sector in secondary education, however, in no way absolves the government of its many responsibilities. To improve access to secondary education, experts agree that the government should invest more money. Unfortunately, the Centre has baulked at involving itself even in primary education, more so when it has to be on a collision. course with private schools.

Similarly, though the CABE committee report advocates a common school system, the government seems to have already shown its disinterest.The CABE report was accepted in principle, but soon after, the Planning Commission diluted our recommendation that the typical secondary school should be like a Kendriya Vidyalaya. The Commission started saying that instead of Kendriya Vidyalaya norms, SSA norms could be extended to secondary schools. Such a move would result in parallel streams of education with poor quality being accepted as a part of secondary education. The CABE committee, incidentally, had worked out the expenditure that will be incurred if all secondary schools are managed like Kendriya Vidyalayas. The total costs in such a scenario do not exceed six percent of the GDP but that does not seem to have been enough to convince the government. The report does not mention how many additional schools will be needed to meet the future demand. However, it presents two estimates, one projection based on the 100 percent success of SSA and the other, the 75 percent success of the programme. In the case of the former, the report estimates that 88,562 additional classrooms will be required in 2007-08 and over 1.3 lakh additional teachers

A worrisome trend in government schools, undoubtedly a factor contributing to their poor performance, is the fact that almost 95 percent of the government grants go into paying staff salaries. There is no money for buying teaching learning materials, for cleaning or blackboards,” he explains. The ratio should be at least 80:20, with 20 percent of the grant being used for improving or creating infrastructure, he adds. To ensure that government schools are more efficiently managed, a committee comprising members from the neighborhood could be asked to take decisions concerning the school, suggests several experts  of CABE Committee. Experts opines that there are several examples of successful private-public partnerships. “There have been initiatives like DPS Delhi Public School being given the responsibility to run two-three government schools in Gurgaon in Haryana In this way, the private schools can manage the schools for a while and use their expertise to train teachers.

The educationists have a consensus that the children are actually walking out because there is no quality education. Poor children can ill-afford to spend their time in classes that are taken badly, or in schools that have no infrastructure or teachers. Instead of looking for the reasons that are behind the problem, the government appears to be trying to implicate parents or children for the ‘drop-out’ rates. The CABE committee report has already set down comprehensive norms that secondary schools should follow, ranging from having one classroom for 30 students, ensuring safe drinking water facilities and separate toilets for girls and boys to computer labs. Experts also suggest granting free ships or scholarships to those from disadvantaged backgrounds to encourage enrolment in secondary and senior secondary schools. The CABE report notes that expansion of secondary education can be achieved by setting up new schools, upgrading existing elementary schools into high schools by providing more infrastructure and adding to the facilities in existing secondary schools to accommodate more students.

In view of this, the Central and the State/UT governments must jointly initiate planning to implement the agenda of universal and free secondary education in the first phase by the year 2015 and then extend it to senior secondary education in the second phase by the year 2020. The conventional expectation from secondary/senior secondary education lies in its role in creating the necessary base for generating technical person power, raising the potential of a society in contributing to the growth of knowledge and skills and thereby enhancing the nation’s capacity to face the challenge of global competitiveness.

The no of  higher secondary schools has been raised to 50,273 with  1000112 teachers, and figure of secondary schools is 101,777 with 1082878 teachers. Official statistics reveal that the enrolment of secondary and higher secondary school level is  3.70  crore and the gross enrolment ratio is 39.91. The total dropout rate up to matric is 61.92 as on September 2004. The population of children in this age group has been estimated to be 88.5 million as per Census, 2001.Enrolment figures show that only 31 million of these children were attending schools in 2001-02,

However, Para 5.13 –5.15 of the National Policy on Education (NPE), 1986 (as modified in 1992) deal with Secondary Education. Para 5.13. of the NPE, inter alia states that access to Secondary Education will be widened with emphasis on enrolment of girls, SCs and STs, particularly in science, commerce and vocational streams. The disparity between boys’ and girls’ enrollment is particularly marked at the secondary stage. As per the latest data available, out of the total enrollment of 21.2 millions n 1991-92 (as on 30.9.91) at the secondary stage (Classes IX and above), the girls account for 7 millions only, i.e. mere 33 per cent of the total enrollment, whereas boy’s enrollment at this stage of education is 67 per cent of the total enrollment.

            Nevertheless, a significant progress is also made in all spheres of secondary education. More than 84 per cent habitations in 1993-94 had a secondary school/section within a distance of 8 km as compared to 70 per cent within 5 km.  The number of unserved habitations declined from 21 per cent in 1986-87 to 15 per cent in 1993-94.  During 1950-51 to 1999-2000, number of secondary & higher secondary schools increased from 7 thousand to 117 thousand.  The increase (16 times) is much more rapid than the corresponding increase in primary (3 times) and upper primary (14 times) schools.   In the latest decade (1990 to 99), more than 37 thousand secondary & higher secondary schools were opened. The ratio of upper primary to secondary schools also improved from 1.83 in 1950-51 to 1.69 in 1999-2000.

Keeping in view the dismal statistics of secondary education in the country, Ministry of HRD launched several schemes, like scheme for strengthening of boarding and hostel facilities for girl students of secondary and higher secondary schools. The scheme is being implemented by NGOs and of the state governments. A one-time grant non recurring  grant @Rs.1500/- per girl boarder for purchase of furniture (including beds)and utensils and provision of basic recreational aids, particularly material for sports and games, reading room equipments and books. And recurring Rs.5000/- per annum per girl boarder for food and salary of cook. Finally, The CABE Committee in June 2005 recommended that “there is no alternative acceptable to regular schooling of good quality to all the girls”. The Committee also felt that “incentives offered for promotion of girls education need to be revisited and measures taken need to be of such nature, force and magnitude that they are able to overcome the obstacles posed by factors such as poverty, domestic/sibling responsibilities, girl child labour, low preference to girl’s education, preference to marriage over the education of girl child, etc.” The key issues relating to secondary education highlighted in the Tenth Plan are: greater focus on improving access; reducing disparities by emphasizing the Common School System; renewal of curricula with emphasis on vocationalisation and employment-oriented courses; expansion and diversification of the Open Learning System; reorganization of teacher training and greater use of ICT. After merging several schemes like ET & CLASS scheme, a new Scheme called ICT Schools was launched for which the Annual Plan Outlay for 2006-07 was Rs. 67 crore. The intervention of the Central Government in Secondary Education has primarily been in two areas, (i) through apex level bodies and (ii) through various Centrally Sponsored Schemes. Central Government supports autonomous organizations like NCERT, CBSE, KVS and NVS and CTSA, the first named body for providing research and policy support to the Central and State Governments; CBSE for affiliating Secondary Schools and the remaining three for their own school systems. There are 929 Kendriya Vidyalayas (KVS) and 507 Navodaya Vidyalayas (NVS), and 69 Central Schools for Tibetans (CTSA).  Scheme of Vocationalistion of Secondary Education at secondary level to enhance individual Employability. Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) launched in 2007 is a mission-mode exercise to universalize secondary education in which the centre is all set to universalize the secondary education till 2020.

The irony is that the arguments on the part of HRD ministry on community participation in implementing such schemes are not encouraging. Government should initiate evaluation mechanism and core commission to evaluate the progress of the schemes and policies to support the education sector by community mobilization to revitalize the schemes and put the policies into practice.

The author can be contacted at sadaketmalik@rediffmail.com