State of education in India...

[2Tired2Tango]

Now these guys have a real problem going on over there...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826.html

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

Not really surprising. Not that education means much over here. It's sort of like "Oh, you have a degree! You and ten million others! Bwahahahaha!". Nevertheless, I'd like to go back to school. But what do I hear? Moaning and groaning about the cost. Post-secondary education should be free. But we live in a burnt hyper-capitalist circus ...

 

[2Tired2Tango]

Not really surprising. Not that education means much over here. It's sort of like "Oh, you have a degree! You and ten million others! Bwahahahaha!". Nevertheless, I'd like to go back to school. But what do I hear? Moaning and groaning about the cost. Post-secondary education should be free. But we live in a burnt hyper-capitalist circus ...

Another forum I'm a regular on has run into this big time... Seems they're training programmers on 20 and 30 year old compilers, some are still teaching MS-DOS programming and it's actually turning into something of a crisis in the software world.

Not only are these guys getting out of date training, they're getting chequebook diplomas from their professors... like the story points out, all they have to do is write their phone numbers on the exam papers and wait for a phone call to find out how much a passing grade is going to cost them...

And apparently it's not just software... it's all areas of engineering...

Then these guys get into the workplace and next thing you know there are major foulups happing all over the place...



I'm a bit old for going back to school, but I do agree the government is no where near as helpful as it once was. Only in Kanader Ay!

 

[Doomsday]

Another forum I'm a regular on has run into this big time... Seems they're training programmers on 20 and 30 year old compilers, some are still teaching MS-DOS programming and it's actually turning into something of a crisis in the software world.

Not only are these guys getting out of date training, they're getting chequebook diplomas from their professors... like the story points out, all they have to do is write their phone numbers on the exam papers and wait for a phone call to find out how much a passing grade is going to cost them...

And apparently it's not just software... it's all areas of engineering...

Then these guys get into the workplace and next thing you know there are major foulups happing all over the place...



I'm a bit old for going back to school, but I do agree the government is no where near as helpful as it once was. Only in Kanader Ay!

same here sadly!

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

Still teaching MS-DOS? Holy crap! When I went we did C++, Visual Basic, C#, Java (bleh) mainly with Visual Studio. I put 2 years into it and got nothing. People tell me to be hopeful, but it's been a long time, 5 years I think.

 

[2Tired2Tango]

Still teaching MS-DOS? Holy crap! When I went we did C++, Visual Basic, C#, Java (bleh) mainly with Visual Studio. I put 2 years into it and got nothing. People tell me to be hopeful, but it's been a long time, 5 years I think.

Yeah... Turbo C --16 bit version-- MS-DOS ... they just aren't with the times. I sure wouldn't want to be one of their graduates... that first job interview must be one giant rude awakening!

On the hardware side we've had a few guys still trying to do stuff for 16 bit CPUs and even one came right out and said his professor was teaching them 8086 hardware design... Wow... just WOW...


Me I self-educated on Turbo Basic, worked Pascal for the longest time (almost the lifetime of the language) flipped over to C after Borland killed Pascal and been a happy mallocer ever since... Been an electronics tech for 30 years (also self-educated), working mostly in office equipment and 2 way radio...

 

[Kougar]

Wow, that article is appalling....

 

[marfig]

Wow, that article is appalling....

And yet... doesn't tell the whole story, limiting itself to a single type of education and making it look like the whole country goes through it. Fact is, we can find similar universities all around the globe in industrialized countries too.

I'm always skeptical of sweeping generalizations, definitely when it comes to describing the professional capacities of an entire population. What matters in fact is the education levels of those universities that count. And India has quite a few that have created professionals that successfully integrate some of the largest technological companies in the world.

The article serves the purpose of a job conscious western world just fine, by painting professionals coming from India (a threat to many middle class career man and women) with the colors of incompetence. Unfortunately this person here will not be so easily swayed. It happens that I have benefited from a career almost entirely built abroad. Canada and Australia particularly. And I have worked with all sorts of Indonesians, Filipinos, Chinese and Indians. The first two no longer make headlines, but articles like this about them used to be, erm, popular back in the late 90s and early 2000s too. See a pattern?

I've meet, as I said, all sorts. Competent and incompetent. Good, bad and so-so. Like with any other nation where the education system left the stone age, it presents an opportunity for good minds to shine, regardless of the country where they live in. Exchange programs further facilitate this and in the end what we have is a nation that produces good working capital like everyone else. There's no invisible gas or an alien parasite in India that makes people stupid.

