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Students are the victims and culprits of India’s broken higher education system

78 points by ad93611 13y ago

test001only 13y ago
The problem pointed out in the article is a commonly accepted truth in India. Some hard truth - even though there have been many efforts to bring the economically and socially under developed class into the mainstream, it has not happened yet. Most of the students who even come to UG especially college's like St. Stephens are from middle class or upper middle class families. They have very little incentive to fight the system. The brand comes with privilege which is the only thing they are after. In short, people do not fight the system but have learned to make it work for them. The poor and downtrodden are the unfortunate majority who are not able to do it.
- crimsonzagar 13y ago
  Agreed! Emphasis is not given to 'economic' or 'social' need but only to caste-wise situation. If your papa's uncle is on the driving seat of the Government, you're in the game. In many ways we Indians deserve the shit we live in. How many of us actively participate in politics? No one comes forward even if there is incentive to do so. In fact many armchair experts criticize Anna Hazare or Arvind Kejriwal who at least go ahead an walk the talk, trying to garner some support for better Governance. Support them? Nope. Zilch. We love to be in Americas than to make India better - a short-cut. Consider this: Many of us know who the president of United States is, his wife's name, his daughters name, and yet more than 90% Indian kids of our age (i.e. below 25 yrs, and it is not a researched number) would not know the name of the Indian president, or his wife or even consider the fact that he could have children. :) [Edited a couple of times.]
  - test001only 13y ago
    I am not sure in which part you disagree with me. Yes most of the present youth in India - who are in a position to make an impact, are not doing it. A very simple case - they would rather pay the bribe to get LPG connection rather than fight. But the poor, they cannot do that and they are not in a position to make an impact and are trapped. This is a vicious circle. The effect of reservation based on caste is debatable but that would be a topic of its own.
    - crimsonzagar 13y ago
      Damn, corrected.
    - anoncow 13y ago
      I did the no bribe thing once. I wanted a certificate and the officer wouldn't give me one. Went to the bmc office almost every week for 3 months. Gandhiji would have got me the certificate on the very first day.
      - skytalon 13y ago
        It is interesting to notice that Gandhiji is on every currency note. No one else is good enough to be on it?
        anoncow 13y ago
        I hope they stick to Gandhiji.
  - anoncow 13y ago
    True about politics. And there is a lot of corruption and politics of hate. We are stuck between a corrupt party who also play caste/religion and a party who plays the religion card and is equally corrupt. If you are born into a particular religion, you are stuck with it (even if you don't give a damn about religion) and you get the impression that everyone wants to kill you or throw you into the extremely shitty neighbouring country. The same is true to an extent about caste. I have seen educated penple getting married on the basis of caste and religion, even with all the globalization. People support political leaders based on caste and religion. Religion plays a big role in India. You aren't what you are. You are just one more member of one team or another. And people live accordingly. Sorry for the rant. I suppose conditions are not as bad as that in Pakistan or the middle east. And religious-background intolerance is commonplace in the west too.
k4rtik 13y ago
This was published weeks back in The Hindu: http://www.thehindu.com/features/education/college-and-university/an-indian-education/article4683622.ece http://www.thehindu.com/features/education/college-and-unive...
- tokenadult 13y ago
  We should read the original source and not be stuck with the weird page styling of Quartz then. The HN guidelines discourage posting anything but the original source, so that's all the more reason to do so.
shared4you 13y ago
> reservation system for the admission of scheduled castes and others residing at the bottom of India's socioeconomic pyramid Correction: it's social pyramid only. Classification of SC/STs is purely based on caste alone, not on economic status -- and we must fight to make it economic-only pyramid.
- furyg3 13y ago
  As an outsider, I would certainly agree with your comment. Caste quotas seem like they would only strengthen the system... Still, how synonymous is caste with economic status? I would guess "very" but your post makes it seem like there are some interesting nuances. What are India's caste demographics, anyway?
  - test001only 13y ago
    Initially caste based quota was chosen because they were discriminated against by the society for a really long time. The profession one would go in was based on the caste they were born into. A barber's son would be barber, a cleaner's son would be cleaner. Here is one example : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devadasi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devadasi . People from certain caste are still socially backward while other caste have managed to come out. The problem is the reservation system is not reformed based on that. This is a topic of hot contention.
