> The best jobs are reserved for graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the crown jewels of the country’s higher education system. Every April

> The best jobs are reserved for graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the crown jewels of the country’s higher education system. Every April, over a million students take the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), the primary pathway to the IITs. There are fewer than 12 thousand seats at the 16 IITs in India, and they accept one in 50 applicants each year. This is one of the core issues many people seem to ignore. The number of universities where you can actually become a good engineer is really small, apart from the IIT/NIT/BITS/IIIT, the rest can be categorized into mediocre to astonishingly bad. I do have a lot to say about this topic, as I had go through this experience first hand, and I wasn't one of those who managed to get into a good university (in fact, I barely managed to get into a really shitty one). Here's a short summary of what's it like to get a degree from shitty private university in India - a) There's no focus on getting an actual education, people (including professors, students, their parents) are more concerned with getting a piece of paper which certifies that the student is an engineer now. b) The faculty responsible for teaching rarely give a shit, not that they have an ability to give a shit in this case. Most of them barely know the material they teach. I've had lecturers who would literally write out Java code on a board and then explain the meaning of each word for the next hour. c) Most of these schools have mandatory attendance for classes, so if you have assumed you'll just sign up and go through the material on your own, you're screwed. You will end up spending 8 hours everyday for 4 years doing this, then spend additional 2-3 hours everyday doing assignments which basically consist of copying shit from a textbook. d) Exams are just an exercise in mugging up the textbooks. Even for subjects which involve programming. e) Companies that hire out of these schools are usually service based like Infosys, TCS, etc on a salary of about $300/mo. So the next time you complain about the shitty Indian guy with a thick accent who writes spaghetti code, just remember that they're getting paid peanuts for doing so. Also these companies have a bond of anywhere from an year to 3 (which basically means if you leave anytime before this period, you pay the company <X> amount), it might be illegal, but then your lowly IT guy doesn't have the resources to take these companies to court. There's lot to write about this topic, there are a lot of facets which intermingle with one another in absurd ways, perhaps I might write something more detailed some other day.