India's IT Problem part 3
According to India's government report, by 2020 India will produce about 100 million workers for the world because among its 1.2 billion people, half are younger than age 25. By contrast China, Japan, S. Korea and most countries in Europe will not have enough workers because of aging populations. However, the problem is today the world DOES NOT need more labor workers anymore because there are robots that can do that types of work, what the world needs is knowledge workers who have at least a college education.
Knowing this, the Indian government already has a plan to build 1,000 universities (That can offer degrees to the Ph.D level) and 50,000 colleges (That only offer up to Bachelor's degrees) within the next decade. If India can do this with a quality education system then it will easily be an economic powerhouse by 2025. But the fact is India's current education system is under a crisis by focus on quantitive instead of quality. A recent industry study found that less than 17 % of India's college graduates were employable. That means 83% of degreed people had no skills to do anything meaningful with their education. A professor laments: “Within five years we have hundreds of new universities offering all types of degree. Where do you find thousands of qualified professors to teach in such a short time? Where do you find the proper curricula for hundreds of universities in a short time? We were rushing to open more universities without any plan and we are paying a high price for it now. Few years ago, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) warned that less than 25% of college IT graduates was employable and without immediate action, India will lose its control of the IT outsourcing market. Traditionally, Indian IT companies often put new hires through seven to nine months of training for jobs that they were supposed to be qualified. Recently many stop doing that due to the high employees switching job after the training. An executive explains: “Training is a bad investment for us, we hire them, train them for almost a year and pay them during the training then they left for another company. Now we only hire workers with at least two years of experience.”
Last week during a visit in India, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was asked to support Indian's education system to solve this “challenges.” Addressing many business owners and government officers in Delhi, Secretary Kerry announced that the U.S. will help with skill development of Indian youth. He said: "We need to make sure that next generation of India's innovators and entrepreneurs have the skills and training,"
An industry analyst comments: “Given the huge task in a short time frame, India is looking for quicker, less traditional ways to provide college education to its large number of youth. Since it already made many mistakes by having many “for profit” universities of its own with poor trainings, it is looking to the US for help. Today India is willing to opens doors for top U.S universities to both transfer their training programs and train their trainers to teach those programs or allows them to open campuses in India.” Currently, India is asking Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and several top U.S universities to collaborate with them to provide trainings for their people.
Another analyst suggests: “Although many Indians would prefer to go direct to the U.S for an education than to learn from their own schools but only less than 1% can afford to do that. To educate over 100 million people requires significant investments and strategy and leaderships. At this time, everything is just talk and plan but no action yet. To get a high quality education similar to the U.S. the priority should not about building 50,000 colleges but to have a million qualified professors. Instead of invest in building more schools, we should invest on our people because without qualified professors we cannot have quality education and without a quality education we cannot develop knowledge workers for the world.”
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