    - known 13y ago
      https://www.change.org/petitions/independent-nation-for-300-million-india-s-untouchables https://www.change.org/petitions/independent-nation-for-300-...
  - manojlds 13y ago
    Cast system was based on work and hence mapped to the economic status. It is not the case anymore. Actually, it has led to reverse discrimination where those who are supposedly forward caste struggle to get into colleges and elsewhere. The reservation is one of the main reasons people leave India, and remain away.
lake99 13y ago
I agree that nationalism is ruining India. But, this article paints quite a one-sided picture. You can see that in this sentence: "Indian students are taking their useless Indian liberal arts degrees and going abroad to get real ones that signify a real education". See? That's just it! Most people who do well in high-school get pushed into technical fields. My cousins are mostly engineers or doctors, and a few are lawyers. "Liberal arts"? That's something that children of rich parents do when they are not too good at studies. Some girls do it when they want to be housewives when they are done with studies. I have a bachelors in EE (E&C) and have worked for a few multinationals. I have had to work with western-European and American colleagues. If I were asked for my subjective evaluation, I'd say that my EE colleagues at this level are more or less the same. Yes, the degree mills of India do churn out engineers by the millions. 10% of them understand what they have learnt. The others memorize and regurgitate their notes. It's fairly easy to screen people at this level. And that's why I find my colleagues comparable. Leaving aside medicine, about which I know nothing, a masters degree from India in science or engineering is mostly useless. Academia, with the exception of IITs and IISc, is mostly a joke. To conclude: Yes, education here is generally bad, but not as bad as this article paints it out to be.
- jbattle 13y ago
  I'm a little confused - you are saying the article is overstating things, but that degrees in science, engineering, academia, and possibly medicine are "mostly useless"?
  - lake99 13y ago
    I'll clarify. I'll make no comments about medicine - I know nothing about education in this field. The bachelors programs in the IITs are great, by global standards. IISc does some cool work too. Leaving those aside, a BS in engineering (called BE or BTech here) is not bad. We have some outdated courses, we don't have the freedom to choose courses, etc. But for most of our courses, we use the same textbooks as Americans, Brits, Australians, etc. I suppose we have similar kinds of lab sessions too. Academia (includes bacherlors, masters, PhD, post-doc, professorship, research papers, conferences, journals, funding, etc.) in India is generally terrible. ME/MTech in India is mostly useless. BE/BTech in India is not bad.
ilamont 13y ago
I had a history professor who attended Berkeley in the 60s. He recalled the instructional methods used by one of his own professors at Berkeley: He simply got up to the podium, opened a textbook, and started reading. There was no discussion or chances to ask questions. As I recall, he indicated that this was a method of lecturing that had its roots in European academia. A question for HNers from India: With such a long history of sending students to British and American universities, are Anglo-American methods of teaching, research, mentoring, etc. transferred back to Indian universities by returnees who start academic careers?
- diffoperator 13y ago
  Most of the US educated academicians who teach in India are normally at the IITs (engineering schools) and IIMs (management schools). The teaching styles of professors at these schools are identical to US schools, however their effectiveness is debatable. To be fair to them, they are usually ham-strung by institution-wide regulations such as a guideline that 80% of the grade be determined by a mid-term and a final (I know this is the case at IIT Kharagpur, not sure about the others). They are not as productive research wise because while the graduate students in the US are competent and (usually) smarter than undergraduates, the reverse is true at most Indian institutes (the smart guys go abroad). There is no room for mentoring because undergraduates have a heavy courseload (5-6 technical courses per semester) and the professors have a lot of administrative work apart from teaching.
  - microarchitect 13y ago
    I think your opinion is at least a decade old. Research-wise Indian institutions are moderately productive now and especially so if you count the research budgets they have to work with. There is a challenge in finding high-quality graduate students because of course the likes of MIT and Stanford have a lot more to offer. But this is no different from, say, the best undergrads at UMass going to MIT. My point is there are good students and good work does happen. Part of the reason why the best students used to go abroad was because there were a lot more job opportunities in the US after a graduate degree. This is changing now with MSR India, Intel Research India, GE Research, TCS Research and so on becoming well-established labs in their own right. The job scenario for academic jobs in India is way better than it is in the US and a moderately competent candidate can easily get jobs now at an IIT/IISER/ISI. As someone who is keenly following higher education in India, I think the