7 ms·

Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: The IITs

38 points by kanodiaayush 3y ago

1differential 3y ago
I married someone from an IIT/IIM background and I think the public should really meet them and reduce this hype. My wife, while relatively smart and working at a FAANG - is not that smart (I'm trying to use my words respectfully). I've met many of her friends from a similar background from IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, and IIM-A. Infact the IIT-JEET exam is not even "that" competitive, I think a lot of people get caught up in their own smoke and believe millions of indians take it every year - the fact is that less people take the IIT-JEET (a couple of hundred thousand), than some of our exams here - like for law school and medical school. Overall, while I think my wife is a wonderful person, I would peg her and many of her classmates at the equilance of a UC Davis graduate - (Cal/Stanford alum myself, but going off reference points off my high school cohort).
- Spooky23 3y ago
  People love branding and tribes. All of these tests and hoops are proxies for IQ. High IQ tends to lead to better outcomes, but doesn’t guarantee them.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Where did you learn the word "Infact"? (which does not exist) Was it at Stanford? Does typing that not result in a word highlighted with a red squiggly line for you? You seem to have high expectations of others (i.e.: "not that smart"), but something as basic proofreading seems to be beneath you. If you have impressive credentials but still communicate poorly and speak ill of your own family, you will fail to impress much.
  - adamisom 3y ago
    Infact I learned that word in my postpostdoc at HarvPrinceYalefordbridge Iam sorry you dontknow it
  - neofrommatrix 3y ago
    Don’t take his comment personally..
    - 29athrowaway 3y ago
      "I am so important that I do not need to proofread anything I write" "Everyone (including my own family) is not that smart" It is hard to not get upset with people that go through life with that mindset. Treat others the way you want to be treated is the way things work over here.
      - BeetleB 3y ago
        Neither of your quoted statements are things the OP implied. He may not value proofreading but you are poor at reading comprehension.
- qwertyuiop_ 3y ago
  Echo this. While there are smart people. Entry into IITs is based on pure rote learning and discipline. Kids who memorize tomes of math and science and go through rote practice exams over and over again over their peers who are experiencing life normally usually are the ones who get in. I have met much smarter and successful people who went into regular technical schools and are much more creative than IIT types.
- mavelikara 3y ago
  IITs signal a combination of high IQ and great work ethic. People with that combination, as a general rule of thumb, do well in the professional world. But they should not be confused with Einsteins.
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    People with low neuroticism and high fluid intelligence do well in the professional world. High crystallized intelligence (memorization, knowledge transfer) gets you through the door but won't make you a leader.
    - moneywoes 3y ago
      Can you elaborate on these skills please? Essentially people who can adapt fast and care a lot about their work? How do we develop these traits
      - 29athrowaway 3y ago
        It has a lot to do with your personality and the way you developed early in your life. There is a lot going on in your brain before the age of 3. A kid that is left alone in front of a TV or in a tiny space with plastic toys all the time or lives in a toxic home will develop differently to one that grows playing with other kids, pets, has space to move around, that can go outside and experience nature and has an overall richer childhood experience. Good nutrition, a healthy childhood, low exposure to pollution (lead, PFAS, phthalates, etc), genetics, etc. have significant impact. You can train hard but if you had early life experiences that turned you into a neurotic person, your "equilibrium" will always take you back to being a neurotic.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  The same can be said for Cal/Stanford students. (An alum from both) I’ve met some really smart people and some really mediocre people out of these schools. Same is probably true for IITs and IIMs. Testing well shouldn’t be taken as a proxy for being a genius, but at the same time, concluding that all of them are average, is a bit of a stretch. That being said, we had students transfer over from UC Davis to Cal, and I think comparing your wife to a UC Davis graduate, is not as big of a put down as you think. Most UC Davis grads would perform almost the same as an average UC Berkeley grad if they had the same opportunity.
- sealeck 3y ago
  > My wife, while relatively smart and working at a FAANG - is not that smart (I'm trying to use my words respectfully). Hopefully she doesn't read Hacker News!
