Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Higher Education in India

I am facing a very interesting problem while recruiting freshers in our companies. We find either excellent students (the top 5% types) or bad students. There are no above average students anywhere in the horoizon.

I asked at least 25 students (all with Engineering/MCA) the following question:

If A can complete a job in 20 days and B in 10 days, how many days will they take if they work together.

Most thought it was a trick question!

A few were upset because it was not a software question :-(

None answered it correctly so far (most popular was finding the average by the way. My favorite was a M.B.A who said it all depended on how they synched with each other! Can't say he was wrong)

May be I am absolutely unlucky. I hope so.

But, what is happening is that the excellent students are simply beyond the reach of growing companies as the MNCs are a lot more attractive. The bad ones are willing to work without salary also but then it may be more trouble than gain.

I mean, is n't a system supposed to produce many average students and a few exceptions either ways. That will let us have decent quality all over and at an affordable price and effort.

I guess somewhere the issue boils down to the fact that the system is actually not doing anything! Students are what they are in spite of the system and not because of it.

Exceptionals and bad students remain as they are. Average students are becoming bad because of no effort from the system to push them upwards.

The worst thing is that this seems to be a visious circle. A poor quality university output is leading to poor quality teachers and then poorer quality output.

Being the optimist that I am, I believe that the solution can't be very difficult. Let me think over a bit before revealing.

2 comments:

myopic astronomer said...

Hi Murthy,
i am ashish asgekar, a faculty at BITS-Pilani. Most of what you said is bang on. i have been thinking of how to change the current education system.
perhaps i would like to start an institution of my own. i would like to join hands with other like-minded people.
please get in touch, my contact is : ashish.asgekar@gmail.com
i will drop an email on your company website too, plz don't mind that.
thanks,
ashish

Ramesh Mantha said...

Hi,
I banged my head for whole night. and I got a small idea to complete your question in 7 days...

Here is my explanation...

Both A and B can do the work. the only difference is the speed (that means, B use some innovative methodology to complete the task in fewer days.

So here, if B can start educating A on that methodology, lets say it take 1 day. and both are started at the same pace, so that they can complete the work in 6 days,(lets take some calculated risk, like B will give some "ON JOB TRAINING" to A, might take another day of lagging...

so finally, both can complete the work in just 7 days.

Ramesh Mantha
"next decade is declared as Innovation Decade"