Media Release
Udupi, Oct 2: Catholic Colleges dominated India’s landscape for over 100 years. The quality of education, ethics, and management offered ensured that they were on a high pedestal for all to emulate. Not anymore. By 2020, according to the AISHE (All India Survey of Higher Education), India had 1,000 universities and 40,000 colleges with Catholic Colleges constituting a miniscule fraction of that number.
A lot of the private colleges have ensured they have catered to International and Indian rankings and have edged out many Catholic colleges in this regard. Rankings of newer Colleges like Ashoka University, Shiv Nadar University, Azim Premji University and others are in many cases higher than many Catholic Colleges and Universities. And most alarmingly, this trend will continue as Catholic colleges face greater erosion over time in student quality and job availability for their institutions as they have a lot of institutions in semi-urban and rural areas, keeping with their ethos of service for the community at large.
The wood from the trees
Most of the institutions Catholic and non-Catholic, are, however missing the wood from the trees. It’s not rankings, syllabus, and type of courses that make the difference. The type of students who graduate make the difference. An ongoing live example proves this statement. The University of St Andrews in Scotland has in the last 3 years beaten Oxford, Cambridge, London School of Economics, and Imperial College London as the first ranked University in the UK across multiple ranking mediums. To win against such Titans, St Andrews scores heavily above the rest in 2 areas. Student satisfaction and jobs. St Andrews has the highest in the UK and this after all is what education is all about.
But jobs are not easy to secure for institutions in tier 2 and tier 3 cities when competing with cities like Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi and other grade A cities. It is especially difficult for students from semi urban and smaller cities to compete. According to Springer, due to their purchasing power, students in large tier 1 cities spend almost 29 times more on education in comparison to students from smaller regions.
But, if affordable and cutting-edge training is done to alleviate this gap, suddenly the equation changes. According to Dr Vincent Alva, the principal of Milagres College Kallianpur, “A great engineer who does not understand teamwork will fail. A great scientist who cannot delegate will also fail. If you cannot deal with delegation, motivation, handling feedback, offering leadership and other power skills you will struggle in your careers. The list is endless. These power skills are becoming more important than other skills and when the CEO of ZillionPathways, Ronald Olivera wanted to bring this to help our students in Catholic Institutions, I grabbed the opportunity”!
Why simulations and not other forms of learning?
Simulations offer the best outcome for learning today. Simulations are of 2 types, (a) self-learning, and (b) through a group with peer-to-peer participation. Validated data show that simulations using self-learning have a 50% learning outcome. In comparison, lectures have an outcome at 5% and online learning at 20%. But simulations with group participation and peer-to-peer learning have a 75% learning outcome!
According to Ronald Olivera, the CEO of ZillionPathways, “We do these simulations in the Middle East to great acclaim. They are normally very expensive and out of the reach of most institutions, though in the USA, they are being developed for top end colleges. However, I wanted to give our Catholic Institutions an edge in their student training and so am trying to implement this with the help of dynamic people like Dr Alva and a few well-meaning alumni and others to make it affordable for students. And we are not differentiating on offerings! The students are getting our best! These simulations are profiled in US news sites like fox news which is the largest news channel in the USA”.
ZillionPathways also has included a world class 80 hours online English animated course in this programme. This course has won the world-famous ELTon award from the British council 3 times! The mistake most students make is that they feel their English is good, as they study in English medium. But even in urban areas, they struggle to communicate effectively at job interviews, and their English is not as impressive as they think. According to a NEEM report, 70% of graduates from tier 2 and tier 3 cities get rejected due to English communication. And even in tier 1 cities, an India skills report state that 53% of candidates do not get recruited due to insufficient English skills. This is a major reason that even UK students do this course to become more effective.
What are the simulations?
The simulations offered by ZillionPathways are unique and have a good probability of giving students in institutions an edge in their learning outcomes. ZillionPathways has over 50 of these simulations, developed over the last 12 months. However, they are going further! ChatGPT is in the process of launching Sora, Meta is launching EMU, and Google is launching VEO. These are all text to video products which will create a movie from text using AI. Its not as simple as it sounds, as it still includes a lot of expert content creation and generation from different domain experts, but still, you can create a movie at a faction of the cost.
ZillionPathways using the existing competition who have already launched products in the last quarter, has already created movie-based roleplay simulations! This means that rather than using AI avatars, we create it with real people. And since these people are created though AI, there are no copyrights involved. Its an amazing progression of AI technology and just makes the learning outcome even more powerful.
The future for Catholic Institutions
The future lies in learning outcomes like these initiatives and in bettering communication. In this regard, Milagres College Kallianpur is a bellwether to ensure that their students are able to compete with the best by using the best! This is a direction that all Catholic Institutions should move towards. The learning outcomes of any programme for students, should be over 75%. This is just not happening today. Not in the statutory syllabus, nor in any add-on courses being offered. An AICTE study in 2020 found that 55% of students are not employable.
It is not that Indian colleges, and especially Catholic Institutions do not try their best to give their students additional skills. Unfortunately, all institutions face the famous Ebbinghaus learning curve which proves that you forget 90% of what you learn after 1 month. But not simulations! Here you retain as much as 40% of what you learnt, which is a game changer. This is why Ronald Olivera states “I feel that this will give our students an edge and I am in touch with a lot of benefactors to work with my CSR activity to give our Catholic schools and institutions regain the advantages, especially for students we seem to have lost in the last few decades”
As a famous author once said, “Training is not an expense, but an investment in human capital”. But the right training is even more important.