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

I once had a teacher on my staff from India; he had 3-degrees (one in mechanical engineering) from highly regarded Indian Universities (University of Delhi / Indian Institute of Technology). He was a highly intelligent individual and a good and honorable man; sadly he was an ineffective classroom teacher whose contract wasn't renewed (e.g., poor classroom management skills).

 

America is second to none, dammit!

 

If so, why do graduate programs in the US and UK require Indian applicants to have a masters rather than bachelors degree?

 

Are you serious? Silicon valley has been around for well over half a century, and I guarantee that no IIT grads were instrumental in its creation. For one, the name comes from the semiconductor business that was booming in that area during the 50's, 60's early 70's. Ever heard of Bell labs or Fairchild Semiconductor? Show me the Indian's who graduated from IIT that started those businesses.

CEO's? Are we talking the same CEO's who run companies into the ground and then bail out with multi-million dollar golden parachutes...those same CEO's? Not exactly a ringing endorsement on IIT.

Again, I reiterate....you cannot call yourself intelligent when you treat women as second class citizens and property. I don't care how hard it is to get into your school. When your country is essentially wallowed in poverty and the stadard of living for most of your citizens is third world?

Signed "an unapologetic proud American"

(or as you pussies like to say, a redneck xenophobic racist). As long as you acknowledge that I have as much entitlement to pride in my country and heritage as everyone else, then we can be good

 

Silicon valley has existed for some time I agree, but it's real growth spurt didn't happen until the 90s. This is when several of the companies I mentioned were started.
I'm not really discussing the state of India itself and I agree that if you treat women as second class citizens you will never accomplish any progress. However, I'm referring to IIT grads that came here and helped fuel Silicon Valley. They have helped fuel this tech boom we have been experiencing. Just google it unless, of course, you don't google things because a couple of Russian Jews created google. .

Proud enlightened American

 

After independence, India has been a democratic country all along. However pakistan for the most part ruled by either Military or dictators. The "mentality" should be different when one coming from a free country and the other from a "controlled" nation.

Just my 2 cents.

 

Its not the case always. Some undergrad programs in India and UK are 3yrs in length. Most schools in US require a masters degree for those students who have completed a 3year degree program in India and UK(except for honors degree). Please correct me if i am wrong.

 

I will give an example, MA in History from IGNOU in India cost Rupees 7200 which is about $156.52 for the entire program.
Very low income = very low tuition.

I looked at this program, they do enroll only indian citizens. It would have been a great deal if they do. I would have travelled there to write exams.

 

Yes, well, the "controlled nation" actually did a lot to prevent genocide in my country while the free world was watching it live on CNN, coke & chips et al. Much love to Pakistan, with a capital P.

But this is really off topic.

 

I do have much to be proud of your country - the USA is fantastic country one of the greatests in the world and the one I decided to live in.

American people are in general friendly, hard work, fun and smart people. They tend to have the same values that a admire the most - even more than people in my own country.

But don't pretend Uncle Sam it's perfect and the rest of the world is trash - it wasn't that much time ago that women were treated as second class citizen here too and black people even worse.

I'm not even talking about slavery of centuries ago but the until recently Jim crow laws in the South and other things like that (and yeah, in History term that's "recently").

And even now you pretty much have a whole class of second class citizens here in the USA - the immigrants. And I'm not talking about illegal aliens, but the legal ones like me.

We are treated pretty much like second class citizens (I can't even get a SSN to get a phone contract, for example) and as potential terrorist every time I deal with federal authorities, even though I'm here paying a fortune in tuition, paying my taxes and everything else.

We have very limited ways to work legally and most of them transform us in indentured servants to companies for almost a decade to "maybe" get a green card.

And we still stick through all this shit because we believe in the USA.

But don't think here it's paradise and perfect and India or other developing nations (the term third world doesn't make any sense nowadays) are that much worse.

And no, I don't think you're a redneck xenophobic - I just think you need to be a little more critical about your own country and maybe a little bit more informed about the developing world.

 

I wouldn't call you redneck xenophobic racist but a bit ignorant. India is perhaps one of the most ancients cultures in the world and the Hinduism is perhaps one of the oldest religions that exist. Their culture is extremely rich and they have contributed to the world in particular in the spiritual field. If you care to read a bit about their history, you would know that they have been abused by many nations during history and they are not poor because they are ignorant or not non intelligent but because they were fortunate enough to have resources that attracted the greed of many other cultures that just slaved them and abused them.
India has a similar history shared by native Americans that have been abused during history. But let me guess, native Americans are also not intelligent because they happen to be the poorest group in America right?

