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Indian College Students Face Bleak Prospects
The New York Times has a piece on the lackluster prospects facing the great majority of Indian college graduates. Most of the 11 million students in India's 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, according to the article, heavy on obedience and rote memorization and light on useful job skills. From the article: "In the 2001 census, [Indian] college graduates had higher unemployment — 17 percent — than middle or high school graduates... [At a middle-tier college] dozens of students swarmed around a reporter to complain about their education. 'What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different,' a commerce student said.... [A] final-year student who expects next year to make $2 to $4 a day hawking credit cards, was dejected. 'The opportunities we get at this stage are sad,' she said. 'We might as well not have studied.'"
When I was recruiting a replacement for me in my previous job as a financial analyst, the obedience aspect was the reason I rejected all Indian candidates. None of them, despite very high qualifications, didn't even make it to the second round, because the job required a high degree of personal initiative. I simply kept running into such a strong culture of obedience, that sometimes I had the feeling I was talking to computers: very fast, very good at what they were doing, but offering zero dissent or showing any desire to do anything on their own. A human garbage-in-garbage-out system.
I'm a double major (math and CS) and I'd like to think that I can program AND do math. In fact, my job requires both! The purpose of math in CS degrees is to encourage logic, pattern-recognition, and problem-solving, things a good coder needs. Admittedly, most programmers won't ever use advanced math. Even I don't use calculus on the job- just very interesting trig.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I guess all those finite element and fluid flow analysis packages out there just wrote themselves. You know about those, right? They're what drove the design of computers for a very long time. Computers weren't designed from the beginning to let you download music, videos, and basically supplant television as the glass teat in your life.
The article fails to mention that the IIT's are among the best schools in the world. It's not all bleak.
Funny, I graduated in '03 and have been gainfully employed doing embedded programming for the last 5 years. Between contracts I'm beating the head hunters off with a stick because they can't find anyone capable of doing C and Assembly for embedded targets. You can keep your "painting forms and playing with DB rows," I'll stick to safety critical real time applications.
They are having a labor shortage. That's a shortage of labor that is willing to work for 50 cents per day.
Labor shortage as defined by 21st century industrialists.
I work with lots of Indian programmers and developers. Many are very good. Most of them are pretty hard workers. And as you say, there are some that do not belong in IT. I agree particularly with your statement that unless the solution is a stock answer, then they cannot solve it. But I can say the same about the American IT workers I've dealt with, especially those that sprung up during the height of the dotcom. Right now the number of tech schools in India seems to be approaching the number of tech schools during the boom. You remember? Everyone was an MCSE, everyone was a web developer, hardly any knew what a for loop was.
The closest thing that we see to slavery in most places now is economic slavery. I don't mean that people are poor; I refer to the situation where on accepting a contract, a person immediately accepts debt for the equipent or time or services that are provided up-front. In this context, if a person leaves without settling the debt, the power of the court (or the Mafia) can in many jurisdictions do exactly that and drag the person back or drag the person to jail. This situation is found in third world factories, in sex worker arrangments, and in music industry contracts to some extent. In all cases, there is hold over the individual that can be very real. You might also argue that the recent changes in US law to prevent private individuals filing for backruptcy amount to the reintroduction of slavery in the US for many of the underprivileged, because it allows an individual essentially to sell their freedom. If personal freedom is for sale then it is, by definition, no longer inalienable.
Another interesting fact about slavery is that it is approved of by all three major mono-theistic religions. As an example, the Bible defines slave trading as sinful, but not slave ownership. Slaves won through conquest or debt are considered just.
I can't say much about commerce graduates, since I graduated with a B.E. degree in Computers (there is no seperate B.S. degree in India for software). But I certainly believe the computer education syllabus could do with a major overhaul, as well as better teachers.
...) is common - in other words, 25% of my time in college is going to be wasted studying about irrelevant topics that are extremely unlikely to be useful in my chosen profession. To give a few examples, I had to learn (by rote of course): :) )
NOTE: The following is also a rant, if you read it you can understand how dissatisfied I am with wasting several years to get a stupid paper certificate which I am not in the least bit proud of. Be warned that this is all highly subjective and biased opinion.
The syllabus for any degree in India is revised very infrequently, maybe once every 5 or 10 years - this is especially bad for a fast-changing field like computers, I guess it may be OK for mature disciplines such as mechanical or civil engineering. The first year of the 4 year Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) course for *any* specialization (computers, electronics, mechanical
1. How cement is mixed etc. (in Chemistry)
2. Engineering drawing (isometric projection etc., useful in Civil Engg.)
3. Mechanical engg. concepts like stresses and struts (no, not Java Struts!
Now, I can understand that students need to be exposed to different fields so they can decide which one they want etc. - but why do you have to waste an entire year after someone has decided his trade, just for the 0.001% of people who might wish to change professions?
Unlike many people, I went into C.S. (its actually called Computer Engg. degree) because I like programming, not just because of earning potential. As such, I had grouped with a couple of friends and we tried to make small programs, games etc. even before entering college. Now, the only first year subject relevant to C.S. is Computer Programming - where we are initiated into the mysteries of Pascal. In the first semester (we have 2 semesters in a year btw.), I got an assignment to print 1 to 10 as output. When I hand it in, I actually get told off by the teacher for using the 'for' loop - since we hadn't got to that stage in the syllabus, it was Not Allowed to use looping constructs! This should give you some idea of the quality of teaching in our hallowed halls of learning. I quickly learned to keep inquisitive experimentation seperate from class assignments, and got through college by copying almost all assignments (which activity is *very* common btw.)
The teaching staff in most Indian colleges is abysmal, due to extremely poor salary the only people who end up there are rejects from industry who would never get a job elsewhere. I doubt most could even hold a data entry position - there were the few intelligent teachers who did explain and teach well, but they were a minority. Also, when I write a board exam the paper will be corrected by some random teacher, who might be illiterate for all I know.
If questions are based on solved problems in standard textbooks, the teacher will likely expect the exact same answer - if you use a 'while' loop instead of 'for', it might not satisfy the prof. who only wants similar structure and doesn't understand there is more than one way to do a problem. In this environment, how do you expect anyone to use modular structure, descriptive variable names or recursion etc.?
The problem of 'should be done acc. to the textbook' applies in other disciplines too - although I read a lot, when answering an English paper I wouldn't dream of using abstruse erudite diction as it would be incomprehensible to the examiner. In other words, we're actually taught to use small words since few teachers would understand complex verbiage.
Passing college exams in India is not done through understanding the course material and applying learned concepts, this would be a foreign concept to most Indian students. The right way to pass, is of cour
The problem is that the education system ends up training students for the entrance exam rather than for a future life as a researcher. This means that they have to be reeducated a bit when they start doing their Ph.D. However an Indian Ph.D. takes 5 years to aquire, so my impression is that the students have time to change.