Slashdot Mirror
India is Betting On Compulsory Internships To Improve Its Unemployable Engineers (qz.com)
India has come up with a solution to improve the quality of the engineers it churns out. From a report: Over 60 percent of the 800,000 engineering graduates that India produces annually remain unemployed, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex body for technical education in India, says. So, to make them more employable, engineering colleges across the country will now have to ensure that undergraduate students complete three internships lasting between four and eight weeks each during the course of their programme. Currently, less than one percent participate in summer internships. [...] Indians are obsessed with engineering, particularly since the IT boom. The mid-1990s saw a huge spike in the number of engineering graduates as demand increased in sectors ranging from IT to infrastructure.
This is a super good idea. I was very aggressive towards internships, and it paid off big time. Many of my classmates had higher grades, but couldn't get a full time job after graduation due to their lack of experience (and ambition?)
As a nerdy engineering type, often times the softer skills associated with getting, and keeping, a job are more difficult than the technical aspects of performing that job. I think mandatory internships for all engineering disciplines, at least in my home state, would be a great idea.
Why would I pay an engineer fresh out of school when I can hire 5 undergrads for free?
Here: http://magazines.scholastic.co...
Same thing's going to happen with internships.
Most colleges will advertise how a degree will be good for a job. However once in college the professors will often go, this is an education institution not a job placement firm, or vocational school.
Most colleges train students to be professors to train students to be professors. The educational inbreeding problem.
Colleges and professors will need to realize that a lot of students want jobs outside of academia. Internships are excellent in nearly all ways.
The student gets real world experience, and gets exposure to the company.
The college gets support from these companies who like these students.
The companies gets cheap educated labor under the term internship.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Is India creating 800,000 new jobs per year for those 800,000 new graduates? Maybe there are so many unemployed because there are so many.
because if it's one way I know for sure to lower unemployment it's to dump hundreds of thousands of employees at intern level wages directly into a market. I foresee this will in no way have any negative consequences or backfire. This is most certainly not a transparent attempt to get cheap labor in an already overburdened job market. Nosiree.
Also, good to know India has the same B.S. narrative about why folks can't find work as the US.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
or higher. Preventing a parent climbing the wall of lower-storied buildings to pass answers to their kid seems like a no-brainer first step.
TRUMP powa! because it Makes America Great Again!
First, I will say that the program seems like a great idea and I wish them success.
Next, I can say that in my company, we had very, very bad luck with Indian engineers and SW developers. I am not talking about H1 imports either. Ultimately, I think it came down to cultural differences which created a mismatch of expectations from both sides.
After the 5th one, we more or less stopped considering those applications.
We are not a large company, but we do tend to have 5 to 10 interns at any one time. We did accept a few interns from India as well. We sponsored the visas and all that. Didn't really work out.
Then, we starting bringing German interns in. Maybe some people will get offended by this statement, but I can say in about 95% of the cases, the German interns we got were far superior engineers than our full time US master degree engineers. Their problem solving skills, critical thinking and overall work ethics were, for us, amazing.
For nearly all of them, at the end of their internship we offered them a contract plus visas. Of course, this is much easier to handle with Germans because of the visa treaty.
The thing is, they also ask for much less money than out of school Americans and they are vastly better engineers. Whatever they are doing in their schools seems to be working.
Basically what I am saying is, why do so many companies jump through hoops to bring in scores of cheap Indian guys when way better engineers are also willing to come?
I worked with one Indian in my time as a network engineer, and he was a fraud. He lied extensively on his resume and could do very little of what he claimed.
But, take that with a huge grain of salt for the singular data point it is.
>> undergraduate students complete three internships lasting between four and eight weeks each during the course of their programme
What can you possibly get out of 8-week internships? They are way too short, even the total 24 weeks are all spent on one employer. Employers aren't really give anything of substance for them to work on in that period.
Unless it's entry-level helpdesk/IT (non-engineering) jobs.
I am from India, and I *know* the abysmal quality of what passes for an engineering college there.
The poor and lower middle class of India know viscerally that education is the ticket out of poverty. They are willing to mortgage their family wealth, spend 40% of the meagre income on college tuition. They hope somehow their child, usually the eldest son, will somehow make it and pull their family out of poverty.
But that much of money coming out of ill informed population is a honey pot for the unscrupulous scammers of all stripes, politicians in particular. Every damned politician at state level owns college complexes. Engineering, medical, dental and nursing schools, all in one large campus, totally privately and individually owned by a state level minister. Corruption in management, recruiting faculty, running the college, collecting the fees, in admission procedure, everywhere is rampant. Most of these grads don't really make it out of poverty
But the degree they get B.E or B.Tech B.Arch MBBS are the same degrees awarded by real colleges like the IITs and NITs and AIIMS etc. So the ill formed poor people get scammed. It is not going to be fixed by passing a few laws by Delhi bureaucrats.
