Role of Public Policy in Promoting Diversity

Changes in Student Body Regional Diversity Post the 2008 Changes in Admission Policy of the National Institutes of Technology, India

Sachin Garg <sgarg6@masonlive.gmu.edu>

The changing nature of work in the 21st Century calls for an innovative, creative and highly educated workforce. Workplace diversity and increased education levels have been shown to be some of the drivers of innovation and creativity. Studies have also shown the positive link between diversity and student achievement. A diverse student body is also positively linked to democratic functioning and institutional development, which are key to economic and allround human development. Thus it is imperative that institutions of higher learning attract and nurture a diverse student body. This is especially true for large developing countries like India, which are essentially an amalgamation of different regional cultures with rich histories. College admission policies play a key role in shaping student body diversity. The presence of afrmative action and quotas play a "carrot and stick" role in building a diverse student body. While they ensure that students are able to move to institutions which may have been closed to them earlier, they also compel students to move away from

colleges that are geographically and culturally close to them and thus seek admission to colleges that may be culturally alien. This exploratory research deals with the impact changes in college admission policy have on student body diversity. Using admission data from a leading Indian engineering school, we nd that the changes in admission policy which occurred in 2007 and 2012 had a signicant effect on the student regional demographic. Prior to 2007, with a strict regional quota in place, the college had students from across the nation and the regional demographic of the student body mirrored the national populace. With the 2007 and 2012 shift to a largely merit based admission policy, students gravitated to colleges near them, resulting in regional homogenization. Future research in this area would extend it to multiple colleges and also bring in various qualitative elements to analyze the impact of the changed student demographic on various matters like instructional quality, administrative challenges amongst others. Diversity means being varied. The term means different things to different people and in different contexts. In the US, diversity mainly implies ethnic and racial differences, while differences in gender, tastes and preferences are also included. In this paper, I emphasize the geographic and regional aspects of diversity which are exemplied by speaking different languages or coming from different regions. Diversity is extremely important to and for India. As the worlds seventh largest country by area and the second largest by population it is an amalgamation of different sub-cultures exemplifying unity in diversity. The country is sub-divided into 35 states and union territories and is governed on a unitary federal model. Figure 1 on page 9 shows the various states of the country. By virtue of its large size and long history, the country is legendary for the large number of languages1 in use. Language and dialect is an extremely important part of culture. It allows culture to be communicated and one understands
1

The Indian constitution lists 22 ofcially recognised scheduled languages.

cultural coundaries when linguistic shifts start occuring. Similar cultures have similar languages, and the reverse is also true. The protagonist in G. B. Shaws Pygmalion claims to be able to pin a person down to the street in London depending upon their accent. Because of the centrality of language in culture, most Indian states were re-organised along linguistic lines2 .

1 Diversity and Culture

The presence of a large number of (sub) cultures in close proximity could lead to conicts. As Huntington points out, most conicts today are a clash of civilizations [4]. A large part of this clash is the lack of understanding and appreciation of each others cultures. With the forces of globalization holding sway, an increasing fear amongst many cultures is of getting swamped and losing their identity [7] which leads to a backlash against certain forces and sometimes escalates into conict. The best way to manage these conicts is still the age-old way of building people-topeople contacts across these (sub) cultures which leads to people from diverse backgrounds getting together to understand each other and realise that we are not really all that different. These contacts help defuse tensions. Diversity has also been shown to be good for forstering innovation and creativity [5]. Therefore, one of the goals of public policy should be to balance cultural diversity in an area. This is especially relevant to a large diverse nation like India in order to keep it coalesced together, maintain national integrity and promote economic growth.

