Impact of Brain Drain on the Quality of Higher Education in Kerala

Brain drain has changed the very perspective towards higher education. Higher educational institutions had confined to a mere factory for producing brains for the corporate world. The dreams and ambitions of the students are modeled so as to gain a white collar job in prestigious firms in the world. The thirst for knowledge transformed to the unquenchable hunger for information which bring ‘fortune’ in the future. Kerala higher education learning, once rich with debates and discussions, diminished to the exam oriented classroom teaching. Students and parents are running behind marks, ranks, and campus placements with their competitive, jealous minds. Social responsibility, values and ethics disappeared from the higher education sector as the students dream an alien land to fulfill the hopes and make fortune. Humanities, arts and social science courses shrink as a result of the higher demand for (profitable) professional and science courses. The expenses of the public exchequer turned to loss as the benefits of educating the young flowed to the foreign countries. This encouraged the governments to retreat from the public education sector and give birth to the self-financing higher education institutions. The self-financing institutions concentrated on the mere employability of the students and gave importance to the needs of the corporate world. This adversely affected the quality of higher education as learning aimed at earning and the aims of research reached new manifestations. This paper tries a theoretical analysis of the different aspects of higher education which encourage brain drain and portrays the negative and positive impacts of brain drain on the quality of higher education in Kerala.