Quality education, be it engineering, be it Greek literature, needs investment and effort.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
hilarious. I've seen the videos. Unbelievable...
... the US would do something about THEIR unemployable engineers!!!
So looks like we are getting the best and the brightest after all!
So, in order to fix the problem of not having enough jobs for engineers, they're going to make engineers have to compete with student engineers working for free?
Build a Wall!
Make America Work Again!
How can there be a shortage of employable engineers getting churned out of the University system of India? I thought they all come to the United States on a "We don't have enough employable applicants in the U.S. for our corporations" H1B Visa.
Of course, it's a corporate lie that there are enough suitable applicants -- they just don't want to pay the US applicants what they deserve, so they are willing to have the gov't let ship in engineers from India for pennies on the dollar.
Is this the same India the has a 60% rate of cheating on their engineering tests? Internships are not going to remove that stigma.
Having worked with many degreed "engineers" from Asia and India, there is a huge variation in competence. Typically those that went through grad school in the US are solid engineers, however, those still in their home country are usually sub par for the field.
The article contains the problem. Engineering is very popular in India, thus, there are a lot of people getting the degree who have no business being engineers (this happens with any popular/trendy profession). However, engineering requires a certain mindset and a certain inherent intelligence. https://www.quora.com/How-do-t... If you don't have an IQ of at least 120 or higher, you will likely not do well as an engineer (your best hope is to get rapidly promoted to management, I have seen it happen numerous times). Since the median IQ is theoretically 100, and engineering is popular, you wind up with a sizable fraction who were able to cram their way through school, but who don't have the inherent capacity to do the job.
Hopefully with internships this will become more apparent to the affected students, allowing them to shift into other valuable but less intelligence intensive fields before they spend all 4 years on a field that they won't be successful in.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
to do non-engineering jobs? Like tradesmen or cooks? Do they have to give visas out to foreign workers to come and work for them?
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
when the internships aren't mandatory to graduate. Interns aren't suppose to do work an employee would normally do. That means they're of limited use to a business. It's why they're called gophers (go fer coffee).
The dynamic changes drastically when you suddenly mandate 800,000 people get an internship or don't graduate. It's the same thing as that schmuk in Chicago who wants to mandate a 'plan' before high schoolers can graduate. Businesses will take advantage of the students need for an internship to force them to work full time for little or no pay. This will in turn drive down wages and opportunities for people in the job market proper, which is exactly what this is suppose to do. I'm sure if it was looked into you'd find some wealthy plutocrat buddy-buddy with whoever suggested this.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Does this ever come up in political discussions in India? I see a flow of issues from this:
1. Population Control
a. Yes, we need it, our population is so large that said population is not an asset
b. But we're having our best and brightest practice population control, which is self-defeating
And so on...
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
... to describe most folks with a degree in information systems. Hell even most folks with CompSci degrees are not engineers - techs, yes, engineers, no.
The far majority of people that graduate with a degree and are then considered computer engineers is ludicrous. Sorry folks most of you are far from engineers.
I don't own a business in India, but if I did, I'd be glad to know there would be a ton of free entry level software developers forced to work for free or next to nothing to get their degrees. Great job, India!
There is no free lunch. You get exactly what you pay for and nothing more.
the nazis did Population Control on the jews and that did not turn out that well.
I spent 6 years in college getting 2 engineering degrees, and another 3 doing post Master's work. In those years I worked with many, MANY, Indian students. The largest problem, consistent throughout college, and also painfully obvious after working professionally in the field since 2002 is that being able to speak English, with an accent that is understandable to the average American, is the main hurdle to employment.
Forget grades, being a good developer, or being excellent at math - if your English is so poor nobody can understand you, or your accent so thick as to be unintelligible to the average American, you are going to have problems finding regular employment.
I regularly have meetings with customers that have their IT outsourced to India, and often end up in internet calls trying to help them figure out how to interface with our system. Without fail, 50% of the call time is spent trying to solve the wrong problem because the remote developer's English is wanting. It's not that they are incompetent, it's simply that they ask broken questions, which we give the answers to, and then 15 minutes later we realize the question they asked is not what they *meant*.
1/3 of the price of an employee? Sold.
YOU ARE BEING TAKING ADVANTAGE OF.
Dexel, Cornell, RIT - all require Co-ops, and not some dinky 12-24 weeks, but a minimum of 50 weeks. My daughter will be going on her first in January, and it is supposed to last till the beginning of August. (She's an EE Major)
These are not "unpaid internships" either - the school requires them to be real, paid Jr Engineer positions, and audits to make sure they aren't just making you fetch coffee. It is a reason they tend to get jobs
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Promote them to management.
