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.'"
Use college funds for I'net for ideas, skills (Score:4, Interesting)
- Gather into small Learning Cells (about 5 students / cell)
- Setup Internet-based home study centers (eg, share houses
with FAST Internet on each of their computers)
- discuss ideas, develop skills (technical, entrepreneurial) & knowledge
from Internet sources, courses & talks
- publish & exchange ideas with similar groups
- start on-line businesses
:
- profit & live well...
Re:So... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
I had friends in Georgia Tech who were decent Java programmers who did miserable in their introductory programming classes because the professor chose an extremely obscure language that no one knew beforehand. This way, he knew that no one came in who knew programming, but didn't know the concepts. By choosing a weird language, he could force concepts first, specific languages later. They hated it, got a poor grade, but came out better programmers.
On the same note, a mathematician does not differentiate between solutions of ax^2 + bx + c = 0 and x^2 + 5x + 1 = 0; knowing how to solve the quadratic equation is the important part, the second is just an example to make the theory easier.
Prospects (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as a college CS/Network graduate whom, 2 years after graduating, is still working as a janitor, allow me to welcome you to this planet.
In my case, it's not because I have inferior skills or training. It's because most employers I've had contact with see a diploma/degree as "quaint" and "irrelevant". Since I don't have 5+ years of experience, excellent "soft skills" (PHB corporate-speak if I've ever heard it), and I don't want to sell anything, I'm apparently unemployable, no matter what school I went to or how well I did.
Here's a brief story that gives contrast to the wonderfully frustrating experience I've been putting up with for over 2 years: I have a friend (who dropped out of highschool no less) who works in IT. One of his co-workers, a supposed IT expert who makes ~$100k a year, recently said to him "I assume we'll be using FAT32 for our 1TB backup drive's filesystem?". It seems to me, someone making $100k/year in IT should be aware of things like the limitations of FAT32 and Windows' implementation thereof. My friend tells me this sort of ineptitude is common among the IT "experts" he works with, and he spends more time correcting their mistakes than doing his own work. Meanwhile, I can't even get an *interview* for entry level jobs that a highschool student could perform.
Not that I'm bitter or anything. Anyways, back to washing floors so I can make my student loan payments. Thanks for listening
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:3, Interesting)
My peers (I'm a sysadmin by trade) often discuss the quality of what they've had to deal with when it comes to products developed this way. I read a report recently from one that noted data from the past 4 years showing that while the per-hour cost was low, the products typically took longer to develop, were of much poorer quality (crimes against database normalization, etc), and often had issues following the specs, or followed them in odd ways. These things tend to lead to massive headaches for your average sysadmin
While it's not completely possible to say that some of these issues might not have happened locally too, it's pretty clear there isn't much value to be gained from outsourcing.
ash
an inside story (Score:1, Interesting)
Before all of you who are still students gasp in horror, remember the long-term advantages this would provide: first, you know in detail exactly what you need to know as a senior to leave when you come in as a freshman. You can use that knowledge to study more efficiently during your four precious years. (Indeed, some bright student entrepreneur would no doubt think to correlate student exam performance with whether the student had professor X or Y, so you could surely use it to select your classes and teachers, too.) Second, your degree is far more valuable because it's backed up with specific, verifiable warranty in these grade-inflated days. Since every graduate has passed the exam, a firm or graduate school knows for sure and in detail what graduates of this particular program know. That's the kind of gold-plated guarantee of competence that makes employers feel all warm and fuzzy about you when you turn up for your job interview looking appallingly young, like you started shaving yesterday.
Third, and most importantly, it would give a way for employers to feed back to we faculty what they did and did not want their employees to know. We'd invite them to help design the exam, and they'd give us feedback from when they hired one of our graduates. In this way we'd learn exactly what skills were wanted out there in the Real World(TM), and we'd learn rapidly whether we were successfully teaching those skills.