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    Hopefully she does.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  The fun thing is that it doesn’t even matter how smart you are to begin with beyond a surprisingly low threshold.
  - pedrosorio 3y ago
    > it doesn’t even matter how smart you are If you care about being "happy"? Sure. But plenty of things require a bit more than "a surprisingly low threshold". You're not going to be Jeff Dean (for example) if you're just "smart".
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      Why do you need to be Jeff Dean? Might as well say you’re not going to be Tom Brady by being smart.
      - pedrosorio 3y ago
        Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned a specific name. The point is, some things are impossible to do unless you are extremely smart. So, in response to your first comment, "it doesn't even matter how smart you are" is not accurate unless you specify the context you're referring to.
        endisneigh 3y ago
        Sure and certain things are impossible to do unless you’re extremely strong. So what? Pure intelligence, like strength, is generally not the limiting factor
        pedrosorio 3y ago
        Yep, in many situations intelligence beyond a certain threshold isn't the limiting factor. That's the qualifier missing from the first comment that I addressed. In some situations (that HN members may be disproportionately interested in), it is and it matters.
- ren_engineer 3y ago
  the problem is most standardized tests aren't good at really finding the extremes of the spectrum. There are some proposed solutions to this, whatever government actually implements them will reap the rewards of finding and recruiting the best talent available and nurturing them to reach their potential. basically what you are talking about is the difference between someone who is very smart, one in a thousand, that can score well with lots of studying compared to a one in a million type genius capable of winning math Olympiads. Most standardized tests lump these people in the same category
  - pedrosorio 3y ago
    > one in a thousand That's probably way too high of a threshold. Many standardized tests lump everyone who is in the top 5-10% of ability, as long as they prepare sufficiently well.
- sashank_1509 3y ago
  As someone from an IIT, an average student in IIT would possibly pass for an average student in aUS state college (UT Austin, UCSD etc), but the geniuses in the Indian student population are over represented in IIT’s. The top student in my batch, decided to do independent research from his home, published a blog post that Ian Goodfellow praised in a tweet and now switched fields and is pursuing a PhD in mathematics from Stanford.
- abhink 3y ago
  > the fact is that less people take the IIT-JEET (a couple of hundred thousand), than some of our exams here - like for law school and medical school Do you have some source backing this up? A cursory search reveals that more than 850,000 applicants attempted the IIT-JEE exam in 2023. Total available college vacancies slightly more than 16,000. This number would be around 5000 for the OG IITs. For US medical colleges, for 2022-2023 admission cycle, 22,712 of the 55,188 students who applied to medical school matriculated. Perhaps these numbers belongs to a specific US region? I would say that attempting JEE is now more or less a cultural thing. 90% of the applicants (pardon the number out of thin air) sit the exam because that's just something you do after finishing school.
- vishnugupta 3y ago
  > the fact is that less people take the IIT-JEET (a couple of hundred thousand) This is factually incorrect, or maybe you are referring to JEE-Advanced. The top of the funnel (i.e., JEE Mains), is over 1MM out of which about 25% qualify for JEE-Advanced.
- breadwinner 3y ago
  > I would peg her and many of her classmates at the equivalence of a UC Davis graduate Wouldn't you say the same about most MIT and Stanford grads as well? A lot of eminent people in Tech industry graduated from MIT and Stanford. But, in my experience, the reverse isn't true: graduating from those schools is usually not an indicator of eminence.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    Generalizing wildly from anecdata, I'd say the only thing correlated with graduating from those schools is arrogance.
puzzledobserver 3y ago
I wonder whether the allure of migrating out of the country has lessened somewhat among more recent graduates. Speaking anecdotally, of my group of six friends (we graduated from an IIT about ten years ago), one never expressed any interest in traveling (he subsequently went to an IIM and worked for a FAANG in India), two spent several years in the US but went back, and a fourth has expressed interest in returning to India. All of us who came to the US worked for FAANGs or got Masters / MBAs / PhDs from very well-ranked American universities. More personally, living in the US has not come across as unambiguously better than living in India. I'm in academia, and I cannot imagine an institute like IISc being substantially more difficult to navigate than where I currently am. Society is more broad-minded, politics is (comparatively) less of a shithole, and a few metrics such as pollution and bureaucratic corruption are somewhat better. On the other hand, I am half the world away from aging family, it is easier to be lonely, I miss the food, and with a FAANG salary, I could live like royalty in India. Life in India is not for me, but I suspect that the range of opinions is getting more varied than (say) thirty years ago.
