Teaching and research of professors under reservation as effective as general category

Faculty members appointed under the reserved category in India's engineering colleges and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are as competent in teaching and research as their general category counterparts. According to a report by the Hindustan Times, a new study has revealed that despite reserved category professors having lower average academic qualifications, less experience, and fewer senior positions, it has no negative impact on their efficiency.

The study found that students taught by reserved category faculty performed marginally better in their immediate course examinations, scoring an average of 1.44 percentile points higher. Furthermore, no significant difference was observed between the faculty of both categories in long-term academic outcomes such as standardised test scores, attendance, dropout rates, and graduation rates.

The authors of the study titled ‘Affirmative Action, Faculty Productivity and Caste Interactions: Evidence from Engineering Colleges in India’ include Robert W. Fairlie of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Saurabh Khanna of the University of Amsterdam, Prashant Loyola of Stanford University, and Gagandeep S. Sachdeva of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz).

Researchers analysed data from 50 engineering and technology colleges in India, covering 2,710 faculty members and 20,239 students. Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments were included in this sample. For this purpose, eight prestigious institutions, including IITs, NITs, IIITs, and colleges ranked in the top 100 of NIRF, were randomly selected, while the remaining 42 colleges were selected based on their size.

This data was collected in two phases: the first from October to December 2017 and the second from January to March 2019. The project was funded by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). Researchers stated that the response rate in both baseline and endline surveys remained around 95%.

To increase the reliability of the study, students in 12 colleges were randomly assigned to faculty members. Through this method, researchers were able to determine that differences in results were not due to student characteristics or faculty selection, but were based on faculty capability. Furthermore, the comparison became more accurate as colleges had standardised course content and centrally graded semester examinations.

This report was released as a working paper by NBER in October and is scheduled to be published in the ‘Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics’ published by the University of Chicago Press. The authors noted that more research is needed to examine such findings in other fields. NBER is a US-based non-profit organisation that conducts economic research, and this paper has been circulated for discussion but has not yet been peer-reviewed.

These findings come at a time when discussions regarding caste representation and discrimination are ongoing in premier institutions like the IITs. According to a previous report by the Hindustan Times, out of 12,498 sanctioned teaching posts in 23 IITs, 4,804 were vacant. Among the nine IITs that provided caste-category data, 888 out of 1,501 vacancies were in the SC, ST, and OBC categories.