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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.
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.
Next great idea would be to improve the original education, as it is woefully lacking. At least in Electrical Engineering we see quite a number of awful candidates from Indian schools. Fundamentals of how to make basic transistor level circuits easily stump most.Hands on skills are rarer than even the lousy Berkeley graduates I've had to interview.
A couple years back we had the benefit of having a really good Indian engineer who could decypher the school names on a resume. Many schools apparently are known to be glorified degree mills that he quickly would warn us to avoid.
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.
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Here's a better thought: find non-engineering work for these engineers.
Training 800,000 engineers annually is over-saturating the market, at least for design type engineering work.
If these graduates can work in sales (tech marketing), support, maintenance, hands-on roles with technology in the field, then, sure, they might need more than 800,000 per year. If these 800,000 kids all think that they're going to be working to design skyscrapers, bridges, next generation digital hardware, etc. then they've missed the essence of design work: one good engineer works to design things that are made, sold, maintained and recycled many many times, by _other_ job descriptions.
> You can't train intelligence though. I'm sure India has an equivalent IQ to European populations but they have many "engineers" that really aren't suited to that field as well.
I'll disagree here to some extent. If someone grows up studying in an education system that encourages memorization and rote learning over critical thinking (a major failing imho in Indian education syllabus) then it will certainly have a stunting effect on his intelligence and reasoning capacity. A majority of those 'engineers' are basically human machines that would be good for repetitive tasks, but not as useful for comprehending complex systems and enhancing them.
There are of course many Indian engineers who are actually good, but most of them end up outside of the country to find better work. And then they get drowned out statistically by the hordes who don't really care or take initiatives to develop their skills, but are in it for the money and have suffered thru rote learning way too much as said above.
Indian engineers suck for the same reason that no one will hire them: Because Indians cheat and lie. They cheat and lie when they wake up in the morning. They cheat and lie all day. They cheat and lie at night. They probably cheat and lie in their dreams too.
And they'll no doubt find a way to cheat and lie their way either out of or through their internships too. And no one wants to hire and engineer who cheated and lied his way through school (unless it's a female of course, then they can at least check off a box for their diversity quota and give her a fake job to pretend to do).
You can't fix a corrupt society without addressing the corruption itself.
Corruption in management, recruiting faculty, running the college, collecting the fees, in admission procedure, everywhere is rampant.
China and India both would have world power economies if not for this factor. The cognitive load required to function in a society where you're permanently on guard against being ripped off at every turn is truly enormous. It's downright debilitating, and made all the worse by being so pervasive it becomes unavoidable in certain sectors. The Western world seems weirdly unusual in history for its sheer honesty. Those days are fading as the kleptarchs return to power. It was good while it lasted.