Challenges to Building Diversity in India

Building people to people contact is not easy in nations as large and diverse as India. People are loath to move from the familiar to the unfamiliar unless distinct rewards are in
2

See the Indian States Reorganisation Act of 1956 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_ Reorganisation_Act (retrieved 17-March-2013)

sight. Cultural afnity is extremely strong and prevents the movement into alien cultures. Even when people move, they seek out the familiarity of their own ethnic or linguistic tribe(s). Therefore, even though India provides for a lot of cross-country mobility, it is an exception to nd people from different states in the same place. Most of these exceptions happen for either of two main reasons jobs and education. The promise of getting into a good job or a good education is what can force people to move. Work related immigration largely happens into places where there are perceived to be more opportunities. Thus it is largely from the underdeveloped regions (or rural areas) to places that are more developed. It is only the more entrepreneurial folks who move into less developed areas to exploit opportunity3 . Migrants rarely move back to their origins and thus their learnings often do not percolate back into where they came from. Another source of movement due to work happens in the pan-national public service organizations like the Civil Service or the Armed Forces. The Indian Armed Forces are an interesting case study into how they have been able to assimilate people from all walks of like from across the country into an institution that values diversity while instilling a sense of shared values. Leena Parwar disusses diversity in the Indian Armed forces and the scope of further social science research in her essay [6]. It is to be understood that these pan-national services are highly selective and comprise a miniscule proportion of the population. For example, the Indian Army though a million strong is still 0.1% of the countrys population. The role of education opportunities in facilitating people-to-people contact is much larger. Many students move due to the provision of better education away from their homes. A prime example of this is the elite technical institutes in India like the Indian Institutes of Technology. One sees a wider array of the student population here. But, these institutes are highly selective4 , and such movement impacts a miniscule population. Also,
3

An example of this is the migration of people belonging to business class from the Western state of Rajasthan into cities like Kolkatta (in East India), Bangalore (South India) or even the far Eastern state of Assam. It is to be recognised that these movements occurred many generations ago and these migrants have assimilated into their adopted cultures. 4 According to the World Bank (http://go.worldbank.org/OI8WBQVV50) (retrieved 17-March-2013) the elite Indian Institutes of Technology are accessible to less than 1% of the qualied students.

most of these elite institutes are situated in the nations heartland - there are very few top level institutions in the underserved areas of the country, i.e. the North East5 which means that students move from these areas to the heartland and very few make the reverse transition. Even amongst these institutes, students would prefer to move to places that are geographically and culturally near which means that other things being equal, they would go to the nearest college available to them. Enhanced people-to-people contact during college years leads to a life long appreciation of multiple cultures. Also, education institutions, especially those focussed on higher education are a good place to build an appreciation of diversity and reap the benets it brings ([3]). In this backdrop, one set of institutions the Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs) (now the National Institutes of Technology (NITs)) had pursued a unique carrot and stick admission policy that built a very diverse student body comprised of students from all over the nation. This policy essentially was enforced a strict regional quota on admissions in each institutewhich made these colleges unique a microcosm of the nation, or in other words, a mini India. Each such institute had students from across the country, at a level that would not happen in any other educational institute. Owing to various structural changes in the funding and governance of the institutes, this policy was scrapped in 2008.

Current Research
In this paper, I seek to understand whether this policy change has impacted the regional diversity of the colleges. Building on what we know of people trying to be as culturally near as possible, we look at whether the removal of mechanisms that promoted regional diversity (by building articial barriers) would change the regional demographic of the student body. Building on the assumption that students would have a wider choice in getting into colleges nearer home, we postulate that this would be the case and regional
5

Though this has changed very recently with the setting up of a few national level technical institues in the North Eastern states.

homogeneity would increase (or diversity would decrease). Our case is a single Regional Engineering College (now NIT) for which we analyse the student body regional diversity for the years following the policy change (20082012) and compare it with the year (2007) just before the change. Our dataset consists of the number of students admitted from each state for the years in question. To test that any changes seen were due to the policy, we use the 2 test for Goodness of Fit on this data and interpret the results. The preliminary nding is that the postulate is correct. The paper is structured as follows rst we look at the role of diversity in college education and why public policy should attempt to balance it. Then we look at the structure of the RECs, their unique admission policy and the current admission policy. Then the dataset is analysed and hypotheses tested. Finally, we present the ndings and provide directions for future research.

