I agree that nationalism is ruining India. But, this article paints quite a one-sided picture. You can see that in this sentence: "Indian students are taking their useless Indian liberal arts degrees and going abroad to get real ones that signify a real education".
See? That's just it! Most people who do well in high-school get pushed into technical fields. My cousins are mostly engineers or doctors, and a few are lawyers. "Liberal arts"? That's something that children of rich parents do when they are not too good at studies. Some girls do it when they want to be housewives when they are done with studies.
I have a bachelors in EE (E&C) and have worked for a few multinationals. I have had to work with western-European and American colleagues. If I were asked for my subjective evaluation, I'd say that my EE colleagues at this level are more or less the same. Yes, the degree mills of India do churn out engineers by the millions. 10% of them understand what they have learnt. The others memorize and regurgitate their notes. It's fairly easy to screen people at this level. And that's why I find my colleagues comparable.
Leaving aside medicine, about which I know nothing, a masters degree from India in science or engineering is mostly useless. Academia, with the exception of IITs and IISc, is mostly a joke.
To conclude: Yes, education here is generally bad, but not as bad as this article paints it out to be.
I'm a little confused - you are saying the article is overstating things, but that degrees in science, engineering, academia, and possibly medicine are "mostly useless"?
I'll make no comments about medicine - I know nothing about education in this field.
The bachelors programs in the IITs are great, by global standards. IISc does some cool work too. Leaving those aside, a BS in engineering (called BE or BTech here) is not bad. We have some outdated courses, we don't have the freedom to choose courses, etc. But for most of our courses, we use the same textbooks as Americans, Brits, Australians, etc. I suppose we have similar kinds of lab sessions too.
Academia (includes bacherlors, masters, PhD, post-doc, professorship, research papers, conferences, journals, funding, etc.) in India is generally terrible. ME/MTech in India is mostly useless. BE/BTech in India is not bad.
> I suppose we have similar kinds of lab sessions too.
No! Not by far. The "lab sessions" in a typical non-IIT Indian engineering institutes are a joke. Ever heard of the Borland Turbo C compiler? Yeah, that's still used to teach students C/C++, with outdated (and non-standard) code.
I've had similarly horrible experience in any and all labs, be it circuits and systems, networking, or whatever else you might think of.
Thank god for the Internet, otherwise I would have never have known better.
I don't think that is random sample. All the colleges in Southern state of Tamilnadu come under Anna University and most of the colleges (about 15 - 20) I have had a chance to visit and interact with - they were using Turbo C! Unless the student has good exposure or he/she take it upon to learn, they will not be employable.
The mere fact that the instructor has a schedule put up and sticks to it makes it better than any lab session I had.
Oh, and it's not just something I alone experienced, so writing it off as a "random sample" makes no sense. This is /the/ situation with most colleges here. Which is kinda the entire point of the article.
> The mere fact that the instructor has a schedule put up and sticks to it makes it better than any lab session I had.
You seem to be impressed by the oddest things! FWIW, our labs adhered to a schedule too. Engineering colleges in India fall on some range within the spectrum. You seem to have studied at one of the poorer ones. k4rtik, below, seems to have studied at one of the better ones.
When I made judgements, I made it on the basis of the output of Indian and western colleagues. Compiler versions are a non-issue for me. µA741, though outdated, taught me well enough.
Some pedantry: It was an anecdote. A random sample is multiple data points drawn randomly from a population. GP only provided one, and you suspected it might be an outlier.
Not quite. I meant that my the course description that I provided was a random sampling. I googled for EE programs, picked a university randomly, went to its list of courses, and picked a course randomly.
Haha.. am still tempted to say that still doesn't ensure a random distribution as it's a lot more likely you picked a link from the first few pages for search results. :P. Either way, your point is valid.
> We have some outdated courses, we don't have the freedom to choose courses, etc.
I disagree. I have just finished (few weeks back) my BTech from an NIT and can at least vouch for my CS education and those from some other respectable NITs. We had a great amount of freedom in choosing the courses and had some of the best faculty to learn from.
