Just thought of comparing a plan of 1951 and a report of 2009... Not much has changed.

1. 1st Five Year Plan 1951 Yashpal Committee Report 2009

2. 1st Five Year Plan | 1951 In the field of university education, high priority should be given to the improvement of standards and the development of post-graduate work and research. The university ambience and the controls imposed on it do not permit the youth to be able to contribute unencumbered to her research or gain from the intrinsic joy of teaching. Urgent measures are needed to bring such people who enjoy teaching and research back to the university. Yashpal Committee Report | 2009

3. 1st Five Year Plan | 1951 The immediate difficulty that has to be faced in the reform of university education is that of finance. The financial position of most of the universities has worsened in recent years on account of the large increase in expenditure. A very large number of universities are running on deficit budgets and hardly any university has the funds for necessary development. State universities are still the backbone of higher education in India. Majority of our students get enrolled there and yet, it is the State universities, which are meant to be the responsibility of State Governments to maintain and develop, which have been treated very shabbily in the matters of allocation of funds or creation of more facilities to help them in enriching their existing academic programmers. Yashpal Committee Report | 2009

4. 1st Five Year Plan | 1951 The standards to be attained should be high enough, on the one hand to make the majority of students whose education ends at the secondary stage to be efficient workers and, on the other, to enable the minority who proceed to higher education to profit from the instructions they receive at these institutions. Currently, many students passing out from institutions of higher education do so without obtaining the kind of skills they really need to work in a real-world environment. Among the drawbacks many students face are lack of ability to analyze or solve problems, relate problems to different contexts, communicate clearly and have an integrated understanding of different branches of knowledge. Yashpal Committee Report | 2009

5. 1st Five Year Plan | 1951 No targets have been laid down for the university education as the problem here is mostly one of consolidation rather than expansion. It is, moreover, not possible to determine quantitatively the progress in higher education with the same ease as in the case of earlier strategy. The sudden spurt in the number of newly established educational institutes as deemed universities is another area of concern. Some of the private institutions took the deemed-to-be university route to get degree-granting powers. Between 2000 and 2005, 26 private-sponsored institutions got the deemed university status. Since 2005, the number of private deemed universities has increased to 108. Yashpal Committee Report | 2009

6. 1st Five Year Plan | 1951 The high cost of education, especially at the university level, prevents many an intelligent student from proceeding to higher studies. The provision of free-studentships and scholarships needs to be considerably increased. It should be a principle of State policy that none who has the capacity to profit by higher education should be debarred from getting it. Many private institutions charge exorbitant fees (beyond the prescribed norms) in the form of many kinds of levy (not accounted for by vouchers and receipts) and are unable to provide even minimum competent faculty strength… The regulatory agencies have been unable to come to grips with the problems of capitation fee and unauthorized annual fees mainly due to deficiencies in enforcement instruments, and partly due to high-level reluctance to sort out this problem. Yashpal Committee Report | 2009

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