2 Role & Importance of Diversity in Education

One of the goals of higher or post-secondary education is to build analytical and critical thinking skills that enable the students to face everyday challenges in the real world. Gurin eta la. [3] emphasize the importance of college years in building these skills as this is a time when students are at a critical developmental stage at institutions explicitly constituted to promote late adolescent development. They opine that residential colleges and universities provide students the opportunities to experiment with new ideas, new relationships and new roles. They hold that attending college where the environment is simply a replication or extension of ones home environment impedes the personal struggle and conscious thought that are so important for identity development. They also quote studies done by the sociologist Newcomb and others about the impact of peer inuence on shaping students attitudes during college, which showed that these attitudes remained stable even twenty-ve to fty years laters.

Thus, college life outside the classroom is extremely important in shaping the sort of critical thought processes which is the purpose of the college years. By forcing students into an arena which is unfamiliar and encourages intellectual experimentation allows them to recognize the varied future possibilities. It allows disequilibrium - the process of discontinuity and discrepancy that spurs cognitive growth [3, pg. 335] to occur.

The Importance of Diversity

Gurin et al. [3] talk about three main forms of diversity: structural diversity which is the diversity owing to pure numerical strength, informal interaction diversity which involves both the frequency and quality of intergroup interactions and is key to meanigful diverse experiences, and classroom diversity which includes both learning about diverse people and interacting with diverse peers. It should be noted that structural diversity is a necessary condition for the other two forms of diversity to occur. Unless there is a diversity owing to numbers, where will students form the meaningful formal and informal interactions so necessary for the other forms of diversity. They [3] talk about the importance of diversity with regard to two main outcomes (a) learning, and (b) democracy. According to them, learning happens when students think actively and are intellectually engaged. They cite the research of psychologist Ellen Langer who contends that people will engage in effortful, mindful, and conscious modes of thought when they encounter situations that have discrepancies with their past experience. The importance of diversity to the learning process is that it brings up these features so important to learning, along with multiple and different perspectives. Regarding democracy, their [3] view is that democracy thrives due to the multiplicity of perspectives

and discourses that occur because citizens have differing points of view. Students sense of community and democratic citizenship is increased when they experience how their lives are necessarily shaped by others. Diversity has also been linked with innovation and creativity [1])in a positive way.

3 The Regional Engineering College System

The Regional Engineering College system, was built as a network of institutes with the purpose of serving the Engineering and Technological needs of the various regions in the country. This network was setup in the early sixties and by the turn of the century numbered seventeen. These regionally situated institutes were setup as joint enterprises of the Central and respective State Governments6 . We can see how the netwok was spread out across the nation (c. 1994) in gure 2. These colleges are amongst the prestigious Indian technical institutes, ranked just below the top tier institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and have consistently maintained their status. The State government was to provide the land, building and electric power for each REC, while the expenditure on developing laboratories and manpower training was to be borne by the Central government. The recurring expenditure on teaching faculty and supporting staff for undergraduate education was shared equally between central and state governments. The central government bore the entire expenditure on postgraduate education and its development. These aspects of shared responsibility percolated down into other facets which impact day-to-running, mainly governance and admission policy. The RECs were governed by an independent Board of Governors (BoG) constituted of members nominated by both the central and state governments, which included represen6

This was a signicant departure from the policy of the Indian Institutes of Technology, which were setup as wholly central institutes and other technical colleges that were either wholly funded by the respective state governments or private instiutions which may or may not be supported by state governments. Other types of technical teaching institutes are those setup by various minority groups to impart instruction to their own communities.

tatives from the local industry, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex government reponsible for technical education, the afliating university7 , an institution providing higher technical education of the state (IIT or Technical University), and an elected public representative (MLA or MLC of the region). The chairman of the BoG was appointed by the central government with the concurrence of the state.

India
REC Network (1994)

Legend
Border 0 1 2 3 4 5

Figure 1: Map of India

Figure 2: Map Showing the REC network (c. 1994)

Most colleges in India do not grant degrees on their own, but are rather afliated to a degree-granting university. Some colleges, like the IITs and now the NITs have been deemed to be universities with degree granting powers.