Generalizing the education in India to this extent certainly paints a wrong picture. I agree that there are only a few institutes which are good, but they are surely not limited to just IITs and IISc.
I will put in a word about medicine. Government run medical colleges are good because they have a lot of patients. Private medical colleges for the most part are in the business of selling seats to the highest bidder.
Recently, the central govt proposed a single nationwide entrance test to curb the seat selling. Private colleges filed a case against it and won.(search for NEET exams)
I seriously cannot understand something like admission to medicine being decided by how much one pays. This leads to a lot of doctors who don't know a thing about medicine.
My cousin's son had a protruding spinal cord from the back, and the doctor had not noticed that after doing more than 10 ultrasonography. The doctor was just that ignorant, thanks to which the son was born with both his limbs paralyzed. The doctors who delivered the baby after a huge operation did not believe how a doctor can miss that.
So go to any small town, and you have really lousy doctors, thanks to our education system.
I had a history professor who attended Berkeley in the 60s. He recalled the instructional methods used by one of his own professors at Berkeley: He simply got up to the podium, opened a textbook, and started reading. There was no discussion or chances to ask questions. As I recall, he indicated that this was a method of lecturing that had its roots in European academia.
A question for HNers from India: With such a long history of sending students to British and American universities, are Anglo-American methods of teaching, research, mentoring, etc. transferred back to Indian universities by returnees who start academic careers?
transferred back to Indian universities by returnees who start academic careers?
Of course, they are. I went to a top-tier school in India for my masters degree and I'm now a graduate student at a well-known private university in the US. I would say there is very little difference in the quality of teaching between my Indian alma mater and my current university. The main advantage here seems to be an army of teaching assistants conducting office hours, "precepts" and such which probably help struggling students. But I think the in-class lectures, homework assignments and exams are of the same quality.
I also went to a second-tier private school for my undergraduate degree and that is where I experienced the sort of teaching the article talks about. I think, like most of India's other problems, it boils down to economics. I paid about about $1200 in total for my four year undergraduate degree. I believe the government supplemented some of this with a grant to private institutions for students who met a merit criterion. But my point is that this is very little money and you can see why it would be quite difficult to recruit and retain high quality teaching talent.
The top-tier institutions - the IITs, IISc, IISERs, ISI and so on - don't have great salaries but they make up for it with prestige, perks (on-campus housing, cheap food, discretionary financial awards) and research grants. But beyond the cream of the crop, unfortunately it isn't a rational economic decision to go into teaching in India. This isn't to say nobody does and I've had a few really great teachers even at my undergraduate school but I also realize that India is a poor country with no social safety net. I'm not going to judge anybody for choosing financial security over social service.
This. The main problem at Indian undergrad institutions is lack of good teachers. And that is because of poor pay. I went to a top colleges at one of the decent universities (a step below IIT / REC). I had exactly one great teacher who was passionate about his subjects. 10-15% were decent. But most of them were a joke. And my friends at other colleges under this university, too, had similar experiences.
Apart from good pay, another reason for having poor teachers is reservation / quota for teaching positions. So even if someone doesn't deserve to be teaching, one would be doing so just because of his/her caste.
Most of the US educated academicians who teach in India are normally at the IITs (engineering schools) and IIMs (management schools). The teaching styles of professors at these schools are identical to US schools, however their effectiveness is debatable. To be fair to them, they are usually ham-strung by institution-wide regulations such as a guideline that 80% of the grade be determined by a mid-term and a final (I know this is the case at IIT Kharagpur, not sure about the others). They are not as productive research wise because while the graduate students in the US are competent and (usually) smarter than undergraduates, the reverse is true at most Indian institutes (the smart guys go abroad). There is no room for mentoring because undergraduates have a heavy courseload (5-6 technical courses per semester) and the professors have a lot of administrative work apart from teaching.
