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

[Moof123]

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.

Re:Great Idea

[MangoCats]

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.

Re:Great Idea

[ShanghaiBill]

Many schools apparently are known to be glorified degree mills ...

One reason for these degree mills is the Indian marriage market. Dowries are common, where the bride's family will give money and assets to the groom's family. A son can bring in a bigger dowry if he has a degree, but it is less important that he actually learn anything useful. Degree mills provide credentials that cost less than the expected bump in the dowry value.

Another problem is gender imbalance. China's shortage of females is well known, but the problem in India is almost as severe, especially in more prosperous provinces such as Gujarat and Maharashtra where many families can afford ultrasounds and abortions. So if your son doesn't have a degree, he might end up unmarried for life.

Re:Great Idea

[Alok]

> 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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to doubt the value of IQ tests. Then, I took one (a legit IQ test administered by a practicing psychologist). It rated me very high. That's when I decided that they are, in fact, a good indicator of one's worth as a human being.

Remember the cheating scandal?

[Oligonicella]

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

Same thing's going to happen with internships.

Incompetent? Or 800,000/yr oversupply?

[DutchUncle]

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.

Re:Incompetent? Or 800,000/yr oversupply?

[king neckbeard]

We've got no shortage of engineers and other STEM workers. What we've got a shortage of is workers with mathematically impossible levels of experience who will work for a fraction of an appropriate wage.

This is Genius

[rsilvergun]

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.

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?

Only place to intern them is ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

... in some penitentiary. Not the students, but the owners of these engineering colleges.

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.

Re:Only place to intern them is ...

[Areyoukiddingme]

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.

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.

Their "employable engineers"

[tylersoze]

Having worked with their employable software engineers I shudder to think what their unemployable engineers are like.