1. This is incredibly anecdotal, but the half a dozen people I know who have come from Indian educational backgrounds (specifically IT programs) did not have much to show with their diplomas. These are all incredibly bright people who seemed to start out levels behind their otherwise peers, and often rely (as we all do) on online material to make up for gaping flaws in their knowledge. From the source article:
Hiring is slowing down because recruiters are changing their strategy. "An engineering degree is a poor proxy for your education and employment skills," says Manish Sabharwal, chairman of TeamLease, a temp staffing firm.
"The world of work is evolving... employers increasingly don't care what you know, they focus on what you can do with that knowledge." While dozens of new institutes have been established in the past six or eight years, he claims that over a third of them are empty and perhaps they are "worth more dead (for the real estate they sit on) than alive."
This suggests to me that many Indian STEM degrees are not an adequate proxy for value (just the same as many American STEM degrees.)
2. I wish decentralized certification systems became a bigger thing. Personally, I would love to be able to take a definitive test on whether or not I knew Python well enough to spend forty hours a week working in Python. Make it open notes and timed, like the real world is. I know this used to be a big thing in the 90's, but that was before my time -- why did this go out of style? Did the rapid advancement and evolution of the industry prove the system prohibitively time/effort-consuming?
> 2. I wish decentralized certification systems became a bigger thing. Personally, I would love to be able to take a definitive test on whether or not I knew Python well enough to spend forty hours a week working in Python. Make it open notes and timed, like the real world is. I know this used to be a big thing in the 90's, but that was before my time -- why did this go out of style? Did the rapid advancement and evolution of the industry prove the system prohibitively time/effort-consuming?
The problem is when you have enough desperate unethical people to break any system of testing that you can throw at them. During my undergrad, there were books that were filled with possible questions that could come up in the statewide exams. One was supposed to memorize the answers (given in the book) and write the same answer in the exams. I remember when I wrote my GRE, there were people constructing a database of all the possible questions that showed up in a particular month of the GRE. Every system is breakable; your decentralized certification system will make it only easier for a bunch of people who don't know shit but have shiny new certificates to show up.
> Look at interviewing. There exists of a database of interview questions that you need to learn to game the interview.
That is part of the reason that I have become tired of the tech industry; its job application process is silly. There is enough correlation and causation issues. As an interviewer, you assume that a lifestyle, schools, ability to solve a bunch of textbook algo problems means that the person will be a good employee; as an interviewee, you assume that a company which asks such questions, talks about exotic languages, technologies, provides free lunches and other crap will be the good fit for you. I have decided I am going to ask companies if I can work for x time for them on a project; then we can figure out in practice whether we are both good fits and then decide on a final settlement. Of course, this will never become widespread because it fucks with the H1B system and a lot of people are still convinced that the way tech interviews happen is the right way.
It seems that most Indians who are knowledgeable and well-educated got that way despite the educational system, not because of it. Sure, a tiny proportion of elite students have access to high-quality education, but everyone else seems to be shoved through absolutely awful courses.
The worst example I've seen of this is that until 12th grade, Indian tests consist solely of reproducing memorized material! I mean this literally: you actually will fail an exam if you write anything novel and don't just reproduce the exact text printed in the textbook. So anyone who actually manages to get some kind of understanding and pass the course is doing something above-and-beyond what the coursework prescribes, by both memorizing the text and working to understand it. Someone who learns nothing but merely memorizes the textbook will get a 100%, and someone who comprehends and retains the knowledge but fails to memorize the exact text in the textbook will get a 0%.
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. However, many students go to for-profit colleges that sprung up to meet the huge increase in demand for education and come out with degrees of questionable utility. These people are often of high aptitude, but were put through systems where they were made to learn narrow material (e.g. upper-division courses on Java 7 or Oracle 8i). This leads to the appearance of success in the short-run with high paying jobs right out of college, but a lack of preparation in the long-run (and a lack of knowledge of the lack of preparation).
That said, it's not all bad. One could argue that while the grade school education sucks, the higher-education system in India is actually far more pragmatic than the overly idealistic American system. 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. We deny the reality that most people are looking to acquire practical skills for gainful employment. This leads to a situation where we shun practical vocational training, and instead give everyone a diluted version of a pure academic education.
Disclaimer: I grew up in the American educational system and have observed the Indian system only through my family members and friends-of-family (and a small amount of first-hand experience). I haven't experienced the Indian system up-close as an adult, and I'm sure the above is tainted with a fair amount of Western-centric bias where my expectations are simply miscalibrated. I look forward to corrections from people who have actually been through the Indian system.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree completely that the US higher ed (in engineering) is highly idealistic and not job or practical oriented. However, I think this is probably the strongest advantage of the US over everywhere else.
This kind of system is the only way to create engineers capable of dismantling _any_ sort of animal that bestows upon them. Without a big portion (perhaps not the majority though) of students educated this way there is no hope to get some essential, game-changing innovations going.
Picture an educational system full of, say restricted domain Java programmers capable only of producing highly practical business oriented applications. The market rapidly overflows with useless software and workforce and global productivity stalls.
The reality is, most things around us suck. They not only suck a little, they suck royally. And we're not going to get away with pulling any changes with incremental engineering and maintenance. So only with a broad set of skills we can envision the extent to which things suck and devise tools and solutions for them. Only afterwards incremental changes, straightforward engineering and maintenance play a role (admittedly an essential one).
"the US over everywhere else .. This kind of system is the only way to create engineers capable of dismantling _any_ sort of animal that bestows upon them"
From what I have seen this is just not true, or at least a too narrow point of view. First of all I think there are other western countries out there where you get this type of not so practical nor job oriented eductaion. There's enough countries where you can even choose to take the more theoretic engineering approach or go for the more practical approach. Also I doubt every single institution in the US where you can get an engineering degree works that way.
Secondly, that capability is something that you cannot simply learn to anyone out there. I even dare to say some are born with it and some are not.
1. This is incredibly anecdotal, but the half a dozen people I know who have come from Indian educational backgrounds (specifically IT programs) did not have much to show with their diplomas. These are all incredibly bright people who seemed to start out levels behind their otherwise peers, and often rely (as we all do) on online material to make up for gaping flaws in their knowledge. From the source article:
Hiring is slowing down because recruiters are changing their strategy. "An engineering degree is a poor proxy for your education and employment skills," says Manish Sabharwal, chairman of TeamLease, a temp staffing firm.
"The world of work is evolving... employers increasingly don't care what you know, they focus on what you can do with that knowledge." While dozens of new institutes have been established in the past six or eight years, he claims that over a third of them are empty and perhaps they are "worth more dead (for the real estate they sit on) than alive."
This suggests to me that many Indian STEM degrees are not an adequate proxy for value (just the same as many American STEM degrees.)
2. I wish decentralized certification systems became a bigger thing. Personally, I would love to be able to take a definitive test on whether or not I knew Python well enough to spend forty hours a week working in Python. Make it open notes and timed, like the real world is. I know this used to be a big thing in the 90's, but that was before my time -- why did this go out of style? Did the rapid advancement and evolution of the industry prove the system prohibitively time/effort-consuming?