- sealeck 3y ago
  I would 100% want to move out of India and I think a lot of Indians do.
- bandrami 3y ago
  I've worked tech in Mumbai and Fairfax County (I was one of the fleet of Americans that descended on Mumbai about 10 years ago). I think the big difference is more about corporate/institutional culture than anything else. You have a roughly equivalent lifestyle in a lot of ways (small apartment you're paying way too much for, insane traffic, money for all the "stuff" you want but not really enough to build wealth), modulo some specific differences like hiring a full-time housekeeper or not. But there's a huge difference in the larger corporate cultures where a lot of Indian firms try to emulate the Infosys "we have a problem for every solution" way of doing things; there's less willingness to go out on a limb and break things. OTOH there is now a tiffin delivery service in Reston, and a Krispy Kreme in Mumbai, so something tells me there's a convergence happening.
- gumby 3y ago
kpw94 3y ago
Whether IIT are "that smart" or not like 1differential's comment talks about is irrelevant. IIT have prestige. If they care about leveraging that prestige and incentivize their graduates to some lifestyle choices there's ways to do it. One example is the elite French "école polytechnique" (think the #1 IIT equivalent in engineering): tuition is waived, you even get paid a stipend as a student... But if you don't serve in French public service for 10 years after graduation, you have to repay it. https://programmes.polytechnique.edu/en/ingenieur-polytechnicien-program/tuition-fees https://programmes.polytechnique.edu/en/ingenieur-polytechni... > There are no study costs for French students, on the condition that they work for the civil service for at least 10 years within the 20 years following their graduation. Otherwise, they must repay the tuition fees That would work as a "brain drain" tax.
- sublimefire 3y ago
  Without addressing the actual money involved this will be not complete: > EU students: €19,000 for 3 years > Year 1: €3,500 > Year 2: €7,750 > Year 3: €7,750 Repaying such amount is not a very big deal
  - nbernard 3y ago
    You took the wrong column (the amount to be repaid is €31,000) but your point remains valid. (Moreover, it is often paid by the employer who wants to recruit a student just after graduation.)
  - kpw94 3y ago
    The source I posted has the exact amounts > As of today, the total amount to be repaid is set at > €21,000 for students who have chosen to join a government body for Year 4 > €31,000 for students who have not chosen to join a government body for Year 4 Such amount is not as insignificant in a country with high taxes and where peers in university have like $100/year tuition, it's not super high either (maybe 4-6 months of after tax salary for an entry level position) But I didn't bother posting is as i think it's not relevant. IIT could set that amount at 1 rupee, or 1 lakh, or 1 crore. There's a threshold where this switches from "that's fair you're repaying tuition" to "oh now you're adding a steep penalty" It's complex to set the right value: too high and you're forcing your graduates to choose a high paying job or a government job, but you're killing their chances of startup creation. Too low and IIT is leaving money on the table.
vjust 3y ago
There was a CNN article about India’s time-bomb of unemployment. Job creation is not able to keep up with number of applicants. The net effect is a further intensification of competition : be it for college or school admissions or jobs. The average number of applicants for an open job slot has increased two-fold or something more.. this changing environment has a bearing on what IIT graduates plan for their next step
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > Job creation is not able to keep up with number of applicants That's a symptom of not having a free market.
- gumby 3y ago
  Though some are top-pf-the-world class like IITs, most of the schools (at all levels) are pretty bad, so only low skill jobs are possible for the vast majority of the population. That was true in China 30+ years ago, when it had its demographic boom. It now has to deal with an aging population and a different global economy. Today India is demographically a lot like China was back then, and there is some geopolitical desire to diversify the supply chain away from China-only. Thus many are counting on India to be able to tread the same path China did. We shall see.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

