Indian College Students Face Bleak Prospects 483
The New York Times has a piece on the lackluster prospects facing the great majority of Indian college graduates. Most of the 11 million students in India's 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, according to the article, heavy on obedience and rote memorization and light on useful job skills. From the article: "In the 2001 census, [Indian] college graduates had higher unemployment — 17 percent — than middle or high school graduates... [At a middle-tier college] dozens of students swarmed around a reporter to complain about their education. 'What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different,' a commerce student said.... [A] final-year student who expects next year to make $2 to $4 a day hawking credit cards, was dejected. 'The opportunities we get at this stage are sad,' she said. 'We might as well not have studied.'"
This is where college went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh maybe thats why.....
Welcome to America! (Score:4, Insightful)
"What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different," a commerce student, Sohail Kutchi, said.
Ironically, American businesses, i.e., tech companies, complain about the samething with U.S. Universities.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
college? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to America! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:1, Insightful)
Mod points here for insightful.
I'll never understand why Americans are so bitter about this. I don't have a single colleague who can say they lost their job to offshore outsourcing, or even has any trouble getting a new job for great pay.
If anything, I have only positive things to say about offshore-outsourcing. Farming out the easy stuff frees me up to pursue the more lucrative stuff, like working more with customers or developing partnerships.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Spoken plainly as one who doesn't use any advanced algorithms in their coding. Lemme guess, you paint forms and play with DB rows?
Let me enlighten you: The heart of Computer Science is ALL "math crap".
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
My complaint is that most schools don't teach good large project management skills. Everybody works on toy programs by themselves or in small groups and on short deadlines. That is highly unrealistic in the real world and teaches the kids a lot of bad habits IMHO. I think it would be better if the schools put more emphasis on project management (both from a manager and coder perspective), including version control, planning, testing, debugging, and so forth. Grading would be a bit more difficult, but the ability to compare students based on their amount and general quality (how many fixes did it require afterward?) of checkins would be a good place to start.
The class could even mix it up a bit between writing their own project and maintain last year's project, especially if they build stuff that is actually useful and post it online. Granted, this is an ambitious project for a classroom, but I think it's the only way to properly prepare students for the real world.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
The heart of most Computer Science *jobs* is in "painting forms" and "playing with DB rows".
I see this EVERYDAY!!! (during an outsourcing) (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't for the life of me remember my
IT people that can't fix their own MS word problems...
give them instructions on step by step how to do something, no problem. Give them an exe and tell them to install a program, it'll never happen.
Everyone I've talked to says the same thing. give them a structured problem and they knock it outa the park. give them an open ended real world problem without structure given to them, and they are lost.
It makes me feel good about myself and the ability to think, and figure out what concept to apply and how to apply it...
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
That wasn't what he was complaining about. He was complaining that companies started demanding degrees as proof of "training" (as opposed to proof of the ability to learn skills) and many colleges obliged by providing the training that the companies wanted.
Also, if you think that's not what companies want when they ask for a BS or a MS in Computer Science, how many of those job postings did not tack "and years of experience in
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, duh. They should have taken a programming course. Studying CS to learn programming is like studying Economics when you want to go into business - economics and business are both about money, after all.
The problem is that stupid companies think programmers with a degree are better, even though there are no university level programming degrees.
(spoken as a programmer with a CS degree, but I got it because I love math and theory)
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Universities aren't a place to learn vocational skills.
This is especially true for CS. If you just want a decent paying job, you can get the needed skills at lots of places like ITT-Tech. You don't need a CS degree to write web front-ends and PHP/SQL scripts, or to be a sysadmin.
If you don't want to learn the theoretical foundations, why get a CS degree? You don't get a physics degree if you want a job fixing cars.
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's way too much emphasis on starting your own projects from a clean slate, which is very rare in the 'real world.' More often you get handed the spaghetti-code mess of the "last guy," to puzzle over and figure out how to document and maintain.