state of higher education is better than ever and rapidly improving. An easy way of judging this is to look at where our students are ending up. The best undergrads in India today invariably end up at the best schools in the world. This wasn't true 30 years and there are many examples of really high quality IIT graduates who studied in mid-tier US schools. Even students from second-tier schools like, say CEG Guindy or NIT Surathkul, now end up at very very good universities. The situation is less good in the humanities and social sciences, which btw are struggling the world over, but some of the newer IITs have social science and humanities departments and some progress is being made [1]. [1] http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com/2013/01/sukhdeo-thorat-on-social-science-in.html http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com/2013/01/sukhdeo-thorat-on-so...
jabbernotty 13y ago
Again, I can't reach the article. I end up at "China manufacturing shrinks in May, leaving policymakers with few good options", just as happened with the previous qz link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5756176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5756176
dredmorbius 13y ago
Ugh. Quartz. Readability makes this much more tolerable: http://www.readability.com/articles/ppb4ycws http://www.readability.com/articles/ppb4ycws
squozzer 13y ago
All I can say is "good luck, you'll need it." I don't think India has a unique problem with its' higher ed system. Consider that the modern university is based on ideas developed in the late Middle Ages, throw in a healthy dash of politics (both formal and informal), and the gatekeeper factor, why would any university feel the need to change? Do today's kids have the gumption to boycott the system? We didn't - instead we adapted, just like the kids at St. Stephen's. To be fair to Indians, we Americans probably get even more agitated at criticism from outside (or inside.)
- jseliger 13y ago
  Consider that the modern university is based on ideas developed in the late Middle Ages, throw in a healthy dash of politics (both formal and informal), and the gatekeeper factor, why would any university feel the need to change? To be fair, the idea of the university got started in the Middle Ages but they have changed quite a bit since; if you're interested in the subject, take a look at the latest edition of Clark Kerr's book The Uses of the University, which traces changes in American universities from the post-War period to the present. Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas is also very good. (Disclaimer: I'm writing my dissertation on academic novels.)
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Ooooh, I have been looking for precisely a book on that topic. Thanks!
    - jseliger 13y ago
      If you're deeply interested in these things, send me an e-mail—the address is in my profile.
_gotmilk 13y ago
There are no Indian universities in the top 200 universities according to the QS World Universities rankings. There are only 3 in the top 300! While I don't know if this is an institutional deficiency(lack of research, distinguished professors) or a lack of quality among students, one thing is for sure and that is Indian degrees are not very respected worldwide aside from possibly Indian Institute of Technology. From what my father tells me, the K-12 education system is also broken. The public education system is considered a joke in India to the point that anyone who can enrolls their kids into private schools as soon as possible. Most students who pass India's rigorous college entrance exam take extensive coaching(as my cousins have), and this results in a system of college acceptance being determined by wealth. The thing is, I can't see change coming. India has yet to address nationwide corruption that cripples the whole country!
- kinleyd 13y ago
  It's for lack of research, distinguished professors, facilities... certainly not the quality of students. Graduating from St. Stephen's nearly 30 years ago I can say that the average student there was pretty damn smart and really hard working. The article is spot on in many respects, except for the reference to finding only one applicant to Brown that he really enthused over. That is his experience, but in mine I can assure you that there were a heck of a lot of students most top universities in the US would compete over. In my time the principal and other staff were far more liberal - there seems to have been a sad regression judging from the position of the present principal.
3apo 13y ago
I feel the comparison to American Educational system is rather unfair, the American Higher Education being much more evolved and the best there is. IMHO Indian Education system would compare favorably to many other countries with the same socio-economic factors. This is not to say the system does not need to improve, but so does the Education system everywhere else (more of the sort of MOOCs/Khan Academy for instance; college fees have been increasing sharply in India). In my personal opinion historically the Colleges in India were more occupied by handing out more degrees and not education. To go beyond the routine was always due to self initiatives of the select few and not the majority. If the colleges increased the standards higher than the usual then a majority of students would fail ( "out of syllabus" was a regular complaint if the exams were too hard). This is not a critique of the Educational system, rather I feel glad that my Indian college education was easy enough to let me pursue avenues which benefited me more than what was taught in classroom. A degree from a reputed Indian college is only to open doors, what you learn depends entirely on how motivated you are.