3.1 RECs Unique Admission Policy

The RECs had a unique admission policy which stemmed from their nature as joint central and state government enterprises. According to this policy, every incoming year, each REC admitted half its students from the home state in which it was situated and the other half from the rest of the country. The map in gure 3a on the next page shows the intake for 2007. That year there were a total of 570 places, out of which the home state (UP) accounted for half (265). The rest (265) were apportioned amongst the other states based on their share of the national population. The admission of out of state students was based on a quota system, whereby each state nominated a xed number of students depending on its relative population in the country. Each state was free to decide its own mechanism for nominating these students and these mechanisms varied competitive exams, marks secured in the qualifying exam (High school) or a mix of these. Thus, each REC had representation from almost all states8 . We have weighted the statewide annual intake (as a percentage of total annual intake) by each states population (percentage of national population) and represented them on the national map in gure 3b. From this, we note that most states sent a number of students commensurate to their national population, barring some of the small States/Union Territories. Another outlier is the home state which has a signicantly higher representation owing to the fact that half of the intake is reserved for them by design. Thus, each and every REC was a microcosm of the nation a mini India where one could nd students from almost every region of the country.

Some of the very small Union Territories (not more than a cpouple) unfortunately did not have enough population to send students to each REC, only a few.

10

State's Share in "Other State Quota" weighted by states share in national population

Legend
Allahabad <5 5 - 10 10 - 15 15 - 25 > 25

Legend
Students < National Avg. Students = 1 x National Avg. Students upto 10 x National Avg. Students > 10x National Avg.

(a) Actual Student Intake (Total: 570 places)

(b) Weighted intake. (Share of State Students in Other State Quota) divided by (States Share of the National Population)

Figure 3: Where do the Students Come from? The numbers represent the intake from the corresponding state for 2007.

3.2 NITs Admission Policy (post-2007)

The admission policy mentioned in 3.1 was scrapped in 2008 following the restructuring of the RECs and their upgradation to Institutes of National Importance. Now, these colleges are referred to as National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and are fully centrallyfunded and managed. Acccording to the new admission policy, the per-state quota has been abolished, while still maintaining half of the intake for each college from the home state. The admission process has been centralized, and all intake is through a common, nationwide competitive examination the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). Thus, it is now possible for students from any state to compete for the remaining places in any NIT. For example in 2007, a student from the southern state of Tamil Nadu could compete only for the 13 places available to him/her at MNNIT, Allahabad (see Table 1), while in 2009 the entire eld of more than

11

300 places9 was open. Similarly, students from the neighbouring state of Bihar compete for 28 seats in 2007, but now they too had the entire eld open. In 4.1, we will note that the new policy had the effect of signicantly increasing the home state population. To take care of this bias, the policy was was amended in 2012 so that Admission against All India Quota reserved only Other state candidates10 . With this change, we note that the population has shifted to favour neighbouring, culturally similar states. The reason(s) behind this policy change has not yet been fully explored by me and is part of ongoing research. Some research suggests that it occurred due to the complete takeover of the colleges by the centre. The shift to full central funding 11 meant that the centre felt a need to have a larger say in the institutes affairs, which includes student body selection. Another reason touted is that was ostensibly a feeling that some states were sending students who were below par12 owing to lax selection norms. These policy changes seem to have happened without much debate. It is interesting to note that a question of the impact of changed admission policy on the interests of local students was raised in the Rajya Sabha, in response to which no change in the composition of the student intake was envisaged13 . We intend to show that this change in the admission
The total intake for 2009 was 607. Out of this, half (300+) was set aside for the home state. This leaves around 300 places to be lled by students from other states. 10 3.3.1 (pg. 11) of Central Counseling Board (CCB) 2012 INFORMATION BROCHURE (Version VIII) available from http://ccb.nic.in/ says the other state quota seats in an Institute shall be available only to candidates from other states, home state candidates being forbidden from these seats. 11 The reason behind the takeover itself seems to be certain governance issues like the inability of state governments to provide for funds, especially salaries and the growing political interference in administrative affairs. The status of pay and benets for the staff were also unclear (whether to provide central scales of state scales). This created dissatisfaction among employees and tension between them and administration resulting in continuous disturbance in academic working and hindered the growth of the institutions. (Personal Communication from a former REC Principal). 12 An article making this point was published in the Times of India (24th June, 2008) (http: //articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-06-24/india/27781083_1_ nits-regional-engineering-colleges-admission-process). The contention here is that students who secure low marks (are less meritorious) are still able to get admission into an REC outside their state in a good stream like Computer Science/Electronics Engineering etc., even when those ranking higher to them were not able to get admission in these streams in the home REC. A counter to this point is that no-one stopped such students from doing the same going out of state. Incidentally this is also a form of diversity a diversity of educational levels. 13 From 9 of the proceedings of the Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resource Development 178th Report on the National Institutes of Technology Bill, 2006 (Presented to the Rajya Sabha on 23rd November, 2006) (retrieved from
9