I think your opinion is at least a decade old. Research-wise Indian institutions are moderately productive now and especially so if you count the research budgets they have to work with. There is a challenge in finding high-quality graduate students because of course the likes of MIT and Stanford have a lot more to offer. But this is no different from, say, the best undergrads at UMass going to MIT. My point is there are good students and good work does happen.
Part of the reason why the best students used to go abroad was because there were a lot more job opportunities in the US after a graduate degree. This is changing now with MSR India, Intel Research India, GE Research, TCS Research and so on becoming well-established labs in their own right. The job scenario for academic jobs in India is way better than it is in the US and a moderately competent candidate can easily get jobs now at an IIT/IISER/ISI.
As someone who is keenly following higher education in India, I think the state of higher education is better than ever and rapidly improving. An easy way of judging this is to look at where our students are ending up. The best undergrads in India today invariably end up at the best schools in the world. This wasn't true 30 years and there are many examples of really high quality IIT graduates who studied in mid-tier US schools. Even students from second-tier schools like, say CEG Guindy or NIT Surathkul, now end up at very very good universities. The situation is less good in the humanities and social sciences, which btw are struggling the world over, but some of the newer IITs have social science and humanities departments and some progress is being made [1].
> are Anglo-American methods [...] transferred back to Indian universities by returnees who start academic careers?
Of all the people I have come across, only two of them finished a session of post-doc in the west, and came back to India. One of them is at IISc, and I forgot where the other one is.
To answer your question: my impression is that Indian academics seldom continue their academics in India. Most Indians who have earned a name in my (secret) field continue as profs in the west, take on Indian and non-Indian students, and teach them all the same way.
It's interesting how fifty years is the difference between world leadership and backwardness. Do you know if the change in teaching style at Berkeley had anything to do with the Free Speech Movement student protests in the 1960s? The author of the original post says that a latent penchant for popular protest is Indian students' best asset, so that's a tantalizing connection.
> reservation system for the admission of scheduled castes and others residing at the bottom of India's socioeconomic pyramid
Correction: it's social pyramid only. Classification of SC/STs is purely based on caste alone, not on economic status -- and we must fight to make it economic-only pyramid.
As an outsider, I would certainly agree with your comment. Caste quotas seem like they would only strengthen the system...
Still, how synonymous is caste with economic status? I would guess "very" but your post makes it seem like there are some interesting nuances. What are India's caste demographics, anyway?
Initially caste based quota was chosen because they were discriminated against by the society for a really long time. The profession one would go in was based on the caste they were born into. A barber's son would be barber, a cleaner's son would be cleaner. Here is one example : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devadasi . People from certain caste are still socially backward while other caste have managed to come out. The problem is the reservation system is not reformed based on that. This is a topic of hot contention.
>Caste quotas seem like they would only
strengthen the system...
Actually they do. Some of my friends have come through quotas and they are no different when it comes to results. Some come from dire economic circumstances and I am happy that the quota system benefits them.
They are no different because even with quotas they have to prepare and get somewhat decent marks in the exams. I agree though that these exams become insanely difficult for the general category students. Most people have enough potential to become a doctor or an engineer, so the quality isn't affected, in my opinion.
The problem comes in because seats in colleges for medicine/engg are few and the quota system irks the general category students who do not get in despite the hardwork. The solution is to have more seats, with quality control else quality will suffer. For eg. District hospitals should have a medical college and seat selling in private colleges should be curbed.
If there were enough seats for everything, students wouldn't have to worry about what they can get into and instead would have thought about what they want to get into.
Cast system was based on work and hence mapped to the economic status. It is not the case anymore. Actually, it has led to reverse discrimination where those who are supposedly forward caste struggle to get into colleges and elsewhere. The reservation is one of the main reasons people leave India, and remain away.
That was almost an answer except in how it wasn't remotely an answer. Are you trying to say that plutocratic authoritarianism is the only reasonable way to run thing?
There are no Indian universities in the top 200 universities according to the QS World Universities rankings. There are only 3 in the top 300! While I don't know if this is an institutional deficiency(lack of research, distinguished professors) or a lack of quality among students, one thing is for sure and that is Indian degrees are not very respected worldwide aside from possibly Indian Institute of Technology.
