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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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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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.
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
Well, its a general failing of most democratic countries that the less educated and lower earning groups reproduce more, get a larger voting share and then end up using a lot of social benefits. No politicians are going to discuss such issues and risk upsetting their vote banks, unless somehow they're lucky enough to have highly qualified demographics in their constituency.
Female infanticide is illegal in India btw, though it seems to go on in remote villages etc. Every now & then there are stories about gender based abortions in some village. Its not as common in metros, but I guess there should still be incidents but rarely reported - maybe city people are more circumspect about flouting laws and hence its harder for media to find out.
Having worked with their employable software engineers I shudder to think what their unemployable engineers are like.
It doesn't matter what kind of government they live under, the less educated reproduce more all over the world.
False. In non-democratic countries the rich have more children than the poor. Part of this is because of polygamy, which is much more common in non-democracies, "serial polygamy" where rich men divorce and have a second family, and the inability of the poor masses to vote themselves benefits.