lappet 13y ago
The author of this article tweeted a response by a Professor from the same college: http://kafila.org/2013/05/06/the-golchakkar-of-premier-institutions-st-stephens-college-as-a-public-concern-n-p-ashley/ http://kafila.org/2013/05/06/the-golchakkar-of-premier-insti...
- test001only 13y ago
  That was a well written article. The following quote from the article shows the situation in India : "If 7 Cabinet ministers, 19 Members of parliament, such a lot of IAS officers, many writers, artists, actors, media personalities and so on came from a single college in a vast county like India, it speaks more about the limited circles that monopolise different kinds of capital in the country than about the training they receive in college. "
- cjensen 13y ago
  Wow that was bad. He basically says "well the arguments were a bunch of anecdotes therefore I will ignore them." Not once does he refute, even anecdotally, the charges made in the original.
- MarkMc 13y ago
  That author really needs to take a class called How To Write Plain English. I struggled to parse text like, "...the 88 teachers who teach can only be used as Indian samples, if and only if, one is ready to situate them in socio-economic givens" or "... disabling us from looking at the micro-manifestations of issues from a methodologically nuanced, institutionally useful and politically sensitive position"
bjoe_lewis 13y ago
>To pause for a moment, here is the problem with me talking about this topic: right now many Indians reading this are starting to feel defensive. No, we are not. We both know it is broken. You definitely should've taken a glimpse into Engineering Education and you would have died, except if it's not the IITs.
guylhem 13y ago
The article is partial to a very western view of education. Lecturing from a book, or from notes, is sometimes the right thing to do, especially when teaching to students who will have trouble following the class otherwise (by lack of discipline, by just being unused to that way of teaching or simply if they can't afford the references book you are asking them to read, or don't have the time to do that). The most important is what the student get from the class, not how elite or interactive the teacher is. If most students understand better after rote learning some dictated notes - why not do that? After all, it is a good way to ensure the majority of students will have a proper base material to learn from, without too many mistakes thrown in, especially if they can't offer books. If they can "do better", don't worry, top students will use their notes as what they truly are - base material, a list of keywords to build their knowledge from, with the help of google or books. professor told us the entire Mahabharata epic from memory ... this professor exemplified passionate teaching. See, memory can be helpful. One needs both memory and understanding. The US system seems to overemphasize understanding. Other systems may overemphasize understanding. I would not call either system "balanced". real education being one that challenges the intellect and questions paradigms, not one of rote memorization and conformity That's biased. How can you challenge the intellect and question paradigms if you don't know them in the first place? There is a time for everything. Maybe a 3rd year college is not the best moment to question paradigms.
- irahul 13y ago
  > Lecturing from a book, or from notes, is sometimes the right thing to do The issue isn't "lecturing from a book" vs "teaching from memory" but "literally reading from the book", expecting students to take notes(Why?) and classifying that as teaching.
- dkarl 13y ago
  I agree that in the United States, we tend to morally stigmatize rote learning instead of recognizing that it can serve as valuable "scaffolding" for other learning processes. (For example, memorizing foreign language verb forms so you can practice using them in conversation. Rote memorization does not accomplish the end goal of fluency, but it greatly facilitates the conversational practice that does build fluency.) However, I think it's a waste to spend class time with a professor on rote learning. Rote learning is a mechanical process that students can do on their own time. When they're in class with a professor, they should get the benefit of the professor's skill and knowledge.
vowelless 13y ago
How was education in the USSR? I was under the impression that the Indian system borrowed quite a bit from their model.
RestlessMind 13y ago
One of the biggest disadvantages plaguing Indian education system is quota / reservations - 50% of the seats are reserved. So which means half of your peers are there just because of their caste / gender. Even worse, quota exists for teaching positions too. So half of your teachers are in that position only because of their caste / gender and not because of mastery over the stuff they are teaching.
known 13y ago
Indian education system is designed to create employees, not employers. Trade/commerce is exclusively reserved to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bania_%28caste%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bania_%28caste%29 for over 3000 years in India.

