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Rethinking on Engineering Education in India

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February 18, 2019

What is the issue?

  • There is a noticeable disconnect between the students, faculty and managements of engineering colleges and the employers.
  • With changing technologies and new demands, engineering education in India needs a serious rethink and reorientation of strategies. 

What is the drawback?

  • It was believed that India, with its vast infrastructure of engineering colleges, can supply the world with well-trained, best-in-class software workers and engineers.
  • However, engineering principles learnt in college are rarely applied in the world of software or product development.
  • Fresh graduates are not really career-ready for developing and maintaining computer systems or for building the next-generation engineering product.

Why is it so?

  • The root causes of the above stem from a diverse set of conflicting visions and goals of the key stakeholders.
  • These include the managements of private engineering institutions, parents, faculty, students, employers and even government.
  • Each of them is into the field for vastly different reasons that are unrelated to the Indian tech industry’s unique selling proposition (USP).
  • [A USP is a factor that differentiates a product from its competitors, such as the lowest cost, the highest quality or the first-ever product of its kind.]
  • Students - It is found that a majority of students never wanted to pursue engineering but did so because of parental pressure.
  • Teachers - Professors in engineering colleges differ in opinion as well as are sometimes unaware of the vision of their managements.
  • Teachers fall short of having the rapidly-changing technology skills to impart them to students, and thus end up confining to books.
  • Management - Many of the sprawling engineering universities are politically well-connected and draw strength from their business legacies.
  • They often have little experience in the field of engineering education.
  • For them, the prime motives are to increase revenues and improve branding, and build impressive campus infrastructure to attract students.
  • Management teams, on the other hand, complain about excessive regulation from government and accreditation bodies.
  • Employers - Employers regard most engineering graduates as unemployable, unless re-trained in basic job and technical skills.
  • Middle and lower-tiered students are unable to find gainful employment in engineering and step down to other professions.
  • Ironically, many of them go on to become teaching faculty at engineering colleges.

What is the new scenario?

  • Developments in the US provide some lessons on solving this anomalies and concerns, at least in the software industry.
  • GitHub (software company), acquired by Microsoft Corp, has not demanded college degrees for most positions in years.
  • At chip maker Intel Corp, degrees are optional for many “experienced hire” positions.
  • Also, there is the inspiration of the IT industry’s charismatic leaders such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, etc who all earned no college degree, far less an engineering degree.
  • Moreover, most mundane technology jobs such as software testing and desktop support are already heavily automated.
  • Modern coding platforms are a lot more developer-friendly.
  • So the tech world does not need as many human engineers as in the past.
  • Evidently, freshers' starting salaries have stayed constant for nearly 10 years.

What could be done?

  • In a rapidly changing technology environment, today’s youth may have to change career paths at least 3 times.
  • So a static engineering degree may be of little value in these days.
  • The focus perhaps should be more on imparting real industry skills.
  • This is more preferable to teaching subjects that are quickly forgotten or are of little practical significance.

 

Source: BusinessLine

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