What do you suppose happened? Do you think this proposal went anywhere? If you shook your head cynically, you are right. In fact, folks were a bit horrified by my suggestion that employers have some influence in the curriculum. Good grief, didn't I realize that knowledge flowed from us (the university) to them (mere tradesmen), not vice versa? Next I'd be saying the purpose of education was merely to make a man a more skilled worker deserving of a higher wage, and not to open his mind to the wonders of the Cosmos, enrich his soul, bring him closer to God, whatever...
I couldn't even find out what happened to our graduates -- who had hired them, what fields and types of positions they'd gone into. The data had never been collected, and no one was interested in doing so. Amazing. Blew my mind, I tell you. Any other business that spent so little effort finding out whether its "product" was meeting the needs of the market would tank. But luckily in modern America "education" is the new "good breeding" -- it can mean nothing at all in a practical, tangible sense, so long as it sets you apart in some ineffable way as a "quality" person.
Re:Absolutely. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why thinking outside the box is a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I will say about Indian college graduates is that they *tend* not to think outside the box. If the solution wasn't painfully obvious or spelled out in the textbook or lecture notes, then some of the Indian students would run into serious problems. Also some Indian students would ace courses which required large amounts of memorization but would fail practical courses.
More factors (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are not an engineer or a doctor, then you are nobody. This is an outlook that is very prevalent among Indian parents - there are only two professional areas worth studying (although MBA has recently joined the two) for any indian student. All other fields (pure sciences, arts, humanities, commerce etc) are considered last resorts and muster very little respect. Graduates in such areas are not as esteemed or valued as their engineer friends, thus they receive less exposure and lesser opportunities.
Which college do you go to? the one on this end of the street or the one on the other end? as a result of this idolatry of disciplines, engineering colleges and medical schools are cropping up like mushrooms everywhere. starting an engineering college is a very easy and profitable business venture in India. This proliferation of institutions (with the wrong motives) thus leads to subpar standards of education - so even the engineers/doctors now are not trained properly in basic skills.
Universities are not for teaching communication skills. That's what society is for. if you cannot converse well with others, if you cannot carry yourself with confidence and in general cannot interact socially, then it's probably not the college's fault. it is up to the students to read non-curricular english books (which a college cannot, and shouldn't force), to form groups, try out new ideas and socialise more. Being anglicised, active and outgoing should not be considered a stigma anymore, and certainly should not be considered unpatriotic. The mindsets of students (and more importantly, of overbearing parents) should adapt to these new circumstances.
There are more things than thick-accented teachers and archaic teaching methods at fault here. In a developing country like India where opportunities and population continue to explode at a devilish pace, the competition will only grow fiercer and it takes more than passive complaining about teachers to succeed.
Re:Prospects (Score:5, Interesting)
As an employer, I can tell you that we're well aware of the deficiencies of education, especially in technical fields. We know it emphasizes ivory-tower theory, not practical solutions, and good listening to authority, not the cut-and-thrust compromise and jury-rig of the rambunctious real-world contest between those bastards in Marketing and us bastards in Development. We are also sadly aware of the grade and "AP class" inflation going on, we know very well an A doesn't mean stellar work anymore, and a B a significant cut above average. We know grades and taking "Honors" classes hardly mean a damn thing anymore.
So, yes, we do look for more concrete measures of competence. Something like experience and success in a similar job, a certain amount of dedication and willingness to learn, a lack of rigidity about what you will and won't dirty your hands doing (e.g. God help you if you routinely volunteer the fact during interviews that you refuse to do any selling).
If you didn't know this before, and so didn't spend your summers and after-school and between-school time enhancing your competitiveness, or, worse, didn't even realize you were in a competition with a million other hungry souls -- if you vaguely thought you were living in a socialist paradise where purity of soul guaranteed you your daily bread -- then I'm real sorry for the Big Lie your teachers amused themselves telling you, but there it is. The real world doesn't, in fact, give a damn about you, and will cheerfully let you starve to death unless in its eyes you have something quite valuable to offer. Fortunately, being young, if you were operating under any illusions you have time to make corrections.
