IT Education In Need of a Reboot

This article first appeared in the August 2008 issue of it magazine. This is part of the Folk Technology series that I write every month.




In spite of being considered an IT superpower, India is facing a shortage of talent in this field. Here’s a closer look at the reasons why, and some remedies..

India today produces about half a million engineers every year. But talk to the CEO of any company in India and he will tell you that there is a huge talent crunch. Whether the plan is to expand an existing company or to start a new one, the skills gap in the new hires is hurting growth plans. NASSCOM estimates that only one-fourth of the graduates from our engineering institutions are directly employable. What is our education system lacking in?

Hole in the wall

A famous series of experiments was conducted by NIIT in the late nineties—on the usage of computers and the Internet. Computers with Internet connections were placed in the midst of a slum and observations were made on how people learnt to use them. These computers were made accessible so that anybody could just walk up and start using them. A camera was placed on a nearby tree to observe user activity.

The observations were interesting to say the least. The most avid users were kids aged between 6 and 12 years. Since no instructor was present, the kids had to discover for themselves what they could do with the computer. Within a few days they had learnt to draw and browse the Internet, without a ‘teacher’ intervening. The kids learnt by trial and error as a group, with some of them leading the others. But after a while, their skills tended to plateau out. The ‘teachers’ then intervened, taught some of the kids how to play MP3 songs on the computer, and left. Within a few days the kids had learnt where to download songs from, what players could play songs and everything else related to online music content. Within a few weeks, the slum kids had reached the level of proficiency of an average computer user.

To emphasise the point, NIIT picked a few Class 9 school children and asked them a few questions from the Class 10 physics syllabus. Obviously, they could not answer them. The kids were then given two hours on computers with Internet connections to research and answer the questions. At the end of two hours, they had all the answers. Just to make sure they had understood what they’d read and hadn’t just done some rote learning, a physics teacher quizzed them. He was not surprised when he found out that the students indeed had learnt quite a bit on the subject by going online and learning on their own.

The point is that if the students are motivated, they can find answers to many questions on their own. For young people, teaching should be all about arousing their curiosity. If their curiosity is aroused, then they can be motivated to learn just about anything. These young people then carry this curiosity and enthusiasm to their workplace.

Hole in technology skills

Today, more than half the IIT students don’t pursue a career in their branch of study. So most civil engineering students end up in IT jobs, computer science students end up in finance and banking jobs,and so on. This is also true of non-IIT engineering graduates across the country (to a slightly lesser degree than in the IITs). Students are viewing college education as just a degree in their pocket. The content of this education is not valued by them.

This also means that very few students are opting for higher studies. India hardly produces any PhDs today. Why? We don’t produce students who are curious and who love learning. Getting a PhD involves asking some deep questions and answering them over a period of three to four years. In the IITs, less than 10 per cent of undergraduate students go into research. The numbers are worse in non-IIT colleges. India produces less than 1000 PhDs in science and engineering, in a year. So where are the new cutting edge technologies going to come from? Perhaps from China and USA, where students still seem curious enough to ask deep questions. China and USA, each produce over 40,000 PhDs every year in science and engineering subjects.

These trends show that our universities have failed to inculcate a love for the subject. Entering an IIT is the toughest job in the world. The brightest eighteen- and nineteen-year olds in the world enter the IIT system. But four years later, they don’t even want to remain in the same field, let alone ask any deep or probing questions, answering which will lead to the next generation of technology. The quality of the final year thesis produced by these students has been falling over the years, and many recent theses have large parts 'inspired' by Wikipedia and other Web sources.



By 2010, a NASSCOM study forecasts a shortage of 500, 000 professional employees in the technology sector. Our engineering curriculum is not producing engineers with the right skills and motivation levels. What is the solution?

Choice in course selection

It is very simple--if you are doing something you like, you are more likely to excel in it. One solution is to offer more choice. Colleges should move to an electives-driven curriculum. Engineering students in India do about 50 to 60 courses in four years. Of these, 40 to 45 are core courses in whose selection they have no choice and only 5 to 15 are electives, which they can choose. If students had more electives, they would take more courses that they are interested in rather than just sit through courses that they don’t want to do. Today when students move to the workplace, they lack initiative because their college education was limiting and didn’t encourage them to explore their full spectrum of interests.



More interaction between different branches

We need to move to a system that has softer separation between branches of study. In engineering colleges, strict demarcations exist between various departments. A person in the civil engineering department has little or nothing to do with a person, in say, the electrical engineering department. Our universities must move to a more flexible and interactive setting. Any CEO of a start-up will tell you that while they look for depth in one field, they also look for flexibility, versatility and broad curiosity that comes from being exposed to a wide spectrum of areas. Every employee of a start-up has to do multi-tasking and has to be good at multiple things. Even in more established companies, employees with a broader perspective and knowledge are more successful in the fast changing technology space, because they can quickly take ideas from one sphere and apply them to another.


Industry participation

Most importantly, industry participation needs to be increased. Today, at least a year or two is spent in getting a fresh graduate up to speed. This lag needs to be reduced. Every college student today asks without getting any answers: “What am I studying this for? Will I ever use this after I leave college?” Because the need is not clear, they go through their courses disinterestedly. Students do not come across real-life cases until they are on a job, and by then it is too late. There is a large gap between what they study and what the job requires. Once on the job, they have to recast the skills learnt in college based on real life scenarios. Management education has been so successful because management courses involve case studies and problems from real life.

On their part, it must be said that technical education institutions are willing to change. They have rolled out the red carpet to industry captains to partner them. However, industry leaders have been too busy to heed their request. Instead, companies today have entered this endless race for poaching employees from competitors. This has hurt industry by driving up salaries and attrition rates. Industry must partner technical institutions in taking a hard look at the curriculum and revamp it to keep up with the knowledge-based economy.

We need a workforce that is agile to keep up with the needs of the marketplace. We need a workforce that takes initiatives and generates the technologies of tomorrow in this changing marketplace.

Our education system should be equipped to produce this workforce.



(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)