78 points by ad93611 13y ago

The problem pointed out in the article is a commonly accepted truth in India. Some hard truth - even though there have been many efforts to bring the economically and socially under developed class into the mainstream, it has not happened yet. Most of the students who even come to UG especially college's like St. Stephens are from middle class or upper middle class families. They have very little incentive to fight the system. The brand comes with privilege which is the only thing they are after. In short, people do not fight the system but have learned to make it work for them. The poor and downtrodden are the unfortunate majority who are not able to do it.

crimsonzagar 13y ago
Agreed! Emphasis is not given to 'economic' or 'social' need but only to caste-wise situation. If your papa's uncle is on the driving seat of the Government, you're in the game. In many ways we Indians deserve the shit we live in. How many of us actively participate in politics? No one comes forward even if there is incentive to do so. In fact many armchair experts criticize Anna Hazare or Arvind Kejriwal who at least go ahead an walk the talk, trying to garner some support for better Governance. Support them? Nope. Zilch. We love to be in Americas than to make India better - a short-cut. Consider this: Many of us know who the president of United States is, his wife's name, his daughters name, and yet more than 90% Indian kids of our age (i.e. below 25 yrs, and it is not a researched number) would not know the name of the Indian president, or his wife or even consider the fact that he could have children. :) [Edited a couple of times.]
- test001only 13y ago
  I am not sure in which part you disagree with me. Yes most of the present youth in India - who are in a position to make an impact, are not doing it. A very simple case - they would rather pay the bribe to get LPG connection rather than fight. But the poor, they cannot do that and they are not in a position to make an impact and are trapped. This is a vicious circle. The effect of reservation based on caste is debatable but that would be a topic of its own.
  - crimsonzagar 13y ago
    Damn, corrected.
  - anoncow 13y ago
    I did the no bribe thing once. I wanted a certificate and the officer wouldn't give me one. Went to the bmc office almost every week for 3 months. Gandhiji would have got me the certificate on the very first day.
    - skytalon 13y ago
      It is interesting to notice that Gandhiji is on every currency note. No one else is good enough to be on it?
      - anoncow 13y ago
        I hope they stick to Gandhiji.
- anoncow 13y ago
  True about politics. And there is a lot of corruption and politics of hate. We are stuck between a corrupt party who also play caste/religion and a party who plays the religion card and is equally corrupt. If you are born into a particular religion, you are stuck with it (even if you don't give a damn about religion) and you get the impression that everyone wants to kill you or throw you into the extremely shitty neighbouring country. The same is true to an extent about caste. I have seen educated penple getting married on the basis of caste and religion, even with all the globalization. People support political leaders based on caste and religion. Religion plays a big role in India. You aren't what you are. You are just one more member of one team or another. And people live accordingly. Sorry for the rant. I suppose conditions are not as bad as that in Pakistan or the middle east. And religious-background intolerance is commonplace in the west too.

k4rtik 13y ago

This was published weeks back in The Hindu: http://www.thehindu.com/features/education/college-and-university/an-indian-education/article4683622.ece http://www.thehindu.com/features/education/college-and-unive...

tokenadult 13y ago
We should read the original source and not be stuck with the weird page styling of Quartz then. The HN guidelines discourage posting anything but the original source, so that's all the more reason to do so.

shared4you 13y ago

> reservation system for the admission of scheduled castes and others residing at the bottom of India's socioeconomic pyramid Correction: it's social pyramid only. Classification of SC/STs is purely based on caste alone, not on economic status -- and we must fight to make it economic-only pyramid.

furyg3 13y ago
As an outsider, I would certainly agree with your comment. Caste quotas seem like they would only strengthen the system... Still, how synonymous is caste with economic status? I would guess "very" but your post makes it seem like there are some interesting nuances. What are India's caste demographics, anyway?
- test001only 13y ago
  Initially caste based quota was chosen because they were discriminated against by the society for a really long time. The profession one would go in was based on the caste they were born into. A barber's son would be barber, a cleaner's son would be cleaner. Here is one example : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devadasi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devadasi . People from certain caste are still socially backward while other caste have managed to come out. The problem is the reservation system is not reformed based on that. This is a topic of hot contention.
  - known 13y ago
    https://www.change.org/petitions/independent-nation-for-300-million-india-s-untouchables https://www.change.org/petitions/independent-nation-for-300-...
- manojlds 13y ago
  Cast system was based on work and hence mapped to the economic status. It is not the case anymore. Actually, it has led to reverse discrimination where those who are supposedly forward caste struggle to get into colleges and elsewhere. The reservation is one of the main reasons people leave India, and remain away.

