There is a noticeable disconnect between the students, faculty and managements of engineering colleges and the employers.
With changing technologies and new demands, engineering education in India needs a serious rethink and reorientation of strategies.
What is the drawback?
It was believed that India, with its vast infrastructure of engineering colleges, can supply the world with well-trained, best-in-class software workers and engineers.
However, engineering principles learnt in college are rarely applied in the world of software or product development.
Fresh graduates are not really career-ready for developing and maintaining computer systems or for building the next-generation engineering product.
Why is it so?
The root causes of the above stem from a diverse set of conflicting visions and goals of the key stakeholders.
These include the managements of private engineering institutions, parents, faculty, students, employers and even government.
Each of them is into the field for vastly different reasons that are unrelated to the Indian tech industry’s unique selling proposition (USP).
[A USP is a factor that differentiates a product from its competitors, such as the lowest cost, the highest quality or the first-ever product of its kind.]
Students - It is found that a majority of students never wanted to pursue engineering but did so because of parental pressure.
Teachers - Professors in engineering colleges differ in opinion as well as are sometimes unaware of the vision of their managements.
Teachers fall short of having the rapidly-changing technology skills to impart them to students, and thus end up confining to books.
Management - Many of the sprawling engineering universities are politically well-connected and draw strength from their business legacies.
They often have little experience in the field of engineering education.
For them, the prime motives are to increase revenues and improve branding, and build impressive campus infrastructure to attract students.
Management teams, on the other hand, complain about excessive regulation from government and accreditation bodies.
Employers - Employers regard most engineering graduates as unemployable, unless re-trained in basic job and technical skills.
Middle and lower-tiered students are unable to find gainful employment in engineering and step down to other professions.
Ironically, many of them go on to become teaching faculty at engineering colleges.
What is the new scenario?
Developments in the US provide some lessons on solving this anomalies and concerns, at least in the software industry.
GitHub (software company), acquired by Microsoft Corp, has not demanded college degrees for most positions in years.
At chip maker Intel Corp, degrees are optional for many “experienced hire” positions.
Also, there is the inspiration of the IT industry’s charismatic leaders such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, etc who all earned no college degree, far less an engineering degree.
Moreover, most mundane technology jobs such as software testing and desktop support are already heavily automated.
Modern coding platforms are a lot more developer-friendly.
So the tech world does not need as many human engineers as in the past.
Evidently, freshers' starting salaries have stayed constant for nearly 10 years.
What could be done?
In a rapidly changing technology environment, today’s youth may have to change career paths at least 3 times.
So a static engineering degree may be of little value in these days.
The focus perhaps should be more on imparting real industry skills.
This is more preferable to teaching subjects that are quickly forgotten or are of little practical significance.
