The looming education crisis

Every year India graduates about 350,000 engineers, technologists and managers. This is what we hear all the time from the media. These graduates, if one were to believe some of the media hype, especially in the U.S., are all highly talented, quantitatively gifted, fluent in the English language, and ready to take on the world. Unfortunately, this is not exactly the truth!

An industry organization claims that of these, only about 15% to 20% of the graduates are really employable! The rest are just not prepared to enter a global market. One solution to the problem, initiated by the industry, is to have the graduates go through a “finishing school” which will teach them soft skills, as well as refurbish their technical skills in order to bring them on par with the requirements. These finishing schools are slowly becoming the rage here. They offer several courses each averaging six months. Entrepreneurs and even educational institutions are getting into the act. Imagine spending four years in an engineering school, and just after you graduate, enter one of these finishing schools either at your own college or at another college, in order to bring your skills (both soft and hard) up to speed and make you employable! What’s the problem here?

It turns out that the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) can accommodate only about eight or ten thousand students each year, which means that the rest of the aspiring managers and engineers go to private schools. Again, the top private schools, few and far between, select only about one thousand students, leaving the rest to attend under-staffed, ill-staffed and ill-equipped colleges and universities. Other than the elite engineering and business schools, plus a smattering of private elite institutions, much of the newly started private schools function as business ventures, whose inputs consist of students who have not made it to the top schools, perhaps because they are not adequately qualified in the first place, or perhaps because they hail from predominantly rural areas served by inadequate schools. These students often pay exorbitant fees to study at colleges that do not even have adequately qualified faculty or facilities. I visited one of these up-and-coming universities recently, where I was requested to be the external examiner of students’ projects. I found the students to be sharp, fluent in English, and with good communication skills. But what struck me immediately was the appalling quality of the faculty! Many could not communicate properly in English, the language of instruction, and most were not proficient in research. And they even offered a Ph.D. program in Management!

While there are many systemic problems in this scenario, the most critical is the lack of adequate faculty in Indian higher education. A full professor in India gets about $15,000 as his/her annual salary. Research is not required in most universities, except the IITs and IIMs. Research infrastructure and assistance is often non-existent. Faculty travel to conferences is often unheard of. Even in the IITs, the best technical school in the country, faculty cannot easily travel abroad to attend an international conference. I heard from one faculty at IIT that the institute provides a very paltry $100 towards registration fees, and some minimal assistance towards lodging, even to faculty whose papers have been accepted at international conferences in other countries! And added to that, each faculty is governed by rules which prevent him from getting even that assistance more than once every two years!

Clearly, in this system, no faculty is encouraged to do any quality research or attend international meetings to exchange new ideas. The only recourse is for the research performers to attend local conferences once a year, as permitted by the institute’s rules, where they end up meeting the same bunch of researchers year after year. Given that the average starting salary of each successful graduate from the elite institutions is around $22,000, why would anybody opt for a career in academics? What is the incentive for losing so much in life? This has led to a situation where there is hardly any qualified faculty to teach the legions of professional that India needs in the coming years, to continue its explosive growth. Already, many Indian IT companies are looking at countries like China and the Philippines, due to the shortage of adequately qualified graduates in India. Thus, it is a vicious cycle: less faculty pay leads to a shortage of faculty, which leads to inadequate research and training at universities and colleges, which in turn produces students who are not capable of filling the available positions in industry.

If the situation has to change, it should happen at the level of the faculty salaries. Increasing salaries and opportunities to travel abroad for research purposes would attract more qualified people to consider academics as a career choice. It may even attract many qualified and talented faculty of Indian descent who currently work in developed countries around the globe. This will lead to better training, which will then result in employable graduates. The quality of research will also improve. But is anybody listening?

I heard that a “Pay Commission” has been set up to look into the salaries of government employees (the faculty are government employees). But the bad news is that the commission is only looking about a paltry raise of 20% or 30% to the existing salaries. Such a hike will still keep the faculty salaries well below even a starting graduate’s salary, and thus will not change anything from the present.

Rather bleak, I will say.