My thoughts about today's engineering education

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????????????????