What Is Wrong With the Indian Education System?

Originally posted on Quora (also shared via qr.ae/pFYwYK).

I was watching this film 3 Idiots last night when I came across this scene:

I am talking about the character here, where Rancho labeled this person as a “gadha” because first, he did engineering, then MBA in the US, and then ended up doing a job in a Bank.

Students in India pursue engineering in most of the colleges is simply because they want a job, not because they want a job in the field of Engineering but only to get jobs. Parents send their students from class 6 to IIT-JEE coaching and tuition. Here in India, people take up engineering to just get a certificate as proof that they are ‘educated.’ Not everybody loves engineering, almost everybody hates engineering.

Today we have engineers who write books and judge dance shows, we have engineers who do jobs in banks, and in fields not at all related to engineering. This has degraded engineering education in our country to such an extent that getting a job has become harder. Indian engineers are considered unfit and ‘unemployable’ (see the numbers).

I am currently in my second year of engineering and I randomly ask people what they want to be when they grow up. I still got answers like getting a job, do an MBA, do business, and 2–3 out of my class of 60 actually wanted to code (in my branch) and they loved what they are doing. With this number of people in a classroom, let’s multiply the ratio by the total number of students pursuing engineering education in India. Numbers never lie, right?

I was passionate about computers and wanted to pursue a career in them. So I sat with over a million candidates to appear what they call, the toughest competitive exam in the world. Didn’t make it.

Why I didn’t make it? I didn’t understand or (still understand) why do I need to study Physics, Chemistry so hard to study Computer Science Engineering in an IIT. And, people who love Physics, Chemistry end up doing engineering in CSE and do not know shit about coding. To make things worse our reservation system makes sure people who love neither engineering nor science make it to these premium institutions of the country without much effort.

What is wrong with Indian Education System? It makes SURE right people go to the wrong place, and wrong people go to the right place. Slow Claps

Edit 1

To the people in the comments who think JEE is fair I have a question for you to answer.

A person X who is really good in academics breeze through JEE and gets a seat in IIT appearing subjects like Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics. He can’t write a single line of code. What branch? Computer Science Engineering.

Now person Y who is not so good in academics, but knew 5 programming languages and stuffs even before getting into Engineering, brews code all the time but sucks in Physics. Chemistry and Mathematics fail in JEE miserably.

Who deserves to study CSE at a prestigious engineering college? Doesn’t person Y deserve a subsidy in his higher education? I belong to the Y category.

I am pursuing IT at a private college with an education loan of about 7.7 lakh p.a. Life is fair to me. Really.

Edit 2

Arguments in the comments make my answer even better.

For those who mention the names of Raghuram Rajan, Chetan Bhagat, and other great people and question if they are “gadhas” or not. I am not eligible enough to comment on that. They are people who are very successful in their life but their engineering degree does not fit in all their achievements.

If Chetan Bhagat really wanted to be a writer and Raghuram Rajan really wanted to be an Economist, our education system in 11th and 12th should have rather focused on testing the aptitude of these people in the areas of interest/skills instead of putting an ant, an elephant and a monkey in the same test to climb a tree (you know what I mean). If this hadn’t happened such eminent personalities would have saved 4 years of their life doing what they love. Four years is a lot, a government tenure is just a year more than that.

No please, if someone is able to ace the IIT-JEE examinations and make it to the CSE branch at an IIT he cannot be a better professional programmer than someone who loves writing programs and has been doing that much earlier than him — Never; especially when MNCs prefer hiring people with experience and not freshers. Don’t ask me for numbers, verify yourself.

Whatever great names we hear today are people who love what they do, not a guy from IIT who goes on to do M.S from the US and ends up doing a management job. What a waste of degrees.

Update

I learned recently a student from a non-IIT college bagged an offer of 1 Crore from Google. Take that, IITian worshippers, on your face. You’re not destined to great things if you’re from an IIT.