Also...don't forget to give it some time. Very few people get a great job right out of school. Usually it takes a few years to find something nice, and many people have to work for a decade or more to find a position that really suits them. Don't give up, keep trying, it will come if you persist. (And don't forget to feed back your experience to those younger than yourself every chance you get, so the dippy delusions rampant in our Sesame Street educational system are somewhat less effective.)
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, and I will let you explain why:
They spent all their time learning about useless crap like advanced multivariable calculus, matrix theory...
That "useless crap" is why American students are considerably more well rounded than our foreign counterparts (who are usually fed a steady diet of vanilla teachings for their future as cheap labor). I can understand their anger, since they are given no options to ever succeed in life.
Re:Welcome to America! (Score:3, Interesting)
You have a strange definition of "smart". Smart students don't expect to get job training at university, they expect to get a university education - something essentially unrelated to job training.
Smart people who want training to get a job don't go to university they go and get that training and start working a year, maybe two or three earlier than those who go to university. The university students never catch up with that head start on the pay scale.
Of course the occasional university student makes it big in the "real world" via a university spun off startup or whatever.
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
The truth is most students who go to college do so because they want to be employable with decent salaries after they get their deploma.
Assuming that's the case, then we should be investing in trade schools for these students, because that's what they're looking for. Many American universities do seem to be heading in the direction of becoming huge, vaguely connected trade schools with semi-professional sport leagues attached, and I guess that's fine, but let's call a spade a spade. Job training is not the same as higher education.
The real problem, in my mind, is not with the system itself, but with the disconnect between expectations and reality. If we want vocational schools, then we should focus on building vocational schools and calling them vocational schools, but making them high-quality vocational schools. If we're going to make claims about a higher liberal education, then a vocational school doesn't really fit the bill. Sometimes when you're presented with two targets, aiming at both means you don't hit either.
India ailing! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Reminds me of Richard P. Feynman's... (Score:3, Interesting)
-Loyal
Re:Let me just be the first to ask: (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, you can always tell when the American on the other end of the phone doesn't have a clue. Long silences, lots of "ummmm", etc etc. Or they put you on hold after every question you ask because they have to ask someone else for the answer.
Re:Prospects (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that you refer to soft skills as "PHB corporate-speak" speaks volumes about your current predicament. These soft skills - like the ability to gauge personalities, reactions, and simply get along with others - are perhaps more important than any technical skill that you possess.
Did you participate in internships during your time at college? If you didn't, smack yourself upside the head. For those reading that are entering or in college right now in a tech-related field, realize this: internships and other forms of "real" experience are a heck of a lot more important than that shiny diploma you get at the end. I picked my school because of its well-organized and well-respected co-op/internship placement program. There were many other schools that were, in manners of quality of education, comparable (if not superior) to my college, but none of them had an internship program worth a damn, and that's worth a lot nowadays.
Mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well then, outsource! (Score:3, Interesting)
That is why there have been further pursuits of outsourcing opportunities in China and Russia, and even places a bit further "off the already beaten path," essentially because once the "beaten path" has gotten "beaten," you're left with either bidding prices up, or fighting over those that didn't get reasonably decent educations.
The third possibility, of course, is to spend on infrastructure, but that's an activity with a pretty huge latency time, high risk, and no short term payoff. Indeed, in order to get real benefits, it may be necessary to invest, on the educational side of things, in institutions going all the way down to the elementary level, which means a latency of ~15 years before there are commercially meaningful results.
In order to change the schools, you might have to pay good people to teach, rather than getting other immediately-valuable results, thereby eating into your potential benefits.
I don't think there's any easy way out of the relevant quagmires...
Re:Reminds me of Richard P. Feynman's... (Score:2, Interesting)
An American in India (Score:5, Interesting)
I had the unique opportunity to work at an Indian web design firm as a project manager and technology coach. I was directly involved in screening and interviewing job applicants, and I agree many of the observations noted in the article. As nearly 100% of our clients are western companies, solid English skills are a must. We cannot compromise on this requirement, and even the office runner is required to take English classes.