Too much CS education is focused on the very beginning of the software lifecycle. That's like churning out doctors that can only deliver babies, when what the market needs are GPs and geriatric specialists. Grads need to know not only how to start a new project themselves, but how to pick up one that's in the middle of development, or that's well into its maintenance phase.
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:5, Insightful)
What's annoying about the Indians taking the calls is that they pretend to understand when you use words or phrases they don't get, and it quickly becomes apparent as they struggle to troubleshoot a problem they never comprehended in the first place. But they're taught to do this, just like they're taught to tell me their name is Steve or John or Bob. Again, it's really the fault of the company putting the almighty dollar ahead of customer satisfaction.
Re:Welcome to America! (Score:3, Insightful)
Businesses want to hire college graduates because they assume they will be better trained to do jobs.
Smart students go to college expecting to get trained to do jobs.
Colleges try to teach students to think, and don't give them any job skills training.
Trade schools get the students who (mostly) can't get in to a college, and try to train them to do jobs.
What businesses really ought to be doing is refusing to hire college grads and sinking their employment dollars into trade school grads, if that's really what they want. Pay good trade school grads more than you pay good college grads, and the smart students will start going to trade schools so they can earn more money in the job market.
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no comparison between US college education and the middle-tier Indian colleges being discussed. From TFA:
The problem isn't one of teaching intellectual disciplines versus practical skills. The problem is that Indian colleges are teaching neither.
Wrong for a college, but right for a trade school. (Score:5, Insightful)
What most students want is job skills. Few students have the inclination (or spare funds) to learn for the sake of learning for four years, and then spend another two or three at a trade/professional school, before they can get a real position.
Students go to various schools in great part because of the job prospects they think they'll have on completion. Only the rich can afford to simply go because it will be intellectually stimulating. Plus, mixing together people who just want job training with people who are fundamentally interested in learning is a mistake; neither are going to be satisfied with the results.
To be honest, I think we need to remove some of the social stigma surrounding trade schools in the U.S., and we should have a clear path for students that just want to get job skills. Maybe the companies themselves could even help fund them, and in return get to dictate parts of the curriculum (via directed tax contributions, if not voluntarily). That would remove the education/industry disconnect. Students who wanted an 'education' would be able to go to college, and students who want 'job training' and a near-guaranteed job in a relatively short amount of time could go to the trade schools.
I think in the U.S. we have dragged 'childhood' further and further out; there is no reason why a person should have to go through nineteen or twenty years of schooling before they can survive on their own in the economy. Education needs to be made more relevant to what students want to learn, and more rigorous earlier in the curriculum. Huge swaths of my own education were nothing but wasted time because of the way the system is currently set up; there is no reason why a motivated 15 or 16-year-old shouldn't be able to be out learning a skill, if that's what they want to do. Making them acquire thousands of dollars in debt and years of wasted 'education' that they won't use first, helps no one.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been said before in the perspective of not knowing how things work on the inside (especially in language wars) but I've run into more junior programmers that don't understand how to analyze and debug systems because of a simple ignorance of the "magic" of , be it networking, compilers, operating systems, sparse and/or associative arrays, code optimization in large scalable systems, the network stack, internal type representation, threading, memory usage, security...
In each of these topics, I've been on a team of programmers that simply wrote VB-style windows apps for so long they couldn't tackle a bug in one of these more difficult issues. I don't advocate that every programmer needs to learn all these topics before starting, but they have to know that there are layers beneath the tool, and that such layers are subject to examination.
Even now, I'm reengineering a large-scale system that made some horrible scalability decisions. They had a simple point-click, drag-drop style of application construction, and couldn't understand how to optimize for the real-world data throughput the end product needed to satisfy. So here I am, the "math guy", ripping out chunks of tool-generated sequential searches, file caches, and other endless layers, to streamline.
SO I argue that the *jobs* will always have a mix of programmer types, but if you hire only mousemonkeys, you're risk not having a skillset ready to tackle the "difficult" things.
Re:So... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll just put it this way: I've never had to explain the same situation three times to the same person or had a tech doggedly stick to the script regardless of what I told them when talking to an American. I've worked in tech support before and have *seen* some American script monkeys at work, but it's almost a policy for the Indian (and other) call centers to rely entirely on scripts.