38 points by kanodiaayush 3y ago

I married someone from an IIT/IIM background and I think the public should really meet them and reduce this hype. My wife, while relatively smart and working at a FAANG - is not that smart (I'm trying to use my words respectfully). I've met many of her friends from a similar background from IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, and IIM-A. Infact the IIT-JEET exam is not even "that" competitive, I think a lot of people get caught up in their own smoke and believe millions of indians take it every year - the fact is that less people take the IIT-JEET (a couple of hundred thousand), than some of our exams here - like for law school and medical school. Overall, while I think my wife is a wonderful person, I would peg her and many of her classmates at the equilance of a UC Davis graduate - (Cal/Stanford alum myself, but going off reference points off my high school cohort).

Spooky23 3y ago
People love branding and tribes. All of these tests and hoops are proxies for IQ. High IQ tends to lead to better outcomes, but doesn’t guarantee them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
29athrowaway 3y ago
Where did you learn the word "Infact"? (which does not exist) Was it at Stanford? Does typing that not result in a word highlighted with a red squiggly line for you? You seem to have high expectations of others (i.e.: "not that smart"), but something as basic proofreading seems to be beneath you. If you have impressive credentials but still communicate poorly and speak ill of your own family, you will fail to impress much.
- adamisom 3y ago
  Infact I learned that word in my postpostdoc at HarvPrinceYalefordbridge Iam sorry you dontknow it
- neofrommatrix 3y ago
  Don’t take his comment personally..
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    "I am so important that I do not need to proofread anything I write" "Everyone (including my own family) is not that smart" It is hard to not get upset with people that go through life with that mindset. Treat others the way you want to be treated is the way things work over here.
    - BeetleB 3y ago
      Neither of your quoted statements are things the OP implied. He may not value proofreading but you are poor at reading comprehension.
qwertyuiop_ 3y ago
Echo this. While there are smart people. Entry into IITs is based on pure rote learning and discipline. Kids who memorize tomes of math and science and go through rote practice exams over and over again over their peers who are experiencing life normally usually are the ones who get in. I have met much smarter and successful people who went into regular technical schools and are much more creative than IIT types.
mavelikara 3y ago
IITs signal a combination of high IQ and great work ethic. People with that combination, as a general rule of thumb, do well in the professional world. But they should not be confused with Einsteins.
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  People with low neuroticism and high fluid intelligence do well in the professional world. High crystallized intelligence (memorization, knowledge transfer) gets you through the door but won't make you a leader.
  - moneywoes 3y ago
    Can you elaborate on these skills please? Essentially people who can adapt fast and care a lot about their work? How do we develop these traits
    - 29athrowaway 3y ago
      It has a lot to do with your personality and the way you developed early in your life. There is a lot going on in your brain before the age of 3. A kid that is left alone in front of a TV or in a tiny space with plastic toys all the time or lives in a toxic home will develop differently to one that grows playing with other kids, pets, has space to move around, that can go outside and experience nature and has an overall richer childhood experience. Good nutrition, a healthy childhood, low exposure to pollution (lead, PFAS, phthalates, etc), genetics, etc. have significant impact. You can train hard but if you had early life experiences that turned you into a neurotic person, your "equilibrium" will always take you back to being a neurotic.
darth_avocado 3y ago
The same can be said for Cal/Stanford students. (An alum from both) I’ve met some really smart people and some really mediocre people out of these schools. Same is probably true for IITs and IIMs. Testing well shouldn’t be taken as a proxy for being a genius, but at the same time, concluding that all of them are average, is a bit of a stretch. That being said, we had students transfer over from UC Davis to Cal, and I think comparing your wife to a UC Davis graduate, is not as big of a put down as you think. Most UC Davis grads would perform almost the same as an average UC Berkeley grad if they had the same opportunity.
sealeck 3y ago
> My wife, while relatively smart and working at a FAANG - is not that smart (I'm trying to use my words respectfully). Hopefully she doesn't read Hacker News!
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Hopefully she does.
endisneigh 3y ago
The fun thing is that it doesn’t even matter how smart you are to begin with beyond a surprisingly low threshold.
- pedrosorio 3y ago
