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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.'"
In the US and India. College isn't training you for a job, it is learning a field of study. Perhaps this is the issue, jobs require these "degrees" and now that is what colleges teach to, not the theory behind the area of study. My college was guilty of this, sadly.
Well, Indian companies, if your universities are turning out graduates of sub-par, and you're no longer pleased to being able to bringing products to markets in a timely manner, please to be introducing you a land where you can be outsourcing your business products and services. This land is being called America! And you can be outsourcing your technical business to it!
(We are apologizing for the quality of the technical support and code we send back. We are knowing that "Howdy Y'all! My name is Jethro! How can ah help y'all with yer blinkinlights?" and "Segmentation pwnage, core dumped, dude" isn't quite what you're used to receiving, but remember... you do get what you pay for.)
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.
Shock horror, Universities aren't job training centers. Who would have thought, places of higher learning actually caring about theories and learning and not about job skills.
Spoken plainly as one who doesn't use any advanced algorithms in their coding. Lemme guess, you paint forms and play with DB rows?
Let me enlighten you: The heart of Computer Science is ALL "math crap".
I think it's a bit too harsh to say that all of that stuff is useless, but it is true that few students will get much use out of it until much later in their careers.
My complaint is that most schools don't teach good large project management skills. Everybody works on toy programs by themselves or in small groups and on short deadlines. That is highly unrealistic in the real world and teaches the kids a lot of bad habits IMHO. I think it would be better if the schools put more emphasis on project management (both from a manager and coder perspective), including version control, planning, testing, debugging, and so forth. Grading would be a bit more difficult, but the ability to compare students based on their amount and general quality (how many fixes did it require afterward?) of checkins would be a good place to start.
The class could even mix it up a bit between writing their own project and maintain last year's project, especially if they build stuff that is actually useful and post it online. Granted, this is an ambitious project for a classroom, but I think it's the only way to properly prepare students for the real world.
I read the internet for the articles.
You might want to avoid calling them cells though...
HOLY CRAP! this is my daily experience at work!
/. account, but this is what I see everyday...
I can't for the life of me remember my
IT people that can't fix their own MS word problems...
give them instructions on step by step how to do something, no problem. Give them an exe and tell them to install a program, it'll never happen.
Everyone I've talked to says the same thing. give them a structured problem and they knock it outa the park. give them an open ended real world problem without structure given to them, and they are lost.
It makes me feel good about myself and the ability to think, and figure out what concept to apply and how to apply it...
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.
Well, I don't think it is a big of a problem as it is made out to be, I know people who have lost their jobs to outsourcing. However, I think the underlying hate comes from the people who have to call tech support at a placed based in India, and then can't understand or communicate with the person on the other end of the line. All things considered as well, if your calling support, you are probably already frustrated enough, and now you can't understand what the other person is saying? I can see that being pretty aggravating. Worthy of hating an entire nation? Probably not.
The article fails to mention that the IIT's are among the best schools in the world. It's not all bleak.
Second this.
There's way too much emphasis on starting your own projects from a clean slate, which is very rare in the 'real world.' More often you get handed the spaghetti-code mess of the "last guy," to puzzle over and figure out how to document and maintain.
Too much CS education is focused on the very beginning of the software lifecycle. That's like churning out doctors that can only deliver babies, when what the market needs are GPs and geriatric specialists. Grads need to know not only how to start a new project themselves, but how to pick up one that's in the middle of development, or that's well into its maintenance phase.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"lackluster prospects facing the great majority of...college graduates"
:P
Speaking as a college CS/Network graduate whom, 2 years after graduating, is still working as a janitor, allow me to welcome you to this planet.
In my case, it's not because I have inferior skills or training. It's because most employers I've had contact with see a diploma/degree as "quaint" and "irrelevant". Since I don't have 5+ years of experience, excellent "soft skills" (PHB corporate-speak if I've ever heard it), and I don't want to sell anything, I'm apparently unemployable, no matter what school I went to or how well I did.
Here's a brief story that gives contrast to the wonderfully frustrating experience I've been putting up with for over 2 years: I have a friend (who dropped out of highschool no less) who works in IT. One of his co-workers, a supposed IT expert who makes ~$100k a year, recently said to him "I assume we'll be using FAT32 for our 1TB backup drive's filesystem?". It seems to me, someone making $100k/year in IT should be aware of things like the limitations of FAT32 and Windows' implementation thereof. My friend tells me this sort of ineptitude is common among the IT "experts" he works with, and he spends more time correcting their mistakes than doing his own work. Meanwhile, I can't even get an *interview* for entry level jobs that a highschool student could perform.