12

policy did indeed result in a drastic change in the composition of the student intake and thus the demographic composition of the student body.

4 Student Body Regional Diversity

For the purpose of this study, we use actual admission data for the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology (MNNIT) (http://www.mnnit.ac.in) situated at Allahabad in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. This institute, founded in 1961 is named after Pandit Motilal Nehru, father of Indias rst Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who hailed from the city of Allahabad, and was earlier known as MNREC (Motilal Nehru Regional Engineering College). Our data set consists of the number of students admitted per year from every state for the years 20042012. We use actual admission data for the years 2009, 20102012. For 2007 and earlier, we use the sanctioned strength as a proxy for the statewide quotas. Unfortunately, the actual admission data for 2008 (the rst year the changed policy was effected) is unavailable. Hence, we impute data for 2008 using the same student distribution as 2009, with the addition of the special supernumerary quota14 which was put in place for the 12 states and union territories that did not have their own NIT. We use 2007 (the last year admissions were based on the quota system) as the baseline year for comparison. Data for this year is presented in Table 1. The same data can be seen in gure 3 on page 11 graphically. To do a statistical analysis of the data, we need to categorise it. We build categories
http://164.100.47.5/book2/reports/HRD/178threport.htm on March 16, 2013): The Committee observes that NITs also have a Region/State specic focus as they cater to the needs of the local industry. In the governance structure that is envisaged in the Bill, NITs would have enough autonomy to maintain their individuality. Taking note of the fact that NITs have their own admission policies as far as giving specic preference to local students is concerned, the Committee enquired about the impact of the Bill on the interests of local students. The Committee is happy to note that the existing admission policy would continue under the proposed Act and there would be no change in the composition of the student intake. It believes that the NITs will develop and grow faster separately than with the IITs. 14 This special quota comprised 445 seats in total, with MNNIT having a share of 28.

13

based on cultural afnity and use inter-state borders to proxy cultural afnity. The idea is that states which are separate from each other, i.e. have other states between them, will be culturally more distinct compared to neighbouring states. Thus, we construct a BORDER metric which is set to 0 for the home state (Uttar Pradesh or UP in our case), to 1 for states bordering with UP, to 2 for states bordering 1 states, 3 for states bordering 2 states, and so on. We end up with values ranging from 05 as shown in the map in gure 4. Table 2 shows how the college demographic has changed over time with respect to BORDER.

India

Legend
Border 0 1 2 3 4 5

Figure 4: Map of India showing values of BORDER for state of UP

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State Num

State/Union territory Andaman and Nicobar Islands Andhra Pradesh Arunachal Pradesh Assam Bihar Chandigarh Chhattisgarh Dadra and Nagar Haveli Daman and Diu National Capital Territory of Delhi Goa Gujarat Haryana Himachal Pradesh Jammu and Kashmir Jharkhand Karnataka Kerala Lakshadweep Madhya Pradesh Maharashtra Manipur Meghalaya Mizoram Nagaland Orissa Pondicherry Punjab Rajasthan Sikkim Tamil Nadu Tripura Uttar Pradesh Uttarakhand West Bengal

State Code

Border

State %age of Natl Pop.