  > it doesn’t even matter how smart you are If you care about being "happy"? Sure. But plenty of things require a bit more than "a surprisingly low threshold". You're not going to be Jeff Dean (for example) if you're just "smart".
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Why do you need to be Jeff Dean? Might as well say you’re not going to be Tom Brady by being smart.
    - pedrosorio 3y ago
      Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned a specific name. The point is, some things are impossible to do unless you are extremely smart. So, in response to your first comment, "it doesn't even matter how smart you are" is not accurate unless you specify the context you're referring to.
      - endisneigh 3y ago
        Sure and certain things are impossible to do unless you’re extremely strong. So what? Pure intelligence, like strength, is generally not the limiting factor
        pedrosorio 3y ago
        Yep, in many situations intelligence beyond a certain threshold isn't the limiting factor. That's the qualifier missing from the first comment that I addressed. In some situations (that HN members may be disproportionately interested in), it is and it matters.
ren_engineer 3y ago
the problem is most standardized tests aren't good at really finding the extremes of the spectrum. There are some proposed solutions to this, whatever government actually implements them will reap the rewards of finding and recruiting the best talent available and nurturing them to reach their potential. basically what you are talking about is the difference between someone who is very smart, one in a thousand, that can score well with lots of studying compared to a one in a million type genius capable of winning math Olympiads. Most standardized tests lump these people in the same category
- pedrosorio 3y ago
  > one in a thousand That's probably way too high of a threshold. Many standardized tests lump everyone who is in the top 5-10% of ability, as long as they prepare sufficiently well.
sashank_1509 3y ago
As someone from an IIT, an average student in IIT would possibly pass for an average student in aUS state college (UT Austin, UCSD etc), but the geniuses in the Indian student population are over represented in IIT’s. The top student in my batch, decided to do independent research from his home, published a blog post that Ian Goodfellow praised in a tweet and now switched fields and is pursuing a PhD in mathematics from Stanford.
abhink 3y ago
> the fact is that less people take the IIT-JEET (a couple of hundred thousand), than some of our exams here - like for law school and medical school Do you have some source backing this up? A cursory search reveals that more than 850,000 applicants attempted the IIT-JEE exam in 2023. Total available college vacancies slightly more than 16,000. This number would be around 5000 for the OG IITs. For US medical colleges, for 2022-2023 admission cycle, 22,712 of the 55,188 students who applied to medical school matriculated. Perhaps these numbers belongs to a specific US region? I would say that attempting JEE is now more or less a cultural thing. 90% of the applicants (pardon the number out of thin air) sit the exam because that's just something you do after finishing school.
vishnugupta 3y ago
> the fact is that less people take the IIT-JEET (a couple of hundred thousand) This is factually incorrect, or maybe you are referring to JEE-Advanced. The top of the funnel (i.e., JEE Mains), is over 1MM out of which about 25% qualify for JEE-Advanced.
breadwinner 3y ago
> I would peg her and many of her classmates at the equivalence of a UC Davis graduate Wouldn't you say the same about most MIT and Stanford grads as well? A lot of eminent people in Tech industry graduated from MIT and Stanford. But, in my experience, the reverse isn't true: graduating from those schools is usually not an indicator of eminence.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  Generalizing wildly from anecdata, I'd say the only thing correlated with graduating from those schools is arrogance.

puzzledobserver 3y ago

I wonder whether the allure of migrating out of the country has lessened somewhat among more recent graduates. Speaking anecdotally, of my group of six friends (we graduated from an IIT about ten years ago), one never expressed any interest in traveling (he subsequently went to an IIM and worked for a FAANG in India), two spent several years in the US but went back, and a fourth has expressed interest in returning to India. All of us who came to the US worked for FAANGs or got Masters / MBAs / PhDs from very well-ranked American universities. More personally, living in the US has not come across as unambiguously better than living in India. I'm in academia, and I cannot imagine an institute like IISc being substantially more difficult to navigate than where I currently am. Society is more broad-minded, politics is (comparatively) less of a shithole, and a few metrics such as pollution and bureaucratic corruption are somewhat better. On the other hand, I am half the world away from aging family, it is easier to be lonely, I miss the food, and with a FAANG salary, I could live like royalty in India. Life in India is not for me, but I suspect that the range of opinions is getting more varied than (say) thirty years ago.

