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.

Comments

Great Idea

[brian.stinar]

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.

Re:Great Idea

[lgw]

Wrong on both counts.

IQ tests results, as a statistical measure, predict success in high school, in college, and job success with a high correlation - the highest of any psychological test. Within a given country, IQ is a better prediction of economic success in life than how wealthy your parents are.

Early IQ test were very culture-specific, but that was a long time ago. Better modern tests are entirely symbolic, and language-free (beyond the instructions). IQ tests are very repeatable - they are a scientific measure.

The Conscientiousness personality trait is also a decent predictor of college and life success, but it's much harder to measure reliably.

Re:Great Idea

[jeff4747]

If IQ can't predict whether or not people drink from the same river they shit in, what is it good for?

The same thing it's always been good for. Attempting to put a scientific veneer over racial bias.

Remember the cheating scandal?

[Oligonicella]

Here: http://magazines.scholastic.co...

Same thing's going to happen with internships.

Why not Germans?

[pablo_max]

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?

Could be a good thing

[LeftCoastThinker]

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.