Actual / Sanctioned Intake (Seats) 2 18 5 10 15 1 9 0 2

College pop. (%age of other state quota) 0.75 6.79 1.89 3.77 5.66 0.38 3.40 0.00 0.75

College pop. (wtd by state pop.) 25.16 0.97 17.15 1.46 0.66 4.19 1.61 0.00 37.74

Rounded Wtd Pop.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

AN AP AR AS BR CH CG DN DD

5 4 5 4 1 2 1 5 5

0.03 7 0.11 2.58 8.58 0.09 2.11 0.03 0.02

25 1 17 1 1 4 2 0 38

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

DL GA GJ HR HP JK JH KA KL LD MP MH MN ML MZ NL OR PY PB RJ SK TN TR UP UK WB

1 5 2 1 2 3 2 4 5 5 1 2 5 5 5 5 3 5 2 1 5 5 5 0 1 3

1.38 0.12 5 2.09 0.57 1.04 2.72 5.05 2.76 0.01 6 9.28 0.22 0.24 0.09 0.16 3.47 0.1 2.3 5.67 0.05 5.96 0.3 16.49 0.84 7.55

10 2 13 5 7 3 8 9 9 1 12 21 3 4 3 4 8 3 7 10 6 13 3 265 14 25

3.77 0.75 4.91 1.89 2.64 1.13 3.02 3.40 3.40 0.38 4.53 7.92 1.13 1.51 1.13 1.51 3.02 1.13 2.64 3.77 2.26 4.91 1.13 100.00 5.28 9.43

2.73 6.29 0.98 0.90 4.63 1.09 1.11 0.67 1.23 37.74 0.75 0.85 5.15 6.29 12.58 9.43 0.87 11.32 1.15 0.67 45.28 0.82 3.77 6.06 6.29 1.25

3 6 1 1 5 1 1 1 1 38 1 1 5 6 13 9 1 11 1 1 45 1 4 6 6 1

Table 1: State Quotas as in 2007 (baseline)

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4.1 Findings
Analysing where the students come from after 2007, we nd a distinct trend. Figure 5 on page 18 shows graphically how the intake changed between 2007 and 200915 . We note that the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala did not send a single student in 2009, compared to a combined total of 31 in 2007. The western state of Gujarat also did not send a single student (from 13 in 2007), while Maharashtra drastically cut down from 21 to just 3. The entire North Eastern region (which had sent 34 students) now sent none. The big changes happened with the home state (UP) whose number increased by 200, Rajasthan which more than tripled the number it sent. In Figure 6 on page 19, which shows the percentage change in 2009 and 2011 from the baseline of 2007, we note that these changes are consistent over time. From gure 6, we note that the largest increases happened in the proportion coming from the home state. To obviate this home state bias, the policy was tweaked in 2012 to prevent home state students from getting places that were supposed to be for students outside the state (see 3.2). The effect of this is shown in gure 7, which shows the percentage change in student population from 2007 baseline. The number of students from adjoining states (the so called Hindi Belt 16 where Hindi is the primary language spoken) increased manifold. For example, Rajathan sent six times the number it sent in 2007 while Bihar tripled the number of its students. There was a little change in that some of the states did send a few students (comapred to 2009 and 2011). For example. Gujarats contribution was not -100% as in 2011, similar was the case with Punjab (decline of 35% only). Andhra Pradesh stands out as a possible beneciary of this policy, as it is the only non-Hindi Belt state which increased the number of students it sent. These results can also been seen as the change in overall college regional demographics.
15

There was a small increase of 70 places (around 11%) between 2007 and 2009, so the absolute numbers are not exactly comparable. But most of the changes show a more than 10% variation, so even with this fact, we can see a denite shift. 16 The Hindi Belt consists of around 9 states in North-Central India where Hindi is spoken. UP is the most populous state amongst these. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi_belt

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Figure 8 shows how the total home population moved from 50% in 2007 to around 70% in 2012, while the furthest states (BORDER=5) reduced their share from a little over 10% (2007) to almost zero in 2012. Table 3 shows the calculated Simpsons Diversity Index17 . From this we note the decreasing heterogeneity of the college. This also comes out very well in gure 7b which shows how the percentage of students from the Hindi Belt increased from a little over 60% in 2007 to well over 90% in 2012, both in annual intake and total college population. Now, that we have identied that there has been a demographic change in the student body diversity, we need to test whether this change was in the realm of probability or denitely due to the policy change.

