A Status Study of Cancellation of Distance Education Admission Cases in India

Abstract

IGNOU being one of the largest universities of the world in terms of students’ enrollment, not only contributing to the increasing Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) of Higher Education of India in a big way by admitting lakh of students every year, but it is also democratizing the higher education; and promoting life-long education in India. IGNOU is offering relatively flexible entry to aspirants of the higher education, without putting much emphasis on rigidity of subjects/courses studied or percentage obtained as compared to the face-to-face mode universities. Further, there is no restriction in terms of intake capacity for most of its Programmes vis-à-vis maximum number of students to be admitted. Consequently, cumulative strength of students admitted in IGNOU is more than three million. However, there are number of students who are quitting IGNOU due to certain reasons by applying cancellation of their admission. Though the number of such students is not very large, still it has become a persisting trend. To minimize the persisting withdrawal trend, researcher felt that there was a need to analyse the phenomenon of cancellation of admission, which would help in suggesting strategies for containing the same.