The quality of education of an educational programme is a function of the value of the educational goals that the programme aims at, together with the effectiveness and efficiency of the means that it employs to achieve those goals, including pedagogical strategies and assessment tasks. Hence, in order to raise the quality of education, the current discourse of 'Outcome Based Education' needs to shift its focus from what the teacher does in the classroom to raising the quality of student learning. To do this, many universities both in India and abroad have initiated Foundation Programmes as part of both General Education and Specialized Education. This article proposes that such a foundation programme must aim at what we call Academic Cognition, in consonance with what NEP 2020 calls Higher-Order Cognition. We spell out the various strands of Academic Cognition, and explore ways in which foundation programmes in the curricula for Higher Education can provide the foundations for Academic Cognition.