Example: if I tell "Joe" that I've got a problem with my new wireless NIC and I need to know where I can enter the SSID in the software, it should be clear to him that I know what the problem is and what I need to do to fix it. What does he do? Force me to go through twenty minutes of uninstalling, reinstalling, PULLING THE CARD TO GET THE MODEL NUMBER, before finally putting me on hold for ten minutes to get someone else on the phone who knows the answer to my question.
Maybe the problem is what is talked about in the article: they're trained on rote memorization, not troubleshooting. They don't know how to deviate from the norm and jump straight to a solution.
Re:Prospects (Score:5, Insightful)
Most employers do not see degrees as quaint. Experience rules for senior positions, but entry level positions are made for recent grads. A problem you are going to face is that you're graduation is becoming less recent all the time. I hope you are keeping up on your skills and continuing your education. Do some volunteer IT or try to make yourself visible on some open source projects.
Where I work, we turn away people with very good resumes all the time if we don't think the person would fit in. I'm not going to hire somebody unless I think I'm going to enjoy working with them. Think about it- you probably spend more time with people in your office than with your significant other.
We've also hired some people with unrelated degrees to do some of the most demanding work here (our network admin has a degree in german language).
Lastly, what are you doing to expand your people network? Often who you know is more important that what you know. I used to think this was awful, but now I think it's because people are very afraid of risk and the unknown. Find other nerds and find out what they are doing. Interview at their company after you have thoroughly researched whatever it is they do.
-ec
Seen it before (Score:1, Insightful)
I doubted this until we had a visiting professor from India for one Semester. He spent more time yelling at students for bringing coffee into the class room and for asking/commenting on his lecture than teaching anything useful. A fellow student who had a 4.0 throughout his degree failed 3 tests from him due to inability to complete the laborous but simple mathematical questions within time. The few of us that passed the class were only able to do so by pre-program his busy work into our calculators. The department dropped all grades below a B in this course after student outrage.
So needless to say, I am highly suspect of the actual education in India's Universities/Colleges.
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you serious? I highly recommend college just for the enjoyment part of it. I had more fun in college than at any other time in my life. Plus, the connections and friendships that I made there are extremely valuable.
Go there to learn, to learn how to learn, to learn skills (the easy part), and to socialize (the important part). -ec
Why not... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with farming out the "easy stuff" is that is what most entry level people cut their teeth on out in the business world. If you take away the things that the entry level people are qualified to do, they never get the chance to become senior level.
With that simple move, you've cut the legs out from under your technical competence as a society and are now at the mercy of others. This, by the way, is a great way to cause an economic collapse and possibly another depression.
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
I do know why. It's because you (and presumably your friend) majored in Computer Science, not software engineering.
What I don't understand is why you sought a degree in Computer Science if you just wanted the skills to write corporate database applications. That's not what Computer Science is.
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:1, Insightful)
That is wishful thinking. I'd venture that most students would drop out of college this instance if it were not a means to getting a better job. There are very few people in college who are there for the sole purpose of learning.
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:4, Insightful)
It's nit picking, but to throw about the term so lightly is to dishonor people who actually had to endure true slavery.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
You're assuming that software development IS Computer Science. Just because the job requires someone to sit at a keyboard and produce code of some sort doesn't make it a "Computer Science" job.
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
Relational databases are sneaking into all areas ever since.
In most cases this is just a matter of available speed.
As rule of thumb: If your application can deliver sufficient performance written in Java or
Not knowing about relational databases is like not knowing object oriented programming.
Some programmers don't need it.
But graduates of Computer Science absolutely have to.
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This isn't the fault of the Indian system per s (Score:2, Insightful)
The "vocational" or "trade school" remark has been around since early in the 1900s when the tool & dye market was booming. People that wanted to go off and just be "thinkers" went to college, and people that wanted specific applicable skills went to trade school.
Nowadays it's really an empty offering, because a trade school education won't get you the technical skills you need either, and employers don't respect a trade school certification anyways, they want to see a degree.