From what my father tells me, the K-12 education system is also broken. The public education system is considered a joke in India to the point that anyone who can enrolls their kids into private schools as soon as possible. Most students who pass India's rigorous college entrance exam take extensive coaching(as my cousins have), and this results in a system of college acceptance being determined by wealth.
The thing is, I can't see change coming. India has yet to address nationwide corruption that cripples the whole country!
It's for lack of research, distinguished professors, facilities... certainly not the quality of students. Graduating from St. Stephen's nearly 30 years ago I can say that the average student there was pretty damn smart and really hard working.
The article is spot on in many respects, except for the reference to finding only one applicant to Brown that he really enthused over. That is his experience, but in mine I can assure you that there were a heck of a lot of students most top universities in the US would compete over. In my time the principal and other staff were far more liberal - there seems to have been a sad regression judging from the position of the present principal.
We should read the original source and not be stuck with the weird page styling of Quartz then. The HN guidelines discourage posting anything but the original source, so that's all the more reason to do so.
All I can say is "good luck, you'll need it." I don't think India has a unique problem with its' higher ed system.
Consider that the modern university is based on ideas developed in the late Middle Ages, throw in a healthy dash of politics (both formal and informal), and the gatekeeper factor, why would any university feel the need to change?
Do today's kids have the gumption to boycott the system? We didn't - instead we adapted, just like the kids at St. Stephen's.
To be fair to Indians, we Americans probably get even more agitated at criticism from outside (or inside.)
Consider that the modern university is based on ideas developed in the late Middle Ages, throw in a healthy dash of politics (both formal and informal), and the gatekeeper factor, why would any university feel the need to change?
To be fair, the idea of the university got started in the Middle Ages but they have changed quite a bit since; if you're interested in the subject, take a look at the latest edition of Clark Kerr's book The Uses of the University, which traces changes in American universities from the post-War period to the present. Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas is also very good.
(Disclaimer: I'm writing my dissertation on academic novels.)
That was a well written article. The following quote from the article shows the situation in India :
"If 7 Cabinet ministers, 19 Members of parliament, such a lot of IAS officers, many writers, artists, actors, media personalities and so on came from a single college in a vast county like India, it speaks more about the limited circles that monopolise different kinds of capital in the country than about the training they receive in college. "
That author really needs to take a class called How To Write Plain English.
I struggled to parse text like, "...the 88 teachers who teach can only be used as Indian samples, if and only if, one is ready to situate them in socio-economic givens" or "... disabling us from looking at the micro-manifestations of issues from a methodologically nuanced, institutionally useful and politically sensitive position"
Wow that was bad. He basically says "well the arguments were a bunch of anecdotes therefore I will ignore them." Not once does he refute, even anecdotally, the charges made in the original.
Again, I can't reach the article. I end up at "China manufacturing shrinks in May, leaving policymakers with few good options", just as happened with the previous qz link
I feel the comparison to American Educational system is rather unfair, the American Higher Education being much more evolved and the best there is. IMHO Indian Education system would compare favorably to many other countries with the same socio-economic factors. This is not to say the system does not need to improve, but so does the Education system everywhere else (more of the sort of MOOCs/Khan Academy for instance; college fees have been increasing sharply in India).
In my personal opinion historically the Colleges in India were more occupied by handing out more degrees and not education. To go beyond the routine was always due to self initiatives of the select few and not the majority. If the colleges increased the standards higher than the usual then a majority of students would fail ( "out of syllabus" was a regular complaint if the exams were too hard). This is not a critique of the Educational system, rather I feel glad that my Indian college education was easy enough to let me pursue avenues which benefited me more than what was taught in classroom. A degree from a reputed Indian college is only to open doors, what you learn depends entirely on how motivated you are.