Not that I'm bitter or anything. Anyways, back to washing floors so I can make my student loan payments. Thanks for listening
I don't hate India. I hate the companies that route my calls there.
What's annoying about the Indians taking the calls is that they pretend to understand when you use words or phrases they don't get, and it quickly becomes apparent as they struggle to troubleshoot a problem they never comprehended in the first place. But they're taught to do this, just like they're taught to tell me their name is Steve or John or Bob. Again, it's really the fault of the company putting the almighty dollar ahead of customer satisfaction.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
And this is different from American customer service how?
I agree, however: "learning a field of study," is not what most people in college want, nor what most employers are looking for.
What most students want is job skills. Few students have the inclination (or spare funds) to learn for the sake of learning for four years, and then spend another two or three at a trade/professional school, before they can get a real position.
Students go to various schools in great part because of the job prospects they think they'll have on completion. Only the rich can afford to simply go because it will be intellectually stimulating. Plus, mixing together people who just want job training with people who are fundamentally interested in learning is a mistake; neither are going to be satisfied with the results.
To be honest, I think we need to remove some of the social stigma surrounding trade schools in the U.S., and we should have a clear path for students that just want to get job skills. Maybe the companies themselves could even help fund them, and in return get to dictate parts of the curriculum (via directed tax contributions, if not voluntarily). That would remove the education/industry disconnect. Students who wanted an 'education' would be able to go to college, and students who want 'job training' and a near-guaranteed job in a relatively short amount of time could go to the trade schools.
I think in the U.S. we have dragged 'childhood' further and further out; there is no reason why a person should have to go through nineteen or twenty years of schooling before they can survive on their own in the economy. Education needs to be made more relevant to what students want to learn, and more rigorous earlier in the curriculum. Huge swaths of my own education were nothing but wasted time because of the way the system is currently set up; there is no reason why a motivated 15 or 16-year-old shouldn't be able to be out learning a skill, if that's what they want to do. Making them acquire thousands of dollars in debt and years of wasted 'education' that they won't use first, helps no one.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I spent a lot of time with Indian college graduates in grad school. Some were smart and others couldn't even find a computer let alone program it. I can say the exact same thing about American / European / (insert your nationality) graduates.
One thing I will say about Indian college graduates is that they *tend* not to think outside the box. If the solution wasn't painfully obvious or spelled out in the textbook or lecture notes, then some of the Indian students would run into serious problems. Also some Indian students would ace courses which required large amounts of memorization but would fail practical courses.
I disagree. Tools are transient, and the features of each become more commoditized each year. The american programmer chases "learning new tools" with each programming "generation." This in itself isn't bad, but more often than not, rolling your own for a specialized situation is a skill that needs to be present at all times.
It's been said before in the perspective of not knowing how things work on the inside (especially in language wars) but I've run into more junior programmers that don't understand how to analyze and debug systems because of a simple ignorance of the "magic" of , be it networking, compilers, operating systems, sparse and/or associative arrays, code optimization in large scalable systems, the network stack, internal type representation, threading, memory usage, security...
In each of these topics, I've been on a team of programmers that simply wrote VB-style windows apps for so long they couldn't tackle a bug in one of these more difficult issues. I don't advocate that every programmer needs to learn all these topics before starting, but they have to know that there are layers beneath the tool, and that such layers are subject to examination.
Even now, I'm reengineering a large-scale system that made some horrible scalability decisions. They had a simple point-click, drag-drop style of application construction, and couldn't understand how to optimize for the real-world data throughput the end product needed to satisfy. So here I am, the "math guy", ripping out chunks of tool-generated sequential searches, file caches, and other endless layers, to streamline.
SO I argue that the *jobs* will always have a mix of programmer types, but if you hire only mousemonkeys, you're risk not having a skillset ready to tackle the "difficult" things.
If you are not an engineer or a doctor, then you are nobody. This is an outlook that is very prevalent among Indian parents - there are only two professional areas worth studying (although MBA has recently joined the two) for any indian student. All other fields (pure sciences, arts, humanities, commerce etc) are considered last resorts and muster very little respect. Graduates in such areas are not as esteemed or valued as their engineer friends, thus they receive less exposure and lesser opportunities.
Which college do you go to? the one on this end of the street or the one on the other end? as a result of this idolatry of disciplines, engineering colleges and medical schools are cropping up like mushrooms everywhere. starting an engineering college is a very easy and profitable business venture in India. This proliferation of institutions (with the wrong motives) thus leads to subpar standards of education - so even the engineers/doctors now are not trained properly in basic skills.
