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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.'"
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".
You might want to avoid calling them cells though...
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.
A good college shouldn't expect you to know HOW to program in C++. A Good College should teach how to program first and foremost, where the example language is C++.
I had friends in Georgia Tech who were decent Java programmers who did miserable in their introductory programming classes because the professor chose an extremely obscure language that no one knew beforehand. This way, he knew that no one came in who knew programming, but didn't know the concepts. By choosing a weird language, he could force concepts first, specific languages later. They hated it, got a poor grade, but came out better programmers.
On the same note, a mathematician does not differentiate between solutions of ax^2 + bx + c = 0 and x^2 + 5x + 1 = 0; knowing how to solve the quadratic equation is the important part, the second is just an example to make the theory easier.
"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
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.
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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.
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.