The problem pointed out in the article is a commonly accepted truth in India. Some hard truth - even though there have been many efforts to bring the economically and socially under developed class into the mainstream, it has not happened yet. Most of the students who even come to UG especially college's like St. Stephens are from middle class or upper middle class families. They have very little incentive to fight the system. The brand comes with privilege which is the only thing they are after. In short, people do not fight the system but have learned to make it work for them. The poor and downtrodden are the unfortunate majority who are not able to do it.
Agreed! Emphasis is not given to 'economic' or 'social' need but only to caste-wise situation. If your papa's uncle is on the driving seat of the Government, you're in the game.
In many ways we Indians deserve the shit we live in. How many of us actively participate in politics? No one comes forward even if there is incentive to do so. In fact many armchair experts criticize Anna Hazare or Arvind Kejriwal who at least go ahead an walk the talk, trying to garner some support for better Governance. Support them? Nope. Zilch.
We love to be in Americas than to make India better - a short-cut. Consider this: Many of us know who the president of United States is, his wife's name, his daughters name, and yet more than 90% Indian kids of our age (i.e. below 25 yrs, and it is not a researched number) would not know the name of the Indian president, or his wife or even consider the fact that he could have children. :)
True about politics. And there is a lot of corruption and politics of hate. We are stuck between a corrupt party who also play caste/religion and a party who plays the religion card and is equally corrupt.
If you are born into a particular religion, you are stuck with it (even if you don't give a damn about religion) and you get the impression that everyone wants to kill you or throw you into the extremely shitty neighbouring country. The same is true to an extent about caste. I have seen educated penple getting married on the basis of caste and religion, even with all the globalization. People support political leaders based on caste and religion. Religion plays a big role in India. You aren't what you are. You are just one more member of one team or another. And people live accordingly.
Sorry for the rant. I suppose conditions are not as bad as that in Pakistan or the middle east. And religious-background intolerance is commonplace in the west too.
I am not sure in which part you disagree with me. Yes most of the present youth in India - who are in a position to make an impact, are not doing it. A very simple case - they would rather pay the bribe to get LPG connection rather than fight. But the poor, they cannot do that and they are not in a position to make an impact and are trapped. This is a vicious circle. The effect of reservation based on caste is debatable but that would be a topic of its own.
I did the no bribe thing once. I wanted a certificate and the officer wouldn't give me one. Went to the bmc office almost every week for 3 months. Gandhiji would have got me the certificate on the very first day.
One of the biggest disadvantages plaguing Indian education system is quota / reservations - 50% of the seats are reserved. So which means half of your peers are there just because of their caste / gender.
Even worse, quota exists for teaching positions too. So half of your teachers are in that position only because of their caste / gender and not because of mastery over the stuff they are teaching.
>To pause for a moment, here is the problem with me talking about this topic: right now many Indians reading this are starting to feel defensive.
No, we are not. We both know it is broken. You definitely should've taken a glimpse into Engineering Education and you would have died, except if it's not the IITs.
The article is partial to a very western view of education.
Lecturing from a book, or from notes, is sometimes the right thing to do, especially when teaching to students who will have trouble following the class otherwise (by lack of discipline, by just being unused to that way of teaching or simply if they can't afford the references book you are asking them to read, or don't have the time to do that).
The most important is what the student get from the class, not how elite or interactive the teacher is.
If most students understand better after rote learning some dictated notes - why not do that?
After all, it is a good way to ensure the majority of students will have a proper base material to learn from, without too many mistakes thrown in, especially if they can't offer books. If they can "do better", don't worry, top students will use their notes as what they truly are - base material, a list of keywords to build their knowledge from, with the help of google or books.
professor told us the entire Mahabharata epic from memory ... this professor exemplified passionate teaching.
See, memory can be helpful.
One needs both memory and understanding. The US system seems to overemphasize understanding. Other systems may overemphasize understanding.
I would not call either system "balanced".
real education being one that challenges the intellect and questions paradigms, not one of rote memorization and conformity
That's biased. How can you challenge the intellect and question paradigms if you don't know them in the first place?
There is a time for everything. Maybe a 3rd year college is not the best moment to question paradigms.