Universities are not for teaching communication skills. That's what society is for. if you cannot converse well with others, if you cannot carry yourself with confidence and in general cannot interact socially, then it's probably not the college's fault. it is up to the students to read non-curricular english books (which a college cannot, and shouldn't force), to form groups, try out new ideas and socialise more. Being anglicised, active and outgoing should not be considered a stigma anymore, and certainly should not be considered unpatriotic. The mindsets of students (and more importantly, of overbearing parents) should adapt to these new circumstances.
There are more things than thick-accented teachers and archaic teaching methods at fault here. In a developing country like India where opportunities and population continue to explode at a devilish pace, the competition will only grow fiercer and it takes more than passive complaining about teachers to succeed.
My sig has been answered.
Umm...The Americans can draw from context better? I don't know. I can tell you I've never had a basic communication problem with American tech support, even those who aren't native English speakers. When I'm trying to convey a lot of information in a hurry, I tend to use big words and complex grammar; this can completely shut down a conversation with a foreign call center, but the American (and Canadian, to be fair) support manages to get the job done.
I'll just put it this way: I've never had to explain the same situation three times to the same person or had a tech doggedly stick to the script regardless of what I told them when talking to an American. I've worked in tech support before and have *seen* some American script monkeys at work, but it's almost a policy for the Indian (and other) call centers to rely entirely on scripts.
Example: if I tell "Joe" that I've got a problem with my new wireless NIC and I need to know where I can enter the SSID in the software, it should be clear to him that I know what the problem is and what I need to do to fix it. What does he do? Force me to go through twenty minutes of uninstalling, reinstalling, PULLING THE CARD TO GET THE MODEL NUMBER, before finally putting me on hold for ten minutes to get someone else on the phone who knows the answer to my question.
Maybe the problem is what is talked about in the article: they're trained on rote memorization, not troubleshooting. They don't know how to deviate from the norm and jump straight to a solution.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Farming out the easy stuff frees me up to pursue the more lucrative stuff, like working more with customers or developing partnerships.
The problem with farming out the "easy stuff" is that is what most entry level people cut their teeth on out in the business world. If you take away the things that the entry level people are qualified to do, they never get the chance to become senior level.
With that simple move, you've cut the legs out from under your technical competence as a society and are now at the mercy of others. This, by the way, is a great way to cause an economic collapse and possibly another depression.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
I am glad this topic came up. For all the hype sweeping up India I think they need to focus on innovation and then call themselves the next Technology Superpower. I was a victim of the Indian System. I did my undergrad there and those years were the most harrowing . All it involved was rote learning, which I was never good that. It took me 6 years to get through those 4 years. I questioned myself several times over that period. Then I came to the US and started my MS programme. What I experienced in my first few weeks was what I had been dreaming of all my life. All those ingredients like free thinking, risk taking and freedom of speech, things for which I was called rebellious were the norm here. And that is the truth in why we do not see a single Product based India IT Company in the news. All these mega companies are in the IT service segment.
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 recently had to call a tech support line for a company which I knew outsourced it's call center support to India. The girl on the other end of the line called herself "Irene" and talked like a California Valley Girl (if I hadn't known that the call center was in India, I would have been fooled). It was kind of a turn-on knowing that she was working so hard to fulfill my fantasy that I was talking to an American girl. It made me wonder if I could convince her to wear a cheerleader outfit or a french maid uniform or something.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I think you're calling the wrong sort of "support" line...
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
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
I had the unique opportunity to work at an Indian web design firm as a project manager and technology coach. I was directly involved in screening and interviewing job applicants, and I agree many of the observations noted in the article. As nearly 100% of our clients are western companies, solid English skills are a must. We cannot compromise on this requirement, and even the office runner is required to take English classes.
To give an example of the problems with the Indian education system. One applicant brought in her senior design project, a full website, to impress us at an interview. Problem #1, every file she brought was infected with a virus. Problem #2, it was a complete patchwork job from a free scripts site (copyrights intact) pieced together with about 5% her code. Problem #3, she didn't understand the code she ripped off well enough to change a simple menu item. Problem #4, this had received a 100% grade towards her graduation. She was rewarded for searching the internet and creating a website via copy/paste. She was not taught how to create, only how to duplicate.
Any Indian with money can get a masters degree. If you pay your bill at exam time, they will pass you onto the next level. During the time I was in India, a major university was forced to shut down because of student protesting. They were protesting exam fraud investigations of the graders the university employed. Master's level exams were being graded by 10 year-olds based on: length, neatness of writing, number of paragraphs, and the 'prettiness' of the graphs. I think this is where the University of Phoenix got its model for taking people's money.
I absolutely loved my time in India, and I am not trying to bash the country. I just want to share my limited exposure to the reported problem.