4.2 Statistical Testing

For purposes of statistical testing, we postulate that students tend to attend college at a place which is culturally and geographically near. In order to verify this postulate, we test two null hypotheses. We use the 2 test for Goodness of Fit to test both of these hypotheses.

Hypothesis I H0 : There is no change in student intake composition with the new admission policy. That is, the incoming student distribution in 200812 is not statistically different from the baseline incoming distribution of 2007. We use Table 4 for calculating this. The degrees of freedom for this is 5 (as we have 6 categories). For this, we have the critical values for 2 (5, = 0.05) is 11.07018 . We
The commonly measure of diversity measure was created by Gibbs and Martin [2]. The index (D) is n calculated as D = 1 i=1 p2 i , where pi is the proportion of individuals or objects in category i and N is the number of categories. A perfectly homogeneous population would have a diversity index score of 0. A perfectly heterogeneous population would have a diversity index score of 1 (assuming innite categories with equal representation in each category). 18 http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/eda3674.htm
17

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2007
2008 Policy Change

2009

Legend
Allahabad <5 5 - 10 10 - 15 15 - 25 > 25

Legend
Allahabad <5 5 - 10 10 - 15 15 - 25 > 25

Figure 5: Intake Change between 2007 (baseline) and 2009.

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Year 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

0 50 56.77 63.65 72.11 79.22 72.65

1 14.15 14.48 14.96 15.05 15.32 21.48

Border 2 3 10.75 6.79 9 5.13 7.48 3.65 5.15 2.11 2.99 0.73 3.36 0.91

4 6.98 5.26 3.74 2.07 0.7 1.47

5 11.32 9.36 6.52 3.51 1.04 0.13

Table 2: Percentage of Entire College UG Demographic (2007-12) (sorted by BORDER)(Assumes Intake is constant between 2004-2007)

Statewise Population Change (2009 from 2007 Baseline )

Statewise Population Change (2011 from 2007 Baseline )

Legend
Decrease > 50% Decrease < 50% Increase < 50% Increase between 50 - 100% Increase between 100 - 150% Increase > 150%

Legend
Decrease > 50% Decrease < 50% Increase < 50% or same Increase between 50 - 100% Increase between 100 - 150% Increase > 150%

(a) Percentage Change (2009) from 2007 Baseline.

(b) Percentage Change (2011) from 2007 Baseline.

Figure 6: Intake Change is Consistent over Time (Percentage Changes in 2009 and 2011 compared with baseline 2007).

Year 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

Simpsons Index 0.71 0.64 0.56 0.45 0.35 0.42

Table 3: Simpsons Diversity Index

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2012 Delta

Legend
Decrease > 50% Decrease < 50% Increase < 50% or same Increase between 50 - 100% Increase between 100 - 150% > 150% Hindi Belt State

(a) 2012 Intake Changes from Baseline. The cross hatched area is Hindi Belt a set of states which primarily speak Hindi.

(b) Student Population Trends of Hindi Belt.

Figure 7: 2012 Tweaks and Hindi Belt

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Figure 8: College Demographic Over Time (Categorised by BORDER). note from Table 4 that the calculated value of 2 is much greater than this for all the years in question. Even with the policy amendement in 2012, the composition has changed signicantly from the 2007 baseline. Hence, the null hypothesis is rejected. The new policy does signicantly impact the incoming student distribution.

Hypothesis II H0 : There is no change in the college demographic after the new admission policy. That is the college demographic (as a whole) is not statistically different in 2012 from the baseline demographic of 2007. We use Table 5 for calculating this. The degrees of freedom for this is 5 (as we have 6 categories). For this, we have the critical values for 2 (5, = 0.05) is 11.070. We note from Table 5 that the calculated value of 2 is much greater than this for all the years in question.

