Are American & the Rest of the World Behind India's Education?

That's great, thanks a lot!

So it's natural, with more and more women pursuing higher education (I presume) and their lack of interest in engineering and related fields, that the percentage of students selecting engineering and related majors would drop.

 

That picture that I posted I don't think has anything to do with religion or religiosity. I just posted it because it was related to the University of Drinking Too Much and everyone getting a social science degree.

 

Here's a twist. The school I graduated from was once voted the number one party school in the nation by Playboy. I do not drink, and I received a BA in Social Sciences from that school.

 

When I was at Sam Houston State – they carried that number one party school designation with Playboy Magazine. But that was some-time ago; perhaps they’ve cleaned the school up.

 

I'm a psychology major and people always ask me what I can do with that when I graduate. My response, "Nothing except apply for grad school." LOL. So when I saw that picture and the popular jobs with social science degrees I laughed.

 

Perhaps women are smarter than men and choose to avoid careers in engineering. That said, the quoted statistics show a 100% increase (5.9% to 10.8%) in only 7 years (1983 to 2000) for female engineers in the workforce; seems a significant number of women are choosing to pursue engineering careers. And the majority of students attending university has been trending such that women outnumber men on campus.

 

And maybe women prefer careers that consist of much talking and little actual work.

Kidding aside, I have many female engineer friends, but the trend is obvious. I don't think it is either good or bad, it simply shows men and women are different. The graph showing the distribution of men and women in various majors beautifully shows just how complementary men and women are, but that is I guess slightly off topic.

 

The return on investment (ROI) for engineering and hard science degrees tends to be negative these days. If students knew they could get an entry-level engineering or science job with a decent wage and employment stability, more would undoubtedly pursue these harder degrees.

Students are turned off from mathematics at an early age in the school system. These students, by the time they reach high school, avoid mathematics because teachers failed to make the subject interesting and relevant. I survived the mediocre teaching of mathematics in the public school system and finally in high school had a very good mathematics teacher for three of those years. I blame him for my interest in computers and subsequently pursuing a career in the field.

 

This is an interesting observation. Just how much of our later interests have to do with our teachers in primary and secondary education?

Me for example, I used to absolutely love chemistry in 1st grade in high-school. Then we got another teacher with an entirely different method of teaching and I was totally turned away from chemistry.

On the other hand, much of my interests in languages and linguistics could probably be traced to my Latin teacher in high-school.

 

Explains why women worked as telephone operators. The majority of veterinary students are women so you might be on to something... veterinary medicine is a scientific profession and the veterinarians spend time talking to the people whom bring their pets into the office. A medical or legal career is probably also more professionally and personally rewarding to many people and these careers tend to attract an increasing number of women.

Apparently you missed the memo stating women are equal to men not merely complementary. The feminists hate you!

 

Equal <> same.

If men and women were the same, a society could be equally productive with "simply" men working twice as hard. However, the graph above shows that if you were to exclude women from education and work-force certain areas would suffer and be underdeveloped simply because of comparatively lower interest of men in them. Thus ignoring the complementarity factor could actually be harmful.

It's quite clear you can't erase millennia of human development with a single memo.

 

The statistics show differently.

11% growth over the next decade.

VERY attractive lower end earnings (the lowest 10% earn on average 49k).

A labor shortage causing an increase in engineers emigrating from China, India, and Korea.

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos027.htm

 

The IITs are clearly very good schools for engineering and technology, and they are competitive with many US schools in these regards. For example, the 2009 Times World University Rankings put the top IITs at 163 and 181 in the world -- roughly comparable to US schools like UC Irvine, Arizona, Texas A&M, or Rutgers.

On the other hand, there were literally dozens of US universities that were ranked above the highest-ranked IIT campus.

The IIT schools stand out because they may be the hardest schools in the world to get into. Why are they hard to get into? Because the IIT system serves a country with a population of about 1.2 billion, yet has capacity for only about 15,000 undergraduates. Imagine that US had four times as many people as it does now, and the only top school was the University of Arkansas. Obviously, admissions to that school would be insanely competitive.

So it's true that IIT admission is unbelievably difficult -- far harder than at any US school. But is this a bad thing for the US? Absolutely not. It simply follows from the fact that the US has far more top-ranked universities, to serve a much smaller national population. This is a huge plus for the US, not a minus.

By the way, one of the major criticisms that Indians have against the IIT system is the fact that so many of its graduates leave India, primarily for the US.

 

I think another factor that students pay only $700.00 per year and the Government covers the rest. The $700.00 per year is the almost the same as FREE.

 

Exactly what I was thinking.

Seriously....all other things being equal, who are you going to hire, the candidate with the Harvard degree, or the one with the IIT degree?

 

I think there is some confusion. India and pakistan are two very different countries.

 

hello,
first time poster, long time lurker. IIT has an illustrious history worldwide. The CEO of Vodafone, US Airways, cofounders of Sun Microsystems, Juniper Networks, Cirrus Logic, Sycamore Networks, the head of McKinsey Consulting. Silicon Valley would not be what it is without IIT grads.

 

True. However, Indians I have met (Indian Muslims) and Pakistanis were not much different in mentality, and they did tend to stick together. They spoke pretty much the same language.

Historically speaking, they lived in the same region that used to be collectively known as British India until 1947. Millions of people from today's Pakistan are actually refugees from what is modern India from those times, I believe, and the opposite is the case as well. Both are members of the Commonwealth, Pakistan joining on 14th August 1947, India a day later.

Since the world was not created in 1947 and the author asked not only about the educational system of India, but about Indians in general;

I offered my opinion on both Indians and Pakistanis that I have personally gotten to know. If you don't consider it relevant you are free to ignore it, of course.

 

I have few Indian friends and the main issue is that the job market in India is extremely competitive and the best companies look for IIT graduates. Also, although ITT is without doubt a good institution, it seems that India;s general University education is in bad shape so there are only few schools that are recognized as being of high quality while the vast majority are considered substandard.
The US was the main magnet for ITT graduates but it is not the case nowadays with so many research centers in India. Few friends have told me that salaries for ITT graduates in India are now very competitive so there is less need to immigrate to the US.

 

Not when 45% of Indian households as of fiscal 2002 were making the equivalent of 1500-2000 USD per year. There's some cultural relativity in terms of economics that your statement is missing.

Granted that's 7 years ago, but there's a culture of poverty in that country that is often forgotten within the context of educational and employment discussions. Do a few google searches on currency conversions and Indian average income and you'll get a better picture.

Now, I haven't looked up educational costs in India, ever. So if you meant 700 rupees, then maybe that's more plausible.