sealeck 3y ago
I would 100% want to move out of India and I think a lot of Indians do.
bandrami 3y ago
I've worked tech in Mumbai and Fairfax County (I was one of the fleet of Americans that descended on Mumbai about 10 years ago). I think the big difference is more about corporate/institutional culture than anything else. You have a roughly equivalent lifestyle in a lot of ways (small apartment you're paying way too much for, insane traffic, money for all the "stuff" you want but not really enough to build wealth), modulo some specific differences like hiring a full-time housekeeper or not. But there's a huge difference in the larger corporate cultures where a lot of Indian firms try to emulate the Infosys "we have a problem for every solution" way of doing things; there's less willingness to go out on a limb and break things. OTOH there is now a tiffin delivery service in Reston, and a Krispy Kreme in Mumbai, so something tells me there's a convergence happening.
gumby 3y ago

kpw94 3y ago

Whether IIT are "that smart" or not like 1differential's comment talks about is irrelevant. IIT have prestige. If they care about leveraging that prestige and incentivize their graduates to some lifestyle choices there's ways to do it. One example is the elite French "école polytechnique" (think the #1 IIT equivalent in engineering): tuition is waived, you even get paid a stipend as a student... But if you don't serve in French public service for 10 years after graduation, you have to repay it. https://programmes.polytechnique.edu/en/ingenieur-polytechnicien-program/tuition-fees https://programmes.polytechnique.edu/en/ingenieur-polytechni... > There are no study costs for French students, on the condition that they work for the civil service for at least 10 years within the 20 years following their graduation. Otherwise, they must repay the tuition fees That would work as a "brain drain" tax.

sublimefire 3y ago
Without addressing the actual money involved this will be not complete: > EU students: €19,000 for 3 years > Year 1: €3,500 > Year 2: €7,750 > Year 3: €7,750 Repaying such amount is not a very big deal
- nbernard 3y ago
  You took the wrong column (the amount to be repaid is €31,000) but your point remains valid. (Moreover, it is often paid by the employer who wants to recruit a student just after graduation.)
- kpw94 3y ago
  The source I posted has the exact amounts > As of today, the total amount to be repaid is set at > €21,000 for students who have chosen to join a government body for Year 4 > €31,000 for students who have not chosen to join a government body for Year 4 Such amount is not as insignificant in a country with high taxes and where peers in university have like $100/year tuition, it's not super high either (maybe 4-6 months of after tax salary for an entry level position) But I didn't bother posting is as i think it's not relevant. IIT could set that amount at 1 rupee, or 1 lakh, or 1 crore. There's a threshold where this switches from "that's fair you're repaying tuition" to "oh now you're adding a steep penalty" It's complex to set the right value: too high and you're forcing your graduates to choose a high paying job or a government job, but you're killing their chances of startup creation. Too low and IIT is leaving money on the table.

vjust 3y ago

There was a CNN article about India’s time-bomb of unemployment. Job creation is not able to keep up with number of applicants. The net effect is a further intensification of competition : be it for college or school admissions or jobs. The average number of applicants for an open job slot has increased two-fold or something more.. this changing environment has a bearing on what IIT graduates plan for their next step

WalterBright 3y ago
> Job creation is not able to keep up with number of applicants That's a symptom of not having a free market.
gumby 3y ago
Though some are top-pf-the-world class like IITs, most of the schools (at all levels) are pretty bad, so only low skill jobs are possible for the vast majority of the population. That was true in China 30+ years ago, when it had its demographic boom. It now has to deal with an aging population and a different global economy. Today India is demographically a lot like China was back then, and there is some geopolitical desire to diversify the supply chain away from China-only. Thus many are counting on India to be able to tread the same path China did. We shall see.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]