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Year 2007 2009 2010 2011 2012

Border Actual Proportion Actual Expected Actual Expected Actual Expected Actual Expected

0 265 0.50 467 304 650 397 692 420 420 414

1 75 0.14 97 86 117 112 129 119 316 117

2 57 0.11 29 65 17 85 11 90 46 89

3 36 0.07 6 41 6 54 3 57 13 56

4 37 0.07 6 42 4 55 4 59 31 58

5 60 0.11 2 69 0 90 0 95 2 94

Total 530 607 794 839 828

2 234.54 395.81 443.77 494.96

Table 4: 2 Test Contigency Table (Annual Intake) Year 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Border Actual Proportion Actual Expected Actual Expected Actual Expected Actual Expected Actual Expected 0 1060 0.50 1262 1112 1464 1150 1849 1282 2276 1437 2229 1534 1 300 0.14 322 315 344 325 386 363 440 407 659 434 2 228 0.11 200 239 172 247 132 276 86 309 103 330 3 144 0.07 114 151 84 156 54 174 21 195 28 208 4 148 0.07 117 155 86 161 53 179 20 201 45 214 5 240 0.11 208 252 150 260 90 290 30 325 4 347 Total 2120 2223 2300 2564 2873 3068 2 52.82 224.33 636.74 1239.49 1215.95

Table 5: 2 Test Contigency Table (College Population over 4 years) Hence, the null hypothesis is rejected. The new policy does signicantly impact the student demographic.

5 Discussion
Based on the foregoing, we see that the changed admission policy change has resulted in a decrease of the heterogeity amongst the student population. One of the main reasons for this trend is that students tend to self-select themselves into institutes towards which have cultural afnity, especially in a regional sensefood, language and other customs.

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This implies as per Gurin et al. [3], students miss out on some of the cognitive learnings that foster active thinking and personal development. They have also pointed out some of the research topics in the area of the impact of diversity on both college and lifelong learning which would need more research in the Indian context like: 1. students own assessments of the benets they do or do not receive from interaction with their diverse peers; 2. faculty assessments about the impact of diversity on student learning; 3. returns to students and larger community due to diversity; and 4. analyses tying diversity experience during the college years to a wide variety of educational outcomes. A limitation of the current study is that it has looked at data from only one institute and not controlled for the presence or absence of other colleges nearby. For example, the southern states have a very well established network of reasonably good private engineering colleges and some of these are obligated to give places to students at fees set by the government, which is much less than they would normally charge and roughly similar to that in government colleges. A broader study would extend this to multiple NITs and see whether their student demography has also changed similarly, and if not, why? Also, one has to look at whether the students in under-developed regions like the North eastern states are losing out by the new policy in not being able to secure a place. Another point is whether the far ung, underdeveloped regions are losing by not having students from the heartland going there and how does a lack of brain circulation impact the regional economies. Having more data on the socio-economic status, educational background, gender etc. would also help us understand how students select the college to go to and how public policy cah help towards steering students to meet the larger developmental needs of society.

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Thus, this research has a lot of potential to open up fresh vistas of understanding by extending this line of enquiry not only to multiple NITs, but other institutes like the IITs, state government colleges etc. This should help us uncover more the impact diversity has on a country like India and the important role public policy plays.

References
[1] Wesley M Cohen and Daniel A Levinthal. Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation. In: Administrative Science Quarterly (1990), pp. 128152.
URL :

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2393553.

[2] Jack P Gibbs and Walter T Martin. Urbanization, Technology, and the Division of Labor: International Patterns. In: American Sociological Review 27.5 (Oct. 1962). Diversity Index, pp. 667677.
URL :

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2089624.

[3] Patricia Gurin et al. Diversity and Higher Education: Theory and Impact on Educational Outcomes. In: Harvard Educational Review 72.3 (2002), pp. 330367. http://hepg.metapress.com/content/01151786U134N051. [4] Samuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations. In: Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993), pp. 2249. [5] Sam Youl Lee, Richard Florida, and Zoltan Acs. Creativity and entrepreneurship: a regional analysis of new rm formation. In: Regional studies 38.8 (2004), pp. 879 891. [6] Leena Parmar. Cultural diversity in the Armed Forces: An international comparison. In: ed. by Joseph Soeters and Jan van der Meulen. Routledge, 2007. Chap. Diversity in the Indian Armed Forces, pp. 111124.
URL :

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[7] James D Wolfensohn. Entering the 21st century: the challenges for development. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 354.1392 (1999), pp. 19431948.

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