lake99 13y ago

I agree that nationalism is ruining India. But, this article paints quite a one-sided picture. You can see that in this sentence: "Indian students are taking their useless Indian liberal arts degrees and going abroad to get real ones that signify a real education". See? That's just it! Most people who do well in high-school get pushed into technical fields. My cousins are mostly engineers or doctors, and a few are lawyers. "Liberal arts"? That's something that children of rich parents do when they are not too good at studies. Some girls do it when they want to be housewives when they are done with studies. I have a bachelors in EE (E&C) and have worked for a few multinationals. I have had to work with western-European and American colleagues. If I were asked for my subjective evaluation, I'd say that my EE colleagues at this level are more or less the same. Yes, the degree mills of India do churn out engineers by the millions. 10% of them understand what they have learnt. The others memorize and regurgitate their notes. It's fairly easy to screen people at this level. And that's why I find my colleagues comparable. Leaving aside medicine, about which I know nothing, a masters degree from India in science or engineering is mostly useless. Academia, with the exception of IITs and IISc, is mostly a joke. To conclude: Yes, education here is generally bad, but not as bad as this article paints it out to be.

jbattle 13y ago
I'm a little confused - you are saying the article is overstating things, but that degrees in science, engineering, academia, and possibly medicine are "mostly useless"?
- lake99 13y ago
  I'll clarify. I'll make no comments about medicine - I know nothing about education in this field. The bachelors programs in the IITs are great, by global standards. IISc does some cool work too. Leaving those aside, a BS in engineering (called BE or BTech here) is not bad. We have some outdated courses, we don't have the freedom to choose courses, etc. But for most of our courses, we use the same textbooks as Americans, Brits, Australians, etc. I suppose we have similar kinds of lab sessions too. Academia (includes bacherlors, masters, PhD, post-doc, professorship, research papers, conferences, journals, funding, etc.) in India is generally terrible. ME/MTech in India is mostly useless. BE/BTech in India is not bad.

ilamont 13y ago

I had a history professor who attended Berkeley in the 60s. He recalled the instructional methods used by one of his own professors at Berkeley: He simply got up to the podium, opened a textbook, and started reading. There was no discussion or chances to ask questions. As I recall, he indicated that this was a method of lecturing that had its roots in European academia. A question for HNers from India: With such a long history of sending students to British and American universities, are Anglo-American methods of teaching, research, mentoring, etc. transferred back to Indian universities by returnees who start academic careers?

diffoperator 13y ago
Most of the US educated academicians who teach in India are normally at the IITs (engineering schools) and IIMs (management schools). The teaching styles of professors at these schools are identical to US schools, however their effectiveness is debatable. To be fair to them, they are usually ham-strung by institution-wide regulations such as a guideline that 80% of the grade be determined by a mid-term and a final (I know this is the case at IIT Kharagpur, not sure about the others). They are not as productive research wise because while the graduate students in the US are competent and (usually) smarter than undergraduates, the reverse is true at most Indian institutes (the smart guys go abroad). There is no room for mentoring because undergraduates have a heavy courseload (5-6 technical courses per semester) and the professors have a lot of administrative work apart from teaching.
- microarchitect 13y ago
  I think your opinion is at least a decade old. Research-wise Indian institutions are moderately productive now and especially so if you count the research budgets they have to work with. There is a challenge in finding high-quality graduate students because of course the likes of MIT and Stanford have a lot more to offer. But this is no different from, say, the best undergrads at UMass going to MIT. My point is there are good students and good work does happen. Part of the reason why the best students used to go abroad was because there were a lot more job opportunities in the US after a graduate degree. This is changing now with MSR India, Intel Research India, GE Research, TCS Research and so on becoming well-established labs in their own right. The job scenario for academic jobs in India is way better than it is in the US and a moderately competent candidate can easily get jobs now at an IIT/IISER/ISI. As someone who is keenly following higher education in India, I think the state of higher education is better than ever and rapidly improving. An easy way of judging this is to look at where our students are ending up. The best undergrads in India today invariably end up at the best schools in the world. This wasn't true 30 years and there are many examples of really high quality IIT graduates who studied in mid-tier US schools. Even students from second-tier schools like, say CEG Guindy or NIT Surathkul, now end up at very very good universities. The situation is less good in the humanities and social sciences, which btw are struggling the world over, but some of the newer IITs have social science and humanities departments and some progress is being made [1]. [1] http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com/2013/01/sukhdeo-thorat-on-social-science-in.html http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com/2013/01/sukhdeo-thorat-on-so...

