Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
If you want to learn how to approach the profession with a scientific outlook, which will enable you to get an entry-level programming job today and get a new one tomorrow when industry makes a major shift in languages or paradigms, go to the university. The math will make your programming better. The multivariate calc is possibly the least useful math class a CS major could take. More important is set theory, matrix theory, probability, and statistics.
Another way to evaluate degrees is this: were you taught how to think and program, or how to write Java? If Java becomes dead in 5 years, the person who learned how to program will shrug his shoulders and move on. The person who learned how to write Java will become unemployed. (Note: I'm just picking on Java; replace it with language X, and the statement holds true).
You might want to avoid phrases like "cells" in this day and age, even if they're for learning :P