To Whom should I complain???
When I saw
some advertisements in the news papers few years back immediately after plus
two results, there were few engineering college advertisements and lot of
tutorial college advertisements. As the years grew, last year I saw almost 90
engineering college admission notifications and advertisements on the day of
results in a single newspaper.
Some
colleges use some novel ideas like having some meeting or other and
continuously ensuring the presence of their names in the news papers so that no
separate advertisement is needed. Some boast of their infrastructure, some
about their placement history and some about their competencies. Now-a-days all
the traffic barricades near schools bear names of engineering colleges only.
I had a big
question. Why there is such a craze for engineering education. First thing came
in my mind was the software industry growth in the late 90s. Second thing was
the image created by the so called engineers of yesteryears about their
profession, skills and competencies. Third, the life style the software
engineers are leading and frequent trips to some foreign country or other. But
I feel the most important or apt reason is the psychology of the parents. The
present day parents of the engineering aspirants were born in 60s and early
70s. In their student hood there were only a dozen of engineering colleges and
few polytechnics. Their parents – The present grandparents- always wanted an
engineer or a doctor as their son- in- law. Since only 10% of the student
population can get into engineering or medicine, the present parents, who had a
dream of becoming an engineer wanted their children to be engineers.
This has
created a demand for engineering education in the market. When there is a
market, people invest. When there is investment, investor needs return of
investment. When money is pumped in and pumped out, an industry is flourishing.
Hence education, once upon a time in India, was a charity or government run
organisation, never thought about profits started giving good ROI in the last
4-5 years, for which the capital is the unfulfilled dreams of the present
parents, who were not able to get into engineering in their career.
Once there
is a business attitude, you have to advertise and promote. Here you get into competition.
Since more profits or faster returns are main objectives, there came a tendency
of lesser expenditure. Lesser expenditure results in low quality infrastructure
and less paid teachers. You get what you pay for. When you have a substandard
quality input, the output will naturally not be of the right quality.
I am worried
about those days, when these engineers come into the profession and design our
vehicles, manage our transmission lines, build our residences and offices,
manage the telecommunication, write codes and perform engineering. As mentioned
in a movie some time back, with a poor basement, building will be shaky.
Most of the
current engineering graduates has a basic eligibility of less than 60% in plus
two, and current trend of text book based engineering education, poor
infrastructure and resources with a lot of diversions like internet, mobile
phones and life styles I have a fear of life because everything based on the
performance of these engineering students is going to underperform. You will
have poor bridges, automobiles, hygiene, buildings, cloth, medicine, power
generation, distribution and maintenance etc, etc… How to live in such a world?
To whom
should I complain????????????????