Look, not trying to be mean, but lets just stop with everyone can be anything crap. I will never be a good or great astrophysicist. I understand some concepts but everything else my brain is just not able to learn it period. So why keep training people who are clearly not able to get it? Move on, and we should start coming to realities of what people can and can't do. A 4'8" person may be able to shoot 3's all day long but when you crowd the floor with 7' giants, it makes an impact. So why not train these folks to do other things and unfortunately some other things may not be great or lucrative to do.
Having worked with their employable software engineers I shudder to think what their unemployable engineers are like.
Think about it. Modern "Germans" are doing pretty damn well. I'd say it worked out well for them.
Putting integrity back into it. Doing the university thing right.
Demanding an internship when these folk are functionally unemployable as Engineers. Like that's going to work. As in, "Hey, sure you can be an intern. Ok, so you can't do anything useful, even make the tea. No worries, we'll sign off on that."
So, I think /. needs to add two new mod point categories.
1: Idiot
2: Canadian
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
What they need is more infrastructure spending. They should allow foreign companies to collect tolls and fees.
This! Now american kids get to compete with H1B interns. Who is your TATA and what does he do.
Not only do they do nothing for the existing "unemployable", they do not obligate employers to take them on.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Something something STEM something something always find good high paying jobs something something Arts degrees useless
Control for admissions criteria, and the US doesn't look so bad.
The US admits and educates nearly everyone.
Germany only educates a few, sending the rest to drudgery-work.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Attempts to do that here are shot down as it's pretty brutal to tell a kid he's not cut out for college
Attempts to restrict education are rightfully shot down. Streaming only consigns people to drudgery-work even if the person would have done better without streaming.
I think Germany has a slightly nicer cultural attitude when it comes to the trades.
Or that they've managed to culturally instill the idea that bad work can be made good.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Now they'll have lots of engineers specializing in student intern wrangling, because the government will eventually direct money to them for that end. They'll be put to make-work.
India is India towards India as well.
My take is that German universities actually maintain legitimate entrance standards
Only if you believe in withholding education such that most people can only find drudgery-work (aka the lower-tier trades).
Vocational programs exist for other types of jobs.
In other words, they shunt most people into drudgery-work with little hope of upward progress or international recognition (beyond being a perpetual guest worker).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
When you're putting so much on the test, perhaps it'd be far better to kill the test and adopt a US level of openness.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
they suck...
- they have no social skills
- they have no talent
- they BARELY speak english
- they are irresponsible
etc.......
There are plenty of great folks that are very smart and are a true pleasure to work with over there, but these new kids they're pumping out of these "schools" don't know shit about the real world and expect to get paid for doing nothing just because they have a a piece of paper that says they know something.
I think that is a very sensible observation.
The Indians have been very good at separating the wrapping (eg. the certification) from the contents (eg. a body of knowledge), allowing every mechanism for structuring society to be corrupted. One wonders how internships will be faked or rubber-stamped but I am sure the Indians will find a way. In western education, some vocational courses also requires an employment component: However it doesn't have to relate to the field of study. This means one can complete a 'job-focused' course and still have no job experience relevant to the course.
The principle of the internship and apprenticeship is sound: One learns a job by going to work; it kills 2 birds with one stone, creating a qualified employee and guaranteed employment offsetting the extra cost of education. It also obeys an antiquated HR principle of getting the right person, then getting the right skills.
Such an education mechanism prevents formal education being 'wasted', as it is by the current westernized system, where businesses push the cost of training onto the government or the student. That results in a lot of unemployed people with theory but no practice: The very thing businesses don't want. Worse, with every person without a job having a certificate, such theory ceases to be an advantage.
Very few people can complete tertiary education when it requires the knowledge of 'how to be smarter', or the recently deprecated knowledge of 'how to be a leader'. An internship puts the cost of employee failure onto a business, which it doesn't want. There needs to be some means of compensation so a business can participate in the educational process.
Most professional engineers do this no matter what country - some employment history is required before getting registered to be officially allowed to use the title.
The "spin" on it in and the headline is somewhat sickening. Sure the submitter doesn't like Indians, we get that, but what's up with the editor today?
Isn't that the American Way these days? Sounds like Presidential material to me.
I think you've met the ones that are doing what they see earns rewards in the USA.
"I don't care what job you do, my son! Doctor, engineer or government bureaucrat... Whatever makes you happy!"
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Look at wikipedia - they already do!
Have you heard of a guy called Trump?
A minus one and a plus one, at least it is balanced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Which one is plus and which one is minus?
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
India is churning out paper champions much like the US has. I get really angry at the IT certification programs that basically mean a person can pass a paper test, but when you place said person in the real world, they choke. The best way to learn is through hands on experience and trial and error.