 

Do you really consider Native Americans to be poor? Some are poor. But I think on average they are doing okay.

 

The food is good too.

 

The tone of this thread has taken a bad turn. Either it changes immediately or the thread gets locked.

 

It's been threatening to go off the rails for some time. It was a lit fuse from the very beginning, turned into Christian preaching for a while there, and now seems to be lurching towards nationalistic posing. Nevertheless, it's interesting.

Returning to IIT (it has several campuses, doesn't it?)... It's definitely a fine university. No doubt it's among the international leaders in selected research problems. But when it comes to admissions difficulty, I think that Caldog nailed it. India has more than three times the population of the United States but a significantly smaller number of international-class universities. So every secondary graduate seems to apply to the same prestigious few, which have a limited number of places.

One of the things that makes IIT strong is that they intentionally limit the number of places available in each entering class. They try to keep their size manageable and commensurate with the university's resources.

Some of the other Indian universities have expanded like balloons as demand has grown, to the point that they might have hundreds of thousands of students each. The way that they manage the crowds has been that most of those students are external. The university itself is just an examining body for most of its students, who attend classes and receive their instruction from hundreds of local colleges scattered all over the country. Apparently these in turn can vary tremendously in quality. Some are very good, but others are not. The Indian UGC's new national accreditor NAAC has been working strenuously to improve standards.

And India's rolled out huge open universities like IGNOU as well, in hopes of meeting the growing demand for higher education. DL is very well-developed inside India (often by correspondence) since it meshes well with the examining-body model, but it doesn't usually seem to be intended for an international market.

I'm interested in what I guess you would call "Indology". Indian universities have an illustrious history of scholarly publication on Indian philosophical and religious subjects. I often encounter papers in Indian journals or academic books from publishers like Motilal Banarsidass. The Indians cover things like Indian art history or Sanskrit as well or better than anyone else. And as the country modernizes and develops (it's the 'I' in the 'BRIC countries' phrase - Brazil, Russia, India, China) its profile is growing in areas like business management.

It's still poor. Culturally, many of its villages are still very conservative. (So are some American small towns, especially in the South, if we really want to go there.) But it's not all one-sided. India's already had a female Prime Minister. Maybe one of these years the US might see its way to electing a female President. The current Indian PM, Manmohan Singh, is a Sikh, a small minority religion in a country in which Hindus are about the same percentage of the population that Christians are in the US (80%). I'm not entirely sure that the US could manage a similarly broad-minded feat.

Finally, India is the world's largest democracy. It's functioned for 62 years now, since independence from Britain. That's in spite of economic difficulties and ethnic and linguistic divisions that had many early observers giving it little chance of success. The Indian system appears to have settled in and has become pretty stable, with elections freely contested and changes of leadership occurring peacefully. The (nuclear equipped) military is professional and remains in its barracks. The country is on an upward development trajectory that might not be quite as steep as next-door China's, but it's less export-driven (and hence perhaps more sustainable) and it offers its people far more civil liberties.

All in all, I like India a lot and wish its people all the best.

 

Thanks, Bill. That's the degreeifo that I like.

 

I'm afraid I disagree somewhat here - India has a population advantage. Using the analogy of the 1.2 billion population mentioned here, it is likely that the top 2% of students in India are more than the entire US college system. It is a numbers game and the US can not compete with these sort of numbers long term. At the moment they do because Harvard, Yale, Wharton and Stanford are aspirational brands - not because they are a better school that IIT.

 

So menalegal (hilty) claims to be a legal representative of Dubai (it's another thread) in order to set us straight on some issues about that part of the world and then decides to stick around long enough to educated us about the higher education system in India. Thanks hilty, I hope you're not charging those minutes to Dubai. Here's the link to the other thread:

http://www.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?t=32498 Hilty shows up on page 2.

 

Here's the problem with your analysis--Harvard, Yale, and so on attract students from the entire world. They are not really American institutions, they are world institutions. The same cannot be said for IIT.

 

I disagree with this. The schools you've mentioned were created and evolved in America far before globalization. The standards and traditions of these schools (not to mention the laws that govern them) were formed far before the rest of the world began exporting their best and brightest to America. In fact, if this wasn't the case then the rest of the world would never have bothered to export their academic stars into the Ivy League of the USA. While it's true that people from across the globe attend these elite universities, the universities themselves remain American. This is equally true of other elite universities in the world such as Oxford and Cambridge, which remain uniquely British.