In a recent interview with The Indian Express, Director of IIT-Madras V Kamakoti noted the lack of interest in core engineering among IIT graduates. His concern is valid, though narrow. I offer a broader view.
My position is that all graduates, IITians included, must remain free to chart their career paths. Yet, IITs represent only a tiny part of Indian engineering education. Engineering, and STEM in general, is difficult and requires prolonged discipline. Excellence has a price. Nationally, we have many colleges of poor quality producing mediocre graduates. Neither those colleges nor their graduates aspire to excellence because the present job market does not demand excellence in sufficient volumes. But the international picture is changing. The demographics of international competition offer promise for future Indian engineers. Perhaps we can raise our national game to claim that opportunity. Let us now consider these points in detail.
First, should IIT graduates be allowed to take non-core jobs? Society juggles conflicting goals through hierarchies of principles. For example, if abused spouses are not allowed to leave marriages, then some social structures retain stability. Stability is a good principle, but freedom ranks higher. Similarly, if all engineers from IITs are forcefully retained in engineering, then some national goals might be served. However, the freedom of students to choose career paths ranks higher. We must protect that freedom.
Now, no employer shares profits beyond necessity. An employer pays what it must to attract the workers it needs to make the profits it can. So, why are some non-core salaries so high for IIT graduates?
The optimistic answer is that core engineering imparts transferable skills. For example, core engineering teaches many sub-topics, each with different simplifying assumptions, equations and approximations, models and applications, empirical truths backed by simple experiments, and attention to practicality. In contrast, mathematics in its essence is freed from the world. Physics is concerned with truth more than functionality. Economics lacks comparable controlled experiments (you cannot have two identical countries where you test two different tax regimes). And so on.
The pessimistic answer is that the IITs’ entrance exam is merely a label for talent, and the IIT education is irrelevant to both students and non-core employers.
But the answer does not matter. We must look beyond IITs. India has a demographic wave. We have 25 million 20-year-olds alone. On that scale, the IITs are tiny. On the national scale, the AICTE recognises thousands of engineering colleges. Many graduates from these colleges have been dismissed as “unemployable”. The real problem is worse. Even if these colleges make their graduates more employable, there are not enough employers. If two million people apply for one million jobs, salaries will drop. The unemployed will offer to work for less, and employers will agree. For most colleges, improving quality makes no business sense. For most students, career prospects remain unchanged even if they study harder.
Sadly, unemployment seems harsher for non-engineers. Out of India’s 140 crore people, only three crore report salary income in their tax returns. The UPSC alone sees roughly a million aspirants for a thousand successes. Nationally, a million man-years are spent competing for 30,000-odd man-years’ worth of subsequent careers. That is desperation, not aspiration.
Now let us look beyond the nation.
Start with China. After decades of repressive policies, it has relatively few young people and proportionately fewer women. China is now spurring population growth, but babies born today will take 20 years to start work. In Western Europe, several native populations are declining as well. Brazil is big and has many good universities, but Brazilians mostly speak Portuguese.
Now look at the US. When I was a student there, they allowed “practical training” wherein graduating foreign students were given a year to find work. This helped many people stay on permanently. That period of practical training is now three years for STEM graduates.
Have American students moved away from STEM? I think not. Enrollments in four-year STEM degrees in US universities have been rising steadily for many years. Many of those students must be Americans. Then why extend practical training to three years for foreign STEM graduates?
The driving force must come from employers. This suggests employers are not getting excellent STEM graduates in sufficient numbers. Why? Have US universities deliberately lowered standards? I hope not. A second possibility is more insidious. In US universities, external funding drives careers. Professors work only on research that is funded. Funding has shifted from core subjects to newer topics like AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning). Many formerly respected professors of classical subjects now feel unappreciated even as they teach old courses which attract no young teachers. The younger faculty members are pursuing new-age topics and, frankly, are not rewarded for learning the old things well. One student I know who went to study mechanical engineering at a great US university shifted to mathematics after he saw the engineering courses offered. I fear that commerce may have compromised the once-strong discipline of America’s great universities.
Let me clarify that AI and ML are great advances. But there are innumerable people who merely use AI/ML software in mundane ways. These people, I suspect, have not learned core engineering skills at the level that the US industry needs. One cannot remain hazy on voltage, current, electronics, metal, stress, strain, force, mass, etc., and then shift the thinking to AI. Not if one wants to lead.
This brings up my closing point — one of hope. If the wealthy of the world keep the softer jobs, then others will step in to claim the rest. Those remaining jobs lie at two ends. At one end are humble low-paying jobs. At the other end, I hope, is engineering.
Who will do that engineering? With the Chinese shrunk in number and Brazil lacking English, India might do it. India’s next generation might well aspire to core engineering as a rewarding career plan.
Chatterjee is professor of mechanical engineering at IIT Kanpur and author of Build and Sustain a Career in Engineering (Notion Press)
The demographics of international competition offer promise for future Indian engineers. Perhaps we can raise our national game to claim that opportunity. (Graphics by Abhishek Mitra)
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