On 11 July 2008, President Serge Sargsian received the Ambassador of India Ms. Rina Pandey for their first tete-a-tete since the presidential elections. They reviewed the bilateral ties between the two countries including in the area of education and science. According to the President’s Office of Public Relations, “it was noted that nowadays many Indians study in Yerevan”.I am not however sure if “it was noted” that their number has continuously declined since 2006 and if the trend continues, there will be no Indian student left in Armenia in 2-3 years from now.
For Indian students, Armenia has lost its attractiveness mainly due to:
1. Unfavorable evolution of exchange rates
2. Mistreatment of Indian students in Armenia
In fact, since the tragic events and the protest movement of spring 2006 at Mekhitar Heratsi Yerevan State Medical University (YSMU), the Indian Embassy in Armenia, thanks to Ms. Panday, has explicitly discouraged Indian students from applying to Armenian institutions, in general, and to YSMU, in particular.
Moreover, Indians who have graduated and returned to their home country have justifiably generated an extremely negative publicity about Armenian higher education.
Anyway, I hope Ambassador Pandey had at least the opportunity to raise the issue of the remaining Indian students at YSMU who continue to endure intimidation and harassment by their university administrators.
2 comments:
Some background on the troubles Indian students can experience are at:
http://oneworld.blogsome.com/category/india/
http://oneworld.blogsome.com/category/india/page/2/
To be honest, YSMU has never been famous for its student-friendly policies, regardless of nationality. However, for obvious reasons, foreign students have to be treated with more sensitivity, and the way they handled that tragedy was deeply regrettable.
However, I want to raise here another aspect of the problem. Unfortunately, based on my personal experience, I must say that the quality of preparedness and basic knowledge of noticeable proportion of admitted Indian students is pretty low. And the difference is even more striking when I compare them with the Indian students admitted to the universities in Western countries. Just because Armenian universities need foreign students, they should not lower acceptance criteria to such an unacceptable level. Even during studies, there was noticeable lenient treatment of students from foreign countries, in this case India, who regardless their poor records continue their education without any actions taken from the university administration, as it is the case with Armenian residents. Certainly, there are exceptions, but this is my overall general impression based on years of experience.
One of the reasons for that is of course the desire to keep as many foreign students as possible, for financial reasons. But such a blatant disregard to the quality of education, along with other factors, of course - corruption, teaching standards etc, affect the prestige of Higher Education in Armenia among foreigners too.
Post a Comment