India's college problem

Today's New York Times discusses the poor quality of much of India's higher education system: A College Education Without Job Prospects

The job market for Indian college graduates is split sharply in two. With a robust handshake, a placeless accent and a confident walk, you can get a $300-a-month job with Citibank or Microsoft. With a limp handshake and a thick accent, you might peddle credit cards door to door for $2 a day.

India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudgelike jobs.

Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability to communicate crisply in clear English, to work with teams and deliver presentations, to use search engines like Google, to tear apart theories rather than memorize them.

But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India’s upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.

In the shadow of those marquee institutions, most of the 11 million students in India’s 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on obedience and light on useful job skills.

Comments

[Alex M Thomas]

True.

Dichotomised opportunities lead to a stark inequality.

[Jose Costa]

That's also true in most countries of the world

[Arthur Eckart]

I agree, the market pays a premium for required and needed skills. I also agree people from upper income families have better opportunities to acquire those skills, since they attend better schools (private or public) or their families place greater value on education. Studies have shown a school voucher system can increase the quantity and quality of education (i.e. quantity of high quality schools and quality of low quality schools). The U.S. education system is basically a two-tier system of a large proportion of high quality schools and a large proportion of low quality schools.

[G.Visakh Varma]

The last sentence,that is, "....students in India's 18000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training...." is totally misleading and incorrect.There are many good and well functioning colleges even in remote villages of India which give top class training and knowledge to students than some of the IIMs and IITs where many of the faculty members are maximisers-maximising their opportunities for fellowships,foreign travel grants,awards,seminars(both within the country and abroad),top places in advisory agencies) etc.Please don't blame a college teacher working in a remote place without adequate facilities and struggling hard to gather latest information.

[Alex M Thomas]

Well Mr.Varma,

I dont think it is an issue of blame. You talk about IIM's and IIT's, but very few people pass out from sych good institutes. Lot many improvements have to come about.

Most of the colleges do devliver a degree, but essential skills are mostly left untouched.

And rural areas find it difficult to develop owing to lack or opportunities in the form of less supply of education, scanty funds, non willingness of teachers to teach etc.

[G.Visakh Varma]

Mr.Alex M.Thomas,

Some colleges do impart essential skills;some departments work in an excellent manner and some teachers are dedicated.In rural areas,some colleges within their constraints do a lot of good academic work and practical training to their students.

[Alex M Thomas]

Mr Varma,

I do agree to that.

[OP Rawat]

Based on my experience, I can vouch for this. The course and teaching may be excused as being faulty due to lack of investment but the worst part is the evaluation system -- one that emphasizes examination performance and that too in a criminally redundant test of memorisation skills.

[OP Rawat]

Based on my experience, I can vouch for this. The course and teaching may be excused as being faulty due to lack of investment but the worst part is the evaluation system -- one that emphasizes examination performance and that too in a criminally redundant test of memorisation skills.

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