jabbernotty 13y ago

Again, I can't reach the article. I end up at "China manufacturing shrinks in May, leaving policymakers with few good options", just as happened with the previous qz link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5756176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5756176

dredmorbius 13y ago

Ugh. Quartz. Readability makes this much more tolerable: http://www.readability.com/articles/ppb4ycws http://www.readability.com/articles/ppb4ycws

squozzer 13y ago

All I can say is "good luck, you'll need it." I don't think India has a unique problem with its' higher ed system. Consider that the modern university is based on ideas developed in the late Middle Ages, throw in a healthy dash of politics (both formal and informal), and the gatekeeper factor, why would any university feel the need to change? Do today's kids have the gumption to boycott the system? We didn't - instead we adapted, just like the kids at St. Stephen's. To be fair to Indians, we Americans probably get even more agitated at criticism from outside (or inside.)

jseliger 13y ago
Consider that the modern university is based on ideas developed in the late Middle Ages, throw in a healthy dash of politics (both formal and informal), and the gatekeeper factor, why would any university feel the need to change? To be fair, the idea of the university got started in the Middle Ages but they have changed quite a bit since; if you're interested in the subject, take a look at the latest edition of Clark Kerr's book The Uses of the University, which traces changes in American universities from the post-War period to the present. Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas is also very good. (Disclaimer: I'm writing my dissertation on academic novels.)
- saraid216 13y ago
  Ooooh, I have been looking for precisely a book on that topic. Thanks!
  - jseliger 13y ago
    If you're deeply interested in these things, send me an e-mail—the address is in my profile.

_gotmilk 13y ago

There are no Indian universities in the top 200 universities according to the QS World Universities rankings. There are only 3 in the top 300! While I don't know if this is an institutional deficiency(lack of research, distinguished professors) or a lack of quality among students, one thing is for sure and that is Indian degrees are not very respected worldwide aside from possibly Indian Institute of Technology. From what my father tells me, the K-12 education system is also broken. The public education system is considered a joke in India to the point that anyone who can enrolls their kids into private schools as soon as possible. Most students who pass India's rigorous college entrance exam take extensive coaching(as my cousins have), and this results in a system of college acceptance being determined by wealth. The thing is, I can't see change coming. India has yet to address nationwide corruption that cripples the whole country!

kinleyd 13y ago
It's for lack of research, distinguished professors, facilities... certainly not the quality of students. Graduating from St. Stephen's nearly 30 years ago I can say that the average student there was pretty damn smart and really hard working. The article is spot on in many respects, except for the reference to finding only one applicant to Brown that he really enthused over. That is his experience, but in mine I can assure you that there were a heck of a lot of students most top universities in the US would compete over. In my time the principal and other staff were far more liberal - there seems to have been a sad regression judging from the position of the present principal.

3apo 13y ago

I feel the comparison to American Educational system is rather unfair, the American Higher Education being much more evolved and the best there is. IMHO Indian Education system would compare favorably to many other countries with the same socio-economic factors. This is not to say the system does not need to improve, but so does the Education system everywhere else (more of the sort of MOOCs/Khan Academy for instance; college fees have been increasing sharply in India). In my personal opinion historically the Colleges in India were more occupied by handing out more degrees and not education. To go beyond the routine was always due to self initiatives of the select few and not the majority. If the colleges increased the standards higher than the usual then a majority of students would fail ( "out of syllabus" was a regular complaint if the exams were too hard). This is not a critique of the Educational system, rather I feel glad that my Indian college education was easy enough to let me pursue avenues which benefited me more than what was taught in classroom. A degree from a reputed Indian college is only to open doors, what you learn depends entirely on how motivated you are.