To give an example of the problems with the Indian education system. One applicant brought in her senior design project, a full website, to impress us at an interview. Problem #1, every file she brought was infected with a virus. Problem #2, it was a complete patchwork job from a free scripts site (copyrights intact) pieced together with about 5% her code. Problem #3, she didn't understand the code she ripped off well enough to change a simple menu item. Problem #4, this had received a 100% grade towards her graduation. She was rewarded for searching the internet and creating a website via copy/paste. She was not taught how to create, only how to duplicate.
Any Indian with money can get a masters degree. If you pay your bill at exam time, they will pass you onto the next level. During the time I was in India, a major university was forced to shut down because of student protesting. They were protesting exam fraud investigations of the graders the university employed. Master's level exams were being graded by 10 year-olds based on: length, neatness of writing, number of paragraphs, and the 'prettiness' of the graphs. I think this is where the University of Phoenix got its model for taking people's money.
I absolutely loved my time in India, and I am not trying to bash the country. I just want to share my limited exposure to the reported problem.
Re:PragDave has a great blog entry on this... (Score:4, Interesting)
I saw the presentation he mentioned and there's no clear answer at the end of it
to the question "where to tomorrow's novices opportunities come from?".
Outsourcing today takes the opportunity to gain footing on the
bottom 2-3 rungs off the 5 step skills ladder. We can't all be advanced
and experts without having spent the time to get there.
Where indeed. But it's really worse than he lets on because being an expert doesn't mean you'll never have to climb that ladder again. You will if you wish to continue doing technical work. I've already had to because the vast majority of jobs in the electronics industry were outsourced. The second climb has felt quite a bit steeper than the first.
Most people who become an expert in a technical field only climb this skills ladder once. I've met several dozen who have done it twice and in some cases, it's really stretching a point to include some of them in that number. Such people are unusual. I've met 2 individuals who successfully made drastic career changes into 3 technical fields.
I don't know whether I can do it again. Nor do I have any idea what change to make. At least when electronics was on the decline, software loomed. There ain't much light ahead.
The implications are grim.
Re:This is where college went wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact, you are very badly prepared for much graduate work in computer science if you have it as your undergraduate major. For some things, like research in complexity theory, you really need a math degree. For research in, say, machine learning, a physics degree is probably preferable.
I'd have to disagree almost completely, at least based on my experience. Sure, some universities offer java certificates disguised as degrees, but any decent university computer science curriculum should understand that computer science IS A BRANCH OF MATHEMATICS and should treat it as such. I'm an undergraduate senior at Georgia Tech, and here they require Calc I, II, III (w/ Linear Alg), Combo, and Prob Stat, as well as Design and Analysis of Algorithms (which is, as you said, very mathy). Furthermore, there are plenty of offered classes that are cross-listed at the undergrad and graduate levels, which I have taken advantage of (natural language processing, machine learning, hci, ui software, among others). After I entered they started a new curriculum called the Threads program that, from the looks of it, requires even more high level mathematics courses based on the specialization chosen.
All and all, I personally agree with Georgia Tech's curriculum (although I can't say I'm doing spectacularly well). It provides the student a choice of specializations (graphics, software engineering, intelligent systems, etc) and appropriately mixes academia and practicality (that is, theory and real-world programming). It is difficult to graduate GT's CS program without the ability to both develop -- understand the most important factors of the theory behind programming -- AND to design -- understand the important theoretical factors behind design. There is NO reason why a CS undergrad from a good university should not do well in a graduate program (based solely on educational underpinnings, not will/effort).
Just as universities shouldn't output mere "construction workers", they shouldn't output architects that don't know the basics of putting two pieces of wood or brick or stone or whatever together (I mean this both metaphorically for the CS profession and literally - GT also has a great arch program!).
But then, again, everything I've said refers to a good university. Which is the entire point of this entire /. forum topic: unfortunately there is no consistency in quality within the american (and apparently indian) educational systems.