So we all line up, pay our tuition and they spoon feed us the BS that you're getting a REAL education, even though many of the required topics and classes have been outdated since the 80s.
I don't believe that universities should just mass produce employees for the business sector, but they need to be more dynamic and quicker to adopt relevant new technologies.
Wouldn't it be nice if a university algorithms class was advanced enough that they would show you something like PageRank as a real world example?
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:4, Insightful)
I was a support monkey myself at one time in the past. I memorized a lot of the most common problems but I still got in trouble a lot for making sure the customer's system was working before hanging up with them. I had a low reopen rate but that wasn't the stat they were looking at. They just wanted calls closed per hour.
Having been in that position myself I know what dealing an irate customer can be like, but by the same token there's no better way to make me irate than to do a half-assed job of helping me, even if that's not technically what your job description is. Thus my rule of thumb is to escallate early and escallate often for technical problems. Most of the time they're just as happy to get rid of you and move on to the next guy and you can move on to someone who actually knows what they're doing.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of profs I've talked to also agree that this seems to be the case and they're becoming increasingly annoyed.
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
The procedures for solving ax^2 + bx + c = 0 and x^2 + 5x + 1 = 0 are basically the same. Languages on the other hand can do things very differently. Stuff that's easy in a procedural language isn't easy in a functional language for example. Even where the language constructs and features are the same (and you can bet they aren't always the same) there's huge variety between standard and specialised language libraries and how they work. In my experience people learn C, C++, Java and perhaps a Pascal derivative - all very similar in terms of constructs then extrapolate this learning experience to think all languages are the same because they had less trouble with subsequent languages. Here's the list of languages I've used commercially: Java, Smalltalk, C, C++, Cobol, Powerbuilder, Visual Basic and various forms of VBA, and numerous scripting languages. In addition academically I've used Perl, Miranda, Eiffel, prolog and dabbled with a lot more. There are skills that are very transferrable but there are others that are peculiar to the way a particular language or environment does things. You can't take a Java J2EE business coder and expect them to be instantly productive writing games with C and DirectX. They won't know the libraries, correct use, the pitfalls documented and otherwise. It just doesn't work that way even with good example material. It all depends on the complexity of the libraries but I'd say it takes antyhing from 2 weeks to 2 months to grasp the basics of a new language and environment and anything from 3 months to 2 years to become proficient. Don't believe me? Try and get a short term contract job that a company is desperate to fill without some experience in the language/environment required. Not all recruiters and employers are idiots.
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:3, Insightful)
I got higher-level assistance from the engineers on Component A who finally admitted that even though this particular product has been out for over 10 years and is in its third major revision (about to be its fourth) it doesn't appear to actually work outside a sterile lab environment. They promised to put in an enhancement request to make the product work correctly.
We went with a product from a much smaller company that advertises the same functionality and costs twice as much, but has the added advantage of actually working more than 99% of the time.
HP is no better. As they have bought smaller software and hardware companies, their support and service from those companies has been ritually destroyed. The website of one small outfit bought by HP, which used to contain an excellent self-serve knowledgebase for product issues is now scrapped and replaced with their all-in-one/none-at-all website which doesn't do jack shit.
Outsourcing is of course a big favorite of huge software companies and I think it fits in their extremely fucked mentality of consuming all of the marketshare of a particular product and cutting costs (quality) in order to "unlock the profits."
The bigger these companies get, the more catastrophic their failures will be when the real market forces kick in and people get tired of trying to use absolute shit product.
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
CS is useful where ever computers and networks reside - particularly when companies are demanding the most bang for the buck. Today developers can not just be code monkeys. They also must understand architectural issues, network issues, storage issues, and how their system will integrate with hetrogenous networks. I've seen too much wasted money and time when neophytes were put in positions beyond their grasp. I hate being right all the time, and then the company eats an unnecessary $3million or so... What is the price of politics and turf wars in the IT business? I haven't stopped counting yet, and the same people keep phuking up without consequence.