lappet 13y ago

The author of this article tweeted a response by a Professor from the same college: http://kafila.org/2013/05/06/the-golchakkar-of-premier-institutions-st-stephens-college-as-a-public-concern-n-p-ashley/ http://kafila.org/2013/05/06/the-golchakkar-of-premier-insti...

test001only 13y ago
That was a well written article. The following quote from the article shows the situation in India : "If 7 Cabinet ministers, 19 Members of parliament, such a lot of IAS officers, many writers, artists, actors, media personalities and so on came from a single college in a vast county like India, it speaks more about the limited circles that monopolise different kinds of capital in the country than about the training they receive in college. "
cjensen 13y ago
Wow that was bad. He basically says "well the arguments were a bunch of anecdotes therefore I will ignore them." Not once does he refute, even anecdotally, the charges made in the original.
MarkMc 13y ago
That author really needs to take a class called How To Write Plain English. I struggled to parse text like, "...the 88 teachers who teach can only be used as Indian samples, if and only if, one is ready to situate them in socio-economic givens" or "... disabling us from looking at the micro-manifestations of issues from a methodologically nuanced, institutionally useful and politically sensitive position"

bjoe_lewis 13y ago

>To pause for a moment, here is the problem with me talking about this topic: right now many Indians reading this are starting to feel defensive. No, we are not. We both know it is broken. You definitely should've taken a glimpse into Engineering Education and you would have died, except if it's not the IITs.

guylhem 13y ago

The article is partial to a very western view of education. Lecturing from a book, or from notes, is sometimes the right thing to do, especially when teaching to students who will have trouble following the class otherwise (by lack of discipline, by just being unused to that way of teaching or simply if they can't afford the references book you are asking them to read, or don't have the time to do that). The most important is what the student get from the class, not how elite or interactive the teacher is. If most students understand better after rote learning some dictated notes - why not do that? After all, it is a good way to ensure the majority of students will have a proper base material to learn from, without too many mistakes thrown in, especially if they can't offer books. If they can "do better", don't worry, top students will use their notes as what they truly are - base material, a list of keywords to build their knowledge from, with the help of google or books. professor told us the entire Mahabharata epic from memory ... this professor exemplified passionate teaching. See, memory can be helpful. One needs both memory and understanding. The US system seems to overemphasize understanding. Other systems may overemphasize understanding. I would not call either system "balanced". real education being one that challenges the intellect and questions paradigms, not one of rote memorization and conformity That's biased. How can you challenge the intellect and question paradigms if you don't know them in the first place? There is a time for everything. Maybe a 3rd year college is not the best moment to question paradigms.

irahul 13y ago
> Lecturing from a book, or from notes, is sometimes the right thing to do The issue isn't "lecturing from a book" vs "teaching from memory" but "literally reading from the book", expecting students to take notes(Why?) and classifying that as teaching.
dkarl 13y ago
I agree that in the United States, we tend to morally stigmatize rote learning instead of recognizing that it can serve as valuable "scaffolding" for other learning processes. (For example, memorizing foreign language verb forms so you can practice using them in conversation. Rote memorization does not accomplish the end goal of fluency, but it greatly facilitates the conversational practice that does build fluency.) However, I think it's a waste to spend class time with a professor on rote learning. Rote learning is a mechanical process that students can do on their own time. When they're in class with a professor, they should get the benefit of the professor's skill and knowledge.

vowelless 13y ago

How was education in the USSR? I was under the impression that the Indian system borrowed quite a bit from their model.

RestlessMind 13y ago

One of the biggest disadvantages plaguing Indian education system is quota / reservations - 50% of the seats are reserved. So which means half of your peers are there just because of their caste / gender. Even worse, quota exists for teaching positions too. So half of your teachers are in that position only because of their caste / gender and not because of mastery over the stuff they are teaching.

known 13y ago

Indian education system is designed to create employees, not employers. Trade/commerce is exclusively reserved to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bania_%28caste%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bania_%28caste%29 for over 3000 years in India.