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> At the college level there is a huge variation in quality. At one end there's the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) which are world-class and highly comp

by eshvk 13y ago

> At the college level there is a huge variation in quality. At one end there's the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) which are world-class and highly competetive research institutions providing a truly top-notch education. LOL, no. The IITs hardly do any research; they are undergrad mills just like the rest out there in India. All they have is a bunch of incredibly smart people who do research on their own, work their ass off to find an internship abroad and figure out how to escape the system. The American system works far better in taking a bunch of dumb high schoolers and transforming them into engineers (personal experience, not statistically driven). > Trade schools and practical job-oriented degrees are far more common in India than the US. In the US we like to pretend that everyone is training to become some kind of airy-fairy academic (with our liberal-arts degrees and theory-focused engineering degrees), and yet we also want to pass everyone. The problem is not with the system; it is the people. A lot of people at seventeen are stupid; the ones in India go blindly do whatever their family tells us them to do (Engineering, Medicine etc); the ones in America make decisions that a 23 year old working in a coffee shop probably regrets. I would argue that less people need to go to school at that age and should probably spend their time working in the real world before figuring out what they want to invest time in school doing.

anuraj 13y ago
In my experience recruiting engineers, I have found brighter candidates outside the IIT system more often than not, who have invariably higher levels of extra curricular skills that translate well into excellence in jobs. I am afraid IITs are a mono culture that values academic achievement far more than they ought to.
- eshvk 13y ago
  I haven't; my interviewing of Indian origin candidates (with graduate degrees) in the U.S. has mostly found their ability to think through solutions to be uncorrelated with their undergrad institutions. I doubt if the IITs are so drastically different from other institutions as you describe them. First off "extra curricular skills" in the way they exist in the U.S. (where an Engineer can take an art class, learn to row or learn about constitutional law) don't necessarily exist in India. Secondly, the IITs (from what people who went there describe it) are not that hard academically on their students: It is fairly easy to do "relatively well". It gets much harder to get perfect grades; it is that percentage of people where you see the monoculture obsessively working all the time. It works out well though; that percentage typically goes to do a PhD in the U.S. where that obsession pays off well.
  - anuraj 13y ago
    As you rightly said, you can't take different stream courses in India, but that is where ingenuity shows. People step out of their academics and achieve proficiency in one or more unrelated fields - and since it is not so easy - only the driven few do it - and what I meant is I see it happening more often among non-IIT candidates - and they invariably turn out good. IITians I believe get a (somewhat correct) sense of job security after course which probably makes them focus only on academics. I have worked with many interns from US (MIT and the like), India (IITs and non IITS) and have recruited many - but my best interns and recruits always came from less privileged backgrounds.

by eshvk 13y ago

anuraj 13y ago

In my experience recruiting engineers, I have found brighter candidates outside the IIT system more often than not, who have invariably higher levels of extra curricular skills that translate well into excellence in jobs. I am afraid IITs are a mono culture that values academic achievement far more than they ought to.

eshvk 13y ago
I haven't; my interviewing of Indian origin candidates (with graduate degrees) in the U.S. has mostly found their ability to think through solutions to be uncorrelated with their undergrad institutions. I doubt if the IITs are so drastically different from other institutions as you describe them. First off "extra curricular skills" in the way they exist in the U.S. (where an Engineer can take an art class, learn to row or learn about constitutional law) don't necessarily exist in India. Secondly, the IITs (from what people who went there describe it) are not that hard academically on their students: It is fairly easy to do "relatively well". It gets much harder to get perfect grades; it is that percentage of people where you see the monoculture obsessively working all the time. It works out well though; that percentage typically goes to do a PhD in the U.S. where that obsession pays off well.
- anuraj 13y ago
  As you rightly said, you can't take different stream courses in India, but that is where ingenuity shows. People step out of their academics and achieve proficiency in one or more unrelated fields - and since it is not so easy - only the driven few do it - and what I meant is I see it happening more often among non-IIT candidates - and they invariably turn out good. IITians I believe get a (somewhat correct) sense of job security after course which probably makes them focus only on academics. I have worked with many interns from US (MIT and the like), India (IITs and non IITS) and have recruited many - but my best interns and recruits always came from less privileged backgrounds.