I just graduated with a Computer Engineering degree from a third tier engineering university (not the IITs, not the NITs, not even the privately owned universities like BITS, etc) and I can't say anything for those who graduate from first/second tier colleges but I can tell you from my batch of 140 people if I were to recommend someone who would be able to write any piece of working software without blowing up the machines, that number would be less than 10 and most of them performed below average academically.
What about the others?
Some are still confused and are opting for higher studies to gain more clarity (instead of the other way round), some never understood the science of it or gave up midway and want out of programming, others probably would(or might not) learn it the hard way on their boot-camps their jobs want them to take before they start working for them.
And what are the problems here?
1. Way TOO MANY engineering seats across the country, scored dirt low on the entrance ? No problem you can still secure admission somewhere
2. The entrance JEE doesn't test the candidate on the domain they will decide to take up (but so doesn't SAT I suppose) so most candidates have no clue what they are diving into for the next 4 years
3. Tests and grading are a joke (but the education is probably not). I studied the common courses for Computer Science taught mostly all around the world - Linear Algebra, Discrete Maths, Data Structures, Algorithms, Object Oriented Fundamentals, Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Compilers, Databases, Microprocessors, and bunch of other subjects and we were referring to the latest editions of books from popular global publishers available for these subjects, but the teachers seemed to never grasp the whole thing themselves. Zero tests that actually test the practical skills in these subjects - ask someone to setup a subnet, ask someone to traverse a graph, ask someone to write a simple bash script or handle some deployment and see them shit their pants - but these are the same students who would top the theory exams (who am I kidding, I passed all my finals by studying two days before each of them). And the grading, the graders would not analyze your solutions only check for the word checklist they have with them, go a bit different and you are doomed. (I and one of my friend thought it would be a good idea to write a linear solution to one of the questions on exam and most others as expected wrote a quadratic solution, guess who were the lowest scoring students for the test)
Typical leftist - you want the Rorschach blot of a mental case to fit your views, same as your deluded friends at the Guardian. Too bad that his associates called him a leftist before he grew so unbalanced that it was hard to tell. Quoth Wikipedia:
"Records show that Loughner was registered as an Independent and voted in 2006 and 2008, but not in 2010.[39][40]
Loughner's high-school friend Zach Osler said, "He did not watch TV; he disliked the news; he didn't listen to political radio; he didn't take sides; he wasn't on the Left; he wasn't on the Right."[18] A former classmate, Caitie Parker, who attended high school and college with Loughner, described his political views prior to 2007, prior to his personality transformation, as "left wing, quite liberal,"[41] "radical."[42] The tone of Loughner's online writings and videos from immediately before the attack were described by The Guardian as "almost exclusively conservative and anti-government, with echoes of the populist campaigning of the Tea Party movement".[43]
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Loughner's political positions were a "hallmark of the far right and the militia movement."[44] Jesse Walker of Reason expressed deep scepticism at the connections drawn by Potok.[45] In the aftermath of the shooting, the Anti-Defamation League reviewed messages by Loughner, and concluded that there was a "disjointed theme that runs through Loughner's writings", which was a "distrust for and dislike of the government." It "manifested itself in various ways" – for instance, in the belief that the government used the control of language and grammar to brainwash people, the notion that the government was creating "infinite currency" without the backing of gold and silver, or the assertion that NASA was faking spaceflights."
You can read it yourself, with links at Wikipedia.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
What's the relevance of your comment
You used the plural so you don't get to move the goalposts to the single nation with "11 supercarriers with accompanying battlegroups"
If you meant becoming the world's leading economy you should have written so instead of attempting to "correct" my opinion that China and India are now among the leading economies of the world.
I recall reading analysis of curriculum which concluded India definition of engineer includes those running Cable, etc.
I have met so many Indians full of diplomas and certifications that have the IT skills of a high-school student from Europe that we no longer give any credibility to Indian papers. I think it became a state organized scam to make their workforce look more competent to the foreign companies. Stay away from Indian diplomas.
Come to think of it, this is just an instance of Herbert Stein's Law, though not an obvious one. "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
There are groups of people and institutions which suffer bad consequences due to this failure of vastly inferior engineering colleges to meet minimum expectations. These people and institutions have an incentive to figure out what to do about it, and do it. And have incentives to quit doing things that don't work or work so well they are no longer necessary.
Whoever would be in charge of mandating internships -- especially if it's a government or quasi-government agency -- would operate under a different set of incentives.
Being successful may not be at the top of its list of things to consider. (Or even on the list.)
Abolishing itself after unremitting failure (or spectacular success) definitely isn't.
I wonder why the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) didn't simply publish statistics showing unemployment rates for graduates of engineering colleges? (Or just the ones that don't suck?) That seems an obvious approach.
But I don't wonder much.
Seems like a great opportunity for a company like Yelp.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
You want to ensure that interns aren't paid? This is how you ensure that interns aren't paid.