With the empowerment of web, and India being the hub to generate servicing revenues, I wonder why isn’t enough attention paid to improve the academic value system?.
I don’t mean IITs/IIMs which are well known for outsourcing best resources elsewhere – in reality India produces about 6,00,000 engineers a year.When you look into academic value being rendered to fresh graduate, it’s definitely not encouraging. Most of premiere IT companies hire these resources based on academic performance, but I am afraid would they anytime look into what’s been taught ?? [anyways they have world renowned training centers to groom the candidates].
My concern being with the rapid growth of technology advancement I see very few instrumenting some encouragement to the academic value, we tend to always compare India with Developed nations and the topic of discussions being basic amenities, growth factor, economy sustainability and blahhss!! Why isn’t’ academics discussed in these talks?.
A Fresh Graduate [i.e. Fresher : coined by IT majors] who aspires to work with major IT companies [SWIT :call them Satyam, Wipro, Infy, TCS] or major MNC servicing depots,
will literally be unaware of what a product or a servicing factors would do, or how is it effective for his career growth.
I don’t blame the servicing industry. Its a hard truth it generates job and makes a common man live happily, but until when? Won’t we have product developing engineers, or valuable Entrepreneurs?
Its high time we change the academic value system and build the next India 2.0. These are few points which cross my mind when I think of the same:
- Academics should go hand in hand with the technologies and it’s growth; and not the same rudimentary syllabus anymore!
- Bring Industry experts to set syllabus, keep in mind the growth for next 10 years
- No point having adhoc system values and to teach students of age old MYTHS, its time we grow up!
- Bring entrepreneurial education in academics, make students think on their own feet, rather than shaping them to serve others.
- Leave IITs/IIMs alone – they always grow, they constitute only 8% of total engineers in INDIA [out of which less than 1 % have pay scale in Rupees]
- Academic should be the place for a student to understand the Industry and related developments before being a part of industry.
- Product Development in India is still way behind for simple reason that we have very low profiled academic value.
- Bring good Industry experts to teach new technologies [Internet, Chip design, Management lessons].
- teach them product engineering skills [ I don't want to see my son using a Windows paying freakin $110].
- If we are capable of developing Brahmos, Chandrayana Mission,Nuclear Reactors, SuryaKiran‘s and many more , why not a Operating System, Search Engine , Programming language,Semantics?
Few excerpts from my research:
In UK/US, less than 15% of the students [of UK,US origin] completing Bachelors take up further studies and complete their Masters, but the known truth being, where in the world did 450,000 get enrolled in US alone for Masters, this time the record 1,65,000 INDIAN student applied for the Masters programme.
Why would a Indian student need Masters degree from UK/US?
Is it because our Bachelors are not worth a white collar job ?I still reminisce a joke by my friend:
What if the Indian IT Servicing Industry doesn’t work for a week?
Well, none of the US banks can do the transactions, Federal govt employees would go haywire,
Planes would stop flying, NASDAQ would declare bankruptcy…….
But what if the Indian IT industry doesn’t work for a month? - US will outsource the same work to other countries and normalcy will resume!
Talk of bargaining power?
Hey dude !!
Agreed on ur points saying , so called engg shud hav latest tech in the syllabus, get the industrialists into the syllabus making team etc etc etc…
but jus think.. without learning A B C .. u cannot jus make a sentence rite >?? but once u r strong with albhabets , u can create learn words, sentence ……
same way , I think whtevr basics out there in the syllabus shud b der.. and shud b thought to the students yar. Obviously later it shud be the STUDENT who has to put some effort to make use of his basics learnt. and moreover der r trainings planned for a fresher as soon as he/she joins their company.
U cannot jus teach Web2.0 , java or VB directly to a student.
On the otherhand , I wont even agree with the existing syllabus aswell. There shud be an iclusion of more practical exposure than a theoritical.
I never said don;t teach BASICS, but yet Adopt to changes made in the technology environment, make it more viable for Industry standard.
Take expertise from them, build a unique culture…..
To build and to take the growth level to new heights its not only from the industry, but yet people coming to industry should also be very well acknowledged…..
Students should be made involved creatively and to be encouraged to build product levels [Internet, Chip design,Telecom] at bachelors…..
The whole problem lies in the system of revision! You cannot revise the syllabus without having signed by some million people at a million desks located at a million different cities.. And i dont think you need to teach anything thats current in trends to engineering graduates..
Most engineering students go to college to meet their friends, go out for coffee, movie, etc! I see no point in revision of syllabus.. Maybe a revision of human mentality would help!
Your views are way to skewed on one side!
-Su
http://bangalorebuzzz.blogspot.com
Been thinking a lot lately about the important points of concern you have so brilliantly highlighted in the article above.I think innovation is not happening in India because of mainly two reasons:
1) In most of the colleges and universities in India being innovative and disruptive in ideas is not always encouraged by the faculty.Oftentimes they are made to believe that they should go the “wise” traditional way and get a “great” high-paying IT job first instead of risking their career and the respect of their family members by embarking on a “dangerous” path of an entrepreneur,which in their humble opinion is being too “unnecessarily ambitious”.
2)The Indian government doesn’t seem to understand the importance of entrepreneurship and startups to the country’s economy,and maybe that’s why they mostly fail to act in favour of small businesses and independent aspiring businessmen(entrepreneurs).The most recent “paypal issue” is still totally incomprehensible to me.On the contrary the Obama administration in its State of the Union address announced such an ambitious and empowering campaign for the entrepreneurs and startups in the US,named Startup America that is destined to give more strength and sustainability to the already established,thriving and maturing startup ecosystems in the Silicon Valley,Taxes,Boulder and other cool places there.
Overcoming these two hurdles,though difficult,is not impossible.Over the years the first problem may likely reduce to very small with the increasing awareness among students about the new sources of education available on the internet like MIT’s OCW,Khan Academy,iTunes U etc in order to complement their studies and participating in online activities that enhance and test their skills and get them to understand that there is a massive group of people ready to help them convert their idea into real products if only they start having belief in themselves, and this way making their college education more competitive with the best in the world.The second problem is up to the govt for now.And future leaders coming from the “Youth 2.0″ of today.