I agree that in the United States, we tend to morally stigmatize rote learning instead of recognizing that it can serve as valuable "scaffolding" for other learning processes. (For example, memorizing foreign language verb forms so you can practice using them in conversation. Rote memorization does not accomplish the end goal of fluency, but it greatly facilitates the conversational practice that does build fluency.)
However, I think it's a waste to spend class time with a professor on rote learning. Rote learning is a mechanical process that students can do on their own time. When they're in class with a professor, they should get the benefit of the professor's skill and knowledge.
> Lecturing from a book, or from notes, is sometimes the right thing to do
The issue isn't "lecturing from a book" vs "teaching from memory" but "literally reading from the book", expecting students to take notes(Why?) and classifying that as teaching.
> Lecturing from a book, or from notes, is sometimes the right thing to do,
I don't see how this can ever be useful. I grew up in the Middle East and attended an Indian School which followed the CBSE syllabus. There was nothing in the syllabus per se that inspired me to ask why. That came from my innate interest and from the occasional teacher who went beyond what was taught.
The focus was on rote memorization. You could be assured of excellent marks if you simply regurgitated what was in the text book. So if you were a moron, but had great memory, you could get 90%+ on an exam, but did you actually know anything?
In high school, I loved math but I never did well in the exams because I didn't really understand what I was applying and why. My high school teachers told me that I would do better in a western system of education that focused more on application than rote memorization. This was borne true a few years later when I started my undegrad in the US and aced my math classes. Although to be fair, my previous exposure to higher math definitely helped. But what I gained most from my education in the US was that I knew why I was doing what I was doing.
> The US system seems to overemphasize understanding.
I fail to see how anyone can overemphasize understanding. Understanding is the point of learning something. I still remember one of my friends memorizing Physics derivations. I once tried to ask her to explain one particular step and she had no clue why it was being done. She had simply memorized it. I sucked at that; I cannot memorize anything if I do not understand it
> That's biased. How can you challenge the intellect and question paradigms if you don't know them in the first place?
He's talking about the paradigm of rote memorization and conformity. In school I was frequently docked points if I restated my answer in any form that was different from the text book. It didn't matter that what I was saying was essentially the same. I didn't use the language of the book and so it was "wrong". How does that teach anyone anything? I still remember being terribly frustrated because I knew that my answer was right but yet I was being penalized because I hadn't regurgitated what was in the book.
Rote memorization may be helpful, but it cannot be the central underpinning of any kind of educational system. The idea of education is to understand what is being taught and apply it. Not just to memorize and regurgitate it without any regard for the meaning. Otherwise you're not better than a parrot that repeats phrases without any idea of the meaning or context.
I suspect that someone raised in a Western educational system simply cannot comprehend what a typical rote-memorization-driven Indian school education looks and feels like. Because it's insanity.
I worry that the US is moving in the same direction, with all the focus on testing-driven "standards." (Not to mention the use of calculators in math class.)
Indian education system is designed to create employees, not employers.
Trade/commerce is exclusively reserved to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bania_%28caste%29 for over 3000 years in India.
See? That's just it! Most people who do well in high-school get pushed into technical fields. My cousins are mostly engineers or doctors, and a few are lawyers. "Liberal arts"? That's something that children of rich parents do when they are not too good at studies. Some girls do it when they want to be housewives when they are done with studies.
I have a bachelors in EE (E&C) and have worked for a few multinationals. I have had to work with western-European and American colleagues. If I were asked for my subjective evaluation, I'd say that my EE colleagues at this level are more or less the same. Yes, the degree mills of India do churn out engineers by the millions. 10% of them understand what they have learnt. The others memorize and regurgitate their notes. It's fairly easy to screen people at this level. And that's why I find my colleagues comparable.
Leaving aside medicine, about which I know nothing, a masters degree from India in science or engineering is mostly useless. Academia, with the exception of IITs and IISc, is mostly a joke.
To conclude: Yes, education here is generally bad, but not as bad as this article paints it out to be.