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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.
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.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.