I also find entertaining that the article thought that call centers serve as the basis for a supposed analysis of the education level in the country, when call centers are what they are around the world; Low education requirements, no experience required, minimal knowledge requirements...

 

[2Tired2Tango]

And yet... doesn't tell the whole story, limiting itself to a single type of education and making it look like the whole country goes through it. Fact is, we can find similar universities all around the globe in industrialized countries too.

I agree, there's good and bad everywhere... but before an article such as that is going to end up in the wall street journal --a prime target for lawsuits-- you can bet it's been vetted, rewritten and vetted again, several times before it's printed.

As I pointed out in an earlier post there is another forum I participate in where we are deluged by these guys begging for code samples, not understanding their assignments and basically crying out for help on stuff that should have been covered in the first couple of days of their courses. Almost always --in fact it hasn't missed yet-- these guys are using wildly outdated software tools (1990 vintage 16bit Turbo C on MS-DOS is the most common) and are being given assignments months ahead of their skill levels...

As part of my career I used to train new technicians and have trained a number of East Indian techs on the equipment we sold. I found them to be bright, curious and very industrious people who sincerely wanted to learn... Just as often I discovered their education was sabotaging them, half the technicians I trained didn't know Ohms Law or other basic electronic concepts, most could not read a schematic or use test equipment and about a third of them had Electrical Engineering degrees! It took a while but it slowly became obvious that for the most part these were capable people who were being sabotaged by piss poor educations... (and this was 10 years ago)

I don't think this problem is new... but it does appear to be getting worse.

To be perfectly clear... this is not the student's fault, it's the school's fault. But the students are the ones paying the price in failed careers and broken dreams...

Would it surprise anyone to discover that Immigration Canada no longer recognises Engineering, Medical or Scientific diplomas from several universities in India?

 

[marfig]

but before an article such as that is going to end up in the wall street journal --a prime target for lawsuits-- you can bet it's been vetted, rewritten and vetted again, several times before it's printed.

No doubt. But the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times were the ones that just recently were saying that China refused to buy European debt (France, IIRC). A lie that toppled the markets for a few days, despite being vehemently denied and... China buying European debt.

these guys are using wildly outdated software tools (1990 vintage 16bit Turbo C on MS-DOS is the most common) and are being given assignments months ahead of their skill levels...

For sure. The problem being a lack of incentive for teachers to update their resumes. A problem spreading through our universities and that is quite a few decades old. Only the best universities guaranteeing good and updated course programs. These universities pay better and only allow the best teachers to be hired... and remain teaching!

When in the late 80s I went to university they were still trying to feed me Cobol and mainframe architectures. And yet, the promise was elsewhere entirely, with minicomputer and PC architecture already grounded into many corporations. I was lucky enough my entry grades allowed to choose a good university and so I didn't have to go through that. But still today the problem persists. High schools being where the problem actually starts.

But... there's also an element of blame to be put on students. I'd say that many choose their careers as if popularity contests they were, instead of a lifetime investment that will define who they will be and what they will achieve. Choosing to go tech because "that's what hot!" is a recipe for disaster and the reason so many students take their formative years without any care for their future.

What I mean is that education needs to be reformed also by the students themselves. They need to understand the whole university concept as NOT being "education on rails". It's not about getting enough grades to pass. It's about them learning by themselves too, exploring as they learn and understand that when a teacher is forcing them to use Turbo C, they will need to use C99 at home and learn for themselves. Because the job market doesn't care about "blaming the university". Neither does the university. It's their future students are defining. It's up to them to understand university as just another element of their education. Not even the most important.

 

[2Tired2Tango]

@marfig ... good response, point well made. Therefore, if you substitute "curriculae" for "resume" then I agree...

(I don't care if I'm being educated by a high school dropout, so long as I'm getting the right information.)

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

I also find entertaining that the article thought that call centers serve as the basis for a supposed analysis of the education level in the country, when call centers are what they are around the world; Low education requirements, no experience required, minimal knowledge requirements...

They are first-world sweat shops. And they just keep building them.

 

[2Tired2Tango]

They are first-world sweat shops. And they just keep building them.

Because we keep paying them to build them!

But any diplomate engineer who has to resort to "flipping burgers" has problems far greater than landing in a sweat shop...