Even at the risk of angering
students and parents, let me explore one of my worries. In US,
doctors ensure their importance by controlling the number of people
who enter the profession. Chances are that the same is true for
lawyers. Unionised professions, like plumbers, do the same. Even in
India, I am told that Chartered Accountants are very careful about
the number of people who qualify as CA's. While I do not believe that
we should control the number of people who become computer or IT
engineers, we need to ensure that the quality does not suffer.
Unfortunately, the latter imposes contraints on the admissions.
In this and a few other articles, we
will discuss why the stakeholders, students, employers, parents and
teachers, need to have a fresh look at what should our education
system do.
I will discuss two items which
relate to students interests today – salary on entry and quality of
education.
Salary on Entry
When I was in industry, I found that
inspite of very good comparative increments, our salary for software
engineers was way below the market. We tried to revise it – there
was expected resistance because we could not have one division
treated very nicely. The issue was sorted out by market forces. The
salary was revised once it became obvious that the people were
quitting. Market at work. Both who left and who stayed benefitted. I
also realised that we could not possibly compete with the software
export industry. Hence, we took a decision to recruit BSc Computer
Science students even though their curriculum at that time was very
bad. (It is very good now.) Our experience was very favorable. Even
today, I would prefer to hire a first rate BSc than a second rate BE.
We were able to offer the BSc graduates bettr jobs in content and
salary than the market but the cost to the company was lower than
that for BE's.
If I were in the same situation a
few years from now, I may have a hard time finding first rate BSc
students because admissions to BE have become so much easier. Hence,
chances are that I may hire BE's but at a salary close to what I was
paying BSc's. BE's are no longer special.
Quality of Education
A number of teachers from a number
of institutions have mentioned that students are not as good as they
used to be. Some of it is factual because as you have more seats, the
capabilities of all students are not going to be the same. Some of it
is perception – if it is easier to get into engineering, students
must be worse. (There is the very interesting topic of study - how
what people believe affects human behavior? Why does the stock market
go up or down? Why does the currency of a country suddenly become
worthless?)
We have experienced that at least
some students do not seem to be interested. They have joined because
they got the admission and their parents and advisors feel that there
is good scope for engineers. Some of these students would have
preferred to be studying something else. If this number becomes
significant in a class, teachers have a problem teaching. They
invariably wind up repeating some critical parts of a subject even
though it may bore the good students. Over time there may even be
pressure to ease the examination system because no one wants too many
failures.
The impact will be lowering of the
education standards, resulting in the reputation of the University
suffering and future students being seriously affected in gaining
good employment.
The key point I would like to get
across is that what is pleasant for us is not necessarily good for
us. Sometimes painful decisions need to be